The Liberators: America's Witnesses to the Holocaust (43 page)

Those tanks remained on the road outside the camp, but nearly all the men came inside. “We didn’t know what the hell to think. We had heard through
Stars and Stripes
about a couple of the other camps that were [liberated] early on, the main one [Auschwitz] being found by the Russians. So we surmised what it was. We were dumbfounded. The people—the prisoners coming up to us and not knowing what to say. But it’s just—you have no words. You’re looking at this, and it’s kind of hard to believe.”

What Sherman and his buddies wondered was, where were the German guards? “That was the thing we were looking for. And there were only a handful, who were, at that point, dead. The prisoners beat them to death, and we were later told that the majority of them had taken off very early in the morning and the night before because they knew we were literally just four or five miles away in Linz. They took off in our direction; they didn’t want to go where the Russians were, of course. So they went west, but we didn’t see them.” After approximately two hours in the camp, the American officers ordered their troops out and told them to continue with their mission.

T/4 John Stephens was in the village of Mauthausen the day D Troop of the 41st Cavalry liberated the camp. He was just watching what he describes as “little worn men wearing gray-striped pajamas who were still able to walk” come into town. He says, “A German lady came to me to complain that one of the men had stolen her bicycle. I just looked at her and shrugged. After the way the prisoners had been treated, they deserved to steal anything they could get their hands on.

“While walking around, I had passed a bakery in which customers were being served. So when two of the little men pleaded [with me] for food, I took them to the bakery. The door was now locked. I suppose the proprietors must have seen us coming. Determined to break down the door if necessary, I kept pounding until the baker and his wife leaned out of the upstairs window and told me they were closed.
‘Machen Sie auf oder ich werde schiessen!’
[Open up or I’ll shoot!] brought them downstairs on a run. They didn’t know that the chances were considerably less than zero that I would shoot an unarmed civilian. So they came downstairs immediately and were exceedingly polite.
‘Diese Männer müssen Brot haben’
[These men must have bread], I said. The men chose what they wanted and hurried away. I have often wondered what happened to them. There they were, emaciated and weak, surrounded by a sea of enemies and a long, long way from home. Did they ever manage to reach home? If they did, was anything there?”

Pastor Colvin Caughey’s memories of Mauthausen are tied closely to recalling the rumors that the end of the war was near. “We’re in this town, and we started taking prisoners by the hundreds and thousands. You couldn’t believe it—Germans were marching in columns, whole units were coming in. There were much more of them than there were of us, but they were coming as prisoners. We couldn’t even guard them; we’d just say, ‘Go over in that field, there.’ They were trying to get away from the Russians, that’s the whole thing—they were eager to surrender to us.”

It was in the midst of coping with the onrushing surrendering Germans that Caughey’s unit got orders to move to Mauthausen. “They knew about the camp, our leaders did, and they told us, ‘Now, we’re going to this camp and don’t give them any of your food.’ We thought that was kind of a strange order, but we had no idea what we were getting into.

“As we went down the road we could see, up on top of this hill, this big gray rock, stone building. Like a penitentiary. And that was our first glimpse of Mauthausen. And then, as we got closer, we saw all the barbed-wire fence. And we came to a wire gate and went through there into Mauthausen. And down below us was another huge fenced area with all these barracks and so on, and everywhere we went there were these prisoners all begging for food. They were desperate. You could see how starved they were. And we ignored the orders we’d gotten—we just gave them everything we had.”

Caughey and his men had driven their half-track quite a way into the camp, but they were unable to dismount because they were immediately surrounded by inmates. Though the camp had actually been liberated a day or two before his unit arrived, he’d been sent with his men to help occupy the place, which meant he had to get out and walk around. Inmates told him the fenced area they’d driven into was called the hospital unit, but the name was just another perversion. “What it really was,” he recalls, “was a big encampment for those who were too sick to work or crippled or whatever. It was just a place for them to wait until they died. And that’s where the bodies were stacked up in big piles. Another thing we noticed when we got there was the stench. This very strong odor—I couldn’t figure out what this was, you know? And it smelled like something might be burning, the whole area smelled like that. And I couldn’t figure what the hell it was all about until several days later I caught on. That was the stench of the crematorium that was still there, days after they’d shut it down. Burning flesh, that’s what the smell was. Burning human flesh. You just shake your head and say how awful it was, just awestruck at how horrible it is. You don’t know how human beings could do such a thing. You’re just—disgusted. Some guys threw up. I didn’t.”

Colvin Caughey hadn’t been a religious person before the war, but he acknowledges getting religion in combat. As he puts it, “I had a real Christian experience that first day of battle, before I was hit.” By the time he got to Mauthausen, he had committed his life to the ministry, and the horrors of the concentration camp only strengthened his belief. “All you can see is the dire need for something; human nature needs God. I mean, they couldn’t be Christian people doing that. And of course, most of the people in there—not all of them but a vast majority of them—were Jewish people. And you just felt such compassion for those people. You didn’t even know the half of what they’d suffered.”

Caughey’s unit stayed at Mauthausen for about six weeks. It was springtime, sunny and bright, and they could see the Danube River from up in the camp—although the beautiful blue Danube was dirty brown. They were quartered in a development of fairly new homes built for the SS officers within sight of the prison and stayed to help the medical and quartermaster units brought in to feed and treat the thousands of inmates suffering from malnutrition and disease. He saw the quarry and the death camp barracks. “They were so crammed in there, they just had these big bunks with a little straw if they were lucky, maybe a couple feet between bunks, clear to the ceiling, about four different decks. The bunks were three or four foot wide. And they’d have to sleep four people on each bunk, clear up to the ceiling, and just a very narrow aisle down the middle of the barracks. Just crammed in and dark. I talked to one of the guys there—I remember he wanted something to read, and that was so strange. The only thing I had was my New Testament. I said, ‘Here, that’s all I got.’ He was probably Jewish, and I laugh about it, but it’s all I could give him to read.”

The inner prison at Mauthausen, the big stone building, was being used by the Americans to keep special German prisoners locked up in cells. Caughey’s squad was assigned to help deal with roughly twenty of those prisoners. That’s when he saw that inmates inside the camp had wreaked their revenge on some of the guards who hadn’t managed to escape. “In that inner prison, I saw big Germans butchered, really, laying down in the inner camp near the gas chamber. The floor was covered with an inch of blood, and several of the German guards, or whoever they were, had been murdered or killed by the inmates. They were fat and healthy, and they had clothing.

“I was charged with work detail. I had one of these prisoners to do the work, and I was to guard him while he did the job. And he tried to talk to me. He was a big, strong, good-looking guy. Probably SS. And he said in German, ‘What are they going to do to us—or me?’ I forgot which. And I said,
‘Ich weiss nicht.’
I don’t know. And he said, ‘Why? What have I done?’ He said this in German, of course. I said,
‘Der Lager ist schrecklich,’
the camp is terrible. He said, ‘I was a guard on the gate. I didn’t do any of that. All I was, was a guard at the gate.’”

In order to efficiently process the inmates and help them recover, the Americans got the upper camp cleaned up and kept them there. They also set up a hospital tent camp in an open field outside the Mauthausen wire. Eventually, they brought the German prisoners down into the fetid lower camp and forced them to clean out the huge latrines. Caughey says, “We had one guy on our squad who could speak German pretty good. And those prisoners were going to use the hose, stand outside and kinda hose it down from the outside. He just ordered them to get in there, and you-know-what was flying everywhere. Boy, oh boy, in a couple of hours, they had that place cleaned up.”

The fact that his outfit remained at the camp for quite some time gave Caughey and his buddies a real sense of satisfaction. “We’re just glad we got there when we did. You felt some gladness that we liberated that darn place, and we felt pretty good about things improving. Gradually, that camp is getting cleaned up, and those people who were there were starting to recover. So there was some good feelings about being there and doing what you were doing.”

For Werner Ellmann, the fact that he was German-born and could communicate with both local Germans and prisoners inside the camp was not necessarily a positive thing. While his buddies were in shock, some of them throwing up and crying, Ellmann was asking questions. The answers were arguably more disturbing than the atrocities he could see. Take, for example, the stone quarry, where he found and questioned several German civilians who worked in the camp. “They remembered when two hundred American flyers had been captured because they had to parachute from their disabled planes. They took [them] to Mauthausen, and they started them one morning to go down and get those rocks, didn’t stop them until they were dead. Either they collapsed, they were shot, bayoneted, or whatever, but all two hundred of them were liquidated that way. That’s what they did with the prisoners. How sadistic can you be? And how can you walk away with any kind of good feelings about the people who did it, much less than that’s my ancestry?”

Ellmann can still see the camp in his mind’s eye, and the dying inmates. “We had seen killing. For Christ’s sake, that was nothing new to us, but this was too hard to handle.

“I want to help people, but I didn’t know how. When you’re looking at a person in that state, you either think to yourself, ‘If I touch him, he’ll fall apart.’ Or maybe it was even—I don’t know—disgust. I don’t think that was in my mind. I think it was more subconscious. But I do feel that I had a compulsion to go through that place without running out of there. Some guys did.”

After going inside the walls and wire of Mauthausen, Ellmann lost it. “I went crazy. I did. You know, when I went out into that field and I saw these farmers out there and I stopped them and said, ‘What goes on in that camp?,’ and they said they didn’t know. I carried a Thompson submachine gun, .45-caliber. I was just about ready to blast those people. Those people were in jeopardy, because that hatred was instilled in me at that point. And I had to kill people; why the hell couldn’t I kill them? My jeep driver backed my gun down.

“And then I went back in, and I said to the commanding officer, ‘I think every one of those people in that village should be made to come into this place, see what exists here, and then be made to clean it up. Bury those people with a proper ceremony and a proper grave, and make every one of them see what’s going on here.’ And they did that.”

Like Ellmann, Shelby Keeton, a veteran of the 11th Armored Division from Monticello, Kentucky, has been unable to put the war out of his mind. He was born in 1918 and was married and had three children before he volunteered to leave the farm and join the Army in 1944. He’d been married more than fifty years before he told his wife about being at Gusen and Mauthausen with the armored infantry. Her reaction was shock, but he believes she understood why he hadn’t told her all those years. Telling her at last, he said, was necessary. “I had to talk to somebody, to get the pressure off of me, I guess. You don’t forget something like that. You can’t forget something like that. It leaves scars on you. Your memory is scarred.”

Keeton says that unless you’ve been through it, it’s impossible to imagine the burden. Not only was he at Mauthausen, he was also at one of the nearby Gusen subcamps shortly after it was liberated. “One of those commanders at Gusen, the inmates lynched him and hung him. And he had a little twelve-year-old boy, and they brought this boy up and showed him his dad hanging there dead, and the boy spit on him. In disdain. He was just disgusted with his father and spit on him. They called him Junior. He had a .22 rifle, and he would use the inmates, prisoners’ heads, for target practice. We heard he killed over two hundred inmates, shot ‘em.”

Keeton graphically describes other encounters between the newly freed inmates and German guards they’d captured, adding that the Americans didn’t intervene—“they couldn’t.” What the Americans did do is force the local German civilians to come to the camp to bury the dead in trenches dug by bulldozers. Just as at other camps, the locals protested that they hadn’t known. “Oh, bull feathers,” says Keeton. “They lied. They could smell ‘em for two miles. I know it. But we didn’t swallow that line, you know? We made ‘em put ‘em down there.” The GIs made them do it at the point of a gun or a bayonet, whatever it took to make sure that the victims got a proper burial.

Duane Mahlen, a buddy of Keeton, was part of Headquarters Company in Combat Command B. By the time he got to Mauthausen, he’d seen what he described as “the most shocking thing ever” at Flossenbürg, not quite two hundred miles to the north, a camp where thousands had been killed and “the survivors looked like they were dead.” But what he remembers most from Mauthausen is the piles of dead. “I always picture this like a stack of cordwood.”