The Liberators: America's Witnesses to the Holocaust (45 page)

“You feel bad. That’s about all you can do; it’s kind of a shock, you know, when you’re young. The situation is kind of hopeless. You just hope you can save a few. You know how it happened because they talk about it all the time while you’re there. And to see all the piles and piles of people that are outside, stacks of them, bones, and that’s about all. Watch them being thrown into a big hole in the ground.”

By May 11, a 1,500-bed hospital had been established near the main camp and a 600-bed female hospital was started near the town of Mauthausen. By May 12, a total of 1,804 patients were being treated at Mauthausen, Gusen One, Gusen Two, and the Quarry Camp. Existing buildings were converted to hospitals, and at the Mauthausen camp, more than 600 patients were cared for in the former SS barracks. By May 15, the 131st Evacuation Hospital was caring for 3,496 patients in buildings and tents, in beds and litters, and it had begun dispatching displaced persons back to their home countries, with an initial shipment of 950 Poles from Gusen One.

Phyllis Law, who was at Gusen from early May through July 1945, says they weren’t allowed to write home about what they were doing, because everything was censored. And when she got home, she says, “nobody wants to hear about it, anyway.” She didn’t try talking about it, either. “My folks just weren’t interested, you know. All they were interested in was me, I got home. And they were farmers and went about their work and didn’t have radios or anything like that to keep up with anything. That was my experience. My sister was a nurse, but she was also busy in a hospital. People don’t think about it. They think about the war, sure, but they were more concerned with the war than what we’d been through.”

CHAPTER 16

YOU ARE STILL INDIVIDUALLY AND COLLECTIVELY RESPONSIBLE

MAY 7, 1945
FALKENAU AN DER EGER (NOW SOKOLOV)
,
CZECHOSLOVAKIA
    
50 miles north-northeast of Flossenbürg, Germany
    
107 miles northeast of Nuremberg, Germany

A
t 2:41
A.M.
local time, the German high command surrendered all land, sea, and air forces unconditionally to the Allied forces. The surrender act was signed at Reims, France. The order went out to American units that on receipt of this news in the field, “all offensive operations are immediately halted, and organization of defensive positions is to begin.”

The day before, elements of the 9th Armored Division attached to the 1st Infantry Division had attacked into Czechoslovakia along the Cheb-Falkenau road. This area was the Sudetenland, inhabited mostly by ethnic Germans. On the morning after the signing of the surrender, they reached what was then called Falkenau an der Eger.

Owen Tripp, now of Bremerton, Washington, was a member of C Company of the 27th Armored Infantry Battalion. He’d been sent overseas just a few months earlier, had joined the 9th Armored Division as a replacement, and had fought with it at the Remagen bridge. He’d been aware of the concentration camps before going to Europe, but he’d never expected to see one.

On the morning of May 7, Tripp’s outfit came across three 40 and 8 boxcars sitting on a rail siding outside the main entrance to what they learned was the Flossenbürg subcamp of Falkeneau. “This sticks with me because they each were about a third full of bodies. Nude bodies. Some I suspect were not completely dead but very close to it. I don’t think they’d been there any great length of time, as there was no odor or anything of that nature. It was a revolting scene.”

After spending perhaps a half hour going through the boxcars, he got orders to enter the camp, which was empty. “We did go in and clear the barracks, which I hated with a passion because every time I did—I went into a camp and went through the barracks—I got loaded with fleas, much as I tried to avoid it.”

The only people his squad of five men saw were local civilians. He recalls that the concentration camp consisted of about a dozen one-story buildings surrounded by barbed wire with a few guard towers.

MAY 7, 1945
LUDWIGSLUST, GERMANY
    4 miles south of Wöbbelin
    73 miles east of Hamburg

O
n May 2, after reaching an agreement with the Russian army units nearby, the 8th Infantry and 82nd Airborne Divisions liberated the Nazi concentration camp at Wöbbelin. The camp had been opened just three months earlier, in March, as a subcamp of Neuengamme. It was a dumping ground for prisoners evacuated from other camps by the SS, who were attempting to follow Himmler’s order that none should fall into Allied hands.

The living conditions of the approximately 5,000 inmates were abominable, with starvation and disease rampant and cannibalism reported. The camp had no utilities, no showers, primitive latrines; the barracks were unfinished. At least a thousand men had died and been buried in mass graves in nearby woods. Two hundred bodies were scattered about when the Americans arrived.

One of the 82nd Airborne soldiers at the scene had a unique and personal connection to the Holocaust. In 1938, at the age of fourteen, Staff Sergeant Manfred Steinfeld had fled Germany for the Chicago area, leaving his mother, sister, and younger brother, who were unable to get exit visas.

In 1944, while he was a student at the University of Illinois, he was drafted, and because he spoke fluent German he was assigned to military intelligence headquarters in London, where he was an order-of-battle specialist, an expert on the German army. When two additional airborne divisions were created, the skills he possessed were needed in combat outfits. He volunteered, went to jump school in England, and joined the 82nd Airborne Division, an assignment that ultimately took him to the concentration camp at Wöbbelin. Though he knew that his mother and sister had not been able to get out of Germany before the war, he didn’t know their fate. His brother escaped to fight with the partisans and ultimately emigrated to Palestine and fought with the Israeli underground against the British, who killed him. Steinfeld’s mother and sister, having been swept up by the Nazis, survived until just three weeks before the liberation of Wöbbelin. Steinfeld didn’t learn until months later that they had been killed by the SS at the Stutthof, Poland, concentration camp rather than being freed to fall into the hands of the advancing Russians.

Steinfeld recalls his first visit to the Wöbbelin camp. “Conditions were terrible. When we got there, none of the barracks had windows; none of them had been completed. We found most of the inmates were very close to dying.”

Five days after liberation, burial services were held for two hundred of the victims in the Ludwigslust town square. The decision to take the park in front of Castle Ludwigslust as a burial ground was made by the commanding general of the 82nd Airborne, General James M. Gavin, who’d taken over the castle as his headquarters. Steinfeld was in charge of coordinating some of the activities with the local mayor’s office. He recalls, “It was a very solemn ceremony. And, of course, the Germans felt what we were making them do—to walk by the deceased bodies—was an insult to the Germanic character, so to speak. Everybody claimed, ‘We didn’t know.’ It was their standard excuse. No one spoke out loud, but since I spoke German and listened to some of the conversations, I could gather that they resented the fact we made them walk by.”

American soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division observe a moment of silence at a mass funeral held on May 7, 1945, on the palace grounds of the archduke of Mecklenburg in Ludwigslust, Germany, where they forced the townspeople to bury two hundred of the prisoners who had died in the nearby Wöbbelin concentration camp. At the time of the burial, it was estimated that one in four of the unidentified victims was Jewish, and as a result, the Star of David was inscribed on 25 percent of the crosses that had been prepared to mark the graves
.

The after-action report of the 82nd Airborne notes that “German civilians of every social strata and occupation in Ludwigslust removed the bodies from the concentration camp and prepared them for burial, dug the graves, and filled the graves after the services.” At the head of each grave was a cross. Steinfeld, now retired as founder of a successful furniture manufacturing company and still an important philanthropist in the Chicago Jewish community, says that it was estimated that at least 25 percent of the dead were Jews and that though the sight was jarring, a Star of David was painted on every fourth cross.

A eulogy by Major George B. Wood, an 82nd Airborne chaplain, also served as a rebuke to the Germans in attendance:

We are assembled here today before God and in the sight of man to give a proper and decent burial to the victims of atrocities committed by armed forces in the name of and by the order of the German Government. These 200 bodies were found by the American army in a concentration camp four miles North of the city of Ludwigslust.

The crimes here committed in the name of the German people and by their acquiescence were minor compared to those to be found in concentration camps elsewhere in Germany. Here there were no gas chambers, no crematoria; these men of Holland, Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and France were simply allowed to starve to death. Within four miles of your comfortable homes 4,000 men were forced to live like animals, deprived even of the food you would give to your dogs. In three weeks 1,000 of these men were starved to death; 800 of them were buried in pits in the nearby woods. These 200 who lie before us in these graves were found piled four and five feet high in one building and lying with the sick and dying in other buildings.

The world has long been horrified at the crimes of the German nation; these crimes were never clearly brought to light until the armies of the United Nations overran Germany. This is not war as conducted by international rules of warfare. This is murder such as is not even known among savages.