We Who Are Alive and Remain (27 page)

I didn’t do much in Berchtesgaden except pull guard duty and drink champagne and cognac.

In Berchtesgaden, I hardly had anything to do as a medic. We set up medical headquarters in a hotel. Some of the hotel staff got diarrhea, and I gave them some medicine to cork them up. Then I had to give them some more medicine to get them uncorked. Once a major was riding a horse and hit his head on a tree. I was called to help, but by the time I got there he was okay. That’s about all I did medically.

When we were in Berchtesgaden, Sergeant Earl Hale sent us out to get transportation. We went out to look for what we could find. We came across Hitler’s car, but it had no wheels. We found a bus, but it wouldn’t start. We saw a fire truck and took that. On the way back to camp we had a wonderful time ringing the bell. Hale was upset. He didn’t want a fire truck.

I only saw two Germans on the way into Berchtesgaden; one was dead, the other was running. Then we went to a little town close to where the road goes out to the Eagle’s Nest. They said they had blown the road out and nobody could get up there. It was just rocks, so I thought, I can climb over them. I went up there anyway. I just walked over the rocks. It was about five miles, but that was no chore in them days. I went by myself. Hitler’s house had been bombed—it was just a pile of junk, but he had a good wine cellar in there. That’s where we got all that booze. I know I was the first American in Berchtesgaden. Somebody cleared the road eventually and the unit got up there.

From there I went on to Hitler’s
teehaus
, on top of the Alps. I climbed to the ridge and got up there. There was no electricity, you couldn’t take the elevator. Years later we were over there with a tour and the guide started asking me questions about it. He didn’t believe I had been there. I told him about the Persian rugs upstairs and down, which aren’t there anymore. The guide said, “You were there all right. The people in the town cut them up in little pieces and took them out.”

When I was up at the Eagle’s Nest I found some loot hidden in Hitler’s garage. I ended up getting into that and got a box full of fifty-dollar bills and sixteen hundred-pound English notes. About four o’clock the next morning search lights came on in the barracks we were staying in. We fell out in our underwear. Our commanding officers went through the barracks and got that money back. Aside from the cognac, that’s all I got from the Eagle’s Nest. Oh, I got a Luger and got that home through customs; that’s the only thing I got.

Last Duties in Austria

From Germany we moved into Austria at the end of April 1945. All this time the Germans were still surrendering. We headed down the autobahn one way with the Germans coming the other way.

One incident sticks out to me. We had some R & R time in Austria. You could read books, climb mountains, swim, sometimes you didn’t know what to do with yourself. One afternoon some buddies and I went about twenty miles away to a lake to go for a row. You always had to carry your weapon with you—many of us didn’t want to carry our rifles, so we carried German pistols. I must have rowed longer than everybody else, because suddenly I was all alone in the lake; my buddies had all gone back without me. So there I was twenty miles from the base with German soldiers running all around and all I’ve got is a pistol.

I walked back to the main road and stuck my thumb out. The first car that came along was a real fancy German Mercedes staff car with the top down. A driver and an assistant driver were in front, with two officers in the rear. They stopped and gave me a ride. It was probably a safer move on their behalf to travel with an American soldier with them. Plus, they probably didn’t want any of their soldiers taking a shot at one lone American GI standing beside the road, which would have prompted an American retaliation.

We rode together for about half an hour. The officers had been schooled in the States and spoke perfect English. They turned out to be part of General Albert Kesselring’s surrender team and were in the process of negotiating several surrenders. We spoke mostly of home, no politics. As we drove down the road any German we saw saluted us. I wish I had a camera.

I pulled a lot of guard duty around then. We often stood guard alongside of German MPs, who made sure the German civilians and surrendering soldiers went the right directions. For several days I guarded alongside these two older German fellows. They didn’t speak much. They wore these strange collars around their necks. I took a picture of them. Back in the States a friend of mine saw the picture. His mouth flew open. “Do you realize who those guys were?!” he said. They were a specialized German troop, almost like KGB. They had been authorized to shoot anybody on sight, German soldiers or otherwise.

Kaprun, Austria—I thought I had died and gone to heaven there. My job was to hunt and feed the prisoners that the Germans had taken for slave labor who were incarcerated there. The prisoners were freed by then but they had no place to go. I think they were Polish and Romanian mostly. The job fell to us to feed them. I fed them stag and chamois (goats with little hooked horns) until they were coming out of their ears. So I finally got to do some hunting, like I enjoyed. I just camped out. They saw me maybe once or twice a week.

I was there every day Easy Company fought on the line and was one of the very few who were never wounded in combat. That didn’t mean I wasn’t close a bunch of times, but I never got wounded.

Right at the end of the war, I had my name pulled out of a hat to come home early on a furlough. Four of us won, one from each company: Headquarters, Dog, Fox, and Easy. As we traveled down the road in the back of this truck, this drunk GI came around the corner at us and crashed into us. I flew out and broke my pelvis and my wrist.

They shot me full of morphine at the wreck site. The next thing I knew I woke up in the field hospital and a nurse was taking my clothes off. I opened my eyes for a few seconds. I saw her take off my boots. When she got to my pants (I had bloused them with condoms, like we always did), she jumped back and gave out a great big squeal. That’s all I remember before I went back under.

I woke up again in a hospital tent. I was beat up, black and blue all over. I had a whole lot of stuff I was bringing home, and I lost all of it. I felt so sorry for myself. I raised myself up in bed and looked around. Down the other end of the ward was a cot with a soldier lying on it. He had a complete body cast on, from the top of his head to his toes. All you could see were little holes for his eyes, nose, and mouth. That took care of me feeling sorry for myself. I considered how fortunate I was.

I went to Reims to a hospital for a while and got doctored up some. They put me on a ship and sent me back to the States.

In Austria I got detailed with the freight department. I was assigned to a special detail to escort trainloads of displaced persons to Budapest. These were people that the Germans had removed from their homes and taken to Austria and Germany as forced laborers. I don’t remember a single English-speaking person. Not all were Jews. We made two trips on this detail. I was the only one, to my knowledge, from Headquarters Company, 2nd Battalion, of the 506th.

The displaced people were put in boxcars. There was only one coach on the whole train, right in the middle, and that was where the troops lived. We had two machine gun crews. I was a rifleman. Our job was to escort those people to their destination, unload them, and return those boxcars, which belonged to the U.S. Army, back to the U.S. Army at Kaprun. But the engines were all operated by Russians, which made this a tricky situation. Every place we stopped, those Russians tried to get away with a boxcar or two. We needed to set up signals to know that the whole train was still there whenever we left. As soon as a train started slowing down we had to have somebody on that first car to be damn sure we didn’t have to shoot the engineer.

We had to be pretty mean thinking about it, too. We stopped at one station, and this Russian officer started to get on our personal car. I was on the end of the platform. When he started to get on, I said no. He looked up at me and motioned to a Russian rifleman behind him, who immediately trained his weapon on me. The officer stepped back on the car. I stepped sideways and put my foot on the officer’s chest and set him on his ass beside the railroad track. The rifleman looked behind me, and there was another American with an M-1 on him. It was a Mexican standoff. We thought sure we were going to have an awful lot of trouble with that. Every place along that railroad there were flatcars loaded with farm equipment, fire trucks (I remember one row of flatcars was loaded with nothing but fire hoses, coils, and coils of fire hose) that the Russians were taking back to Russia.

When we got to Budapest, we pulled into these railway yards. Alongside were loading docks with warehouses. The Russians were in charge of the station and the displaced people. They unloaded all these people out of the boxcars and all their belongings. The people were taken inside of a building. Then the people were taken out and herded away. I don’t know if they ever got their stuff back or not. Now, these people had an awful lot of baggage—trunks and suitcases and bags. They had been taken out of German homes as they came across the country. Whether they had anything that belonged to them or not wasn’t part of the question.

It wasn’t all relaxed in Austria. Near Kaprun we heard there were some SS troops hiding up in the hill. When the SS troops got you they took no prisoners. So we didn’t either. We got up in the mountains. There was a cabin, and we found out from an elderly lady where the general was. He had been a commandant in a concentration camp and had some SS troops with him up on a hill—I don’t remember how many of them. Some of our sharpshooters took care of the troops. In deference to our men I won’t say who our shooters were. After a little firefight, we captured the general, still alive. We got him up behind a tree and brought him down to a plane where the cabin was. That’s where we shot him by firing squad. About five of us shot together—nobody knows exactly who killed him. That was the first time I saw the back of somebody’s head fly off. The war was technically over at this point, but I’m eighty-six years old as I tell this, so if they want to do something about it, they better hurry. It’s a true story, and rightly or wrongly, it happened. That’s the way war is. I’m sure there are other stories similar to this because we weren’t the only ones who found SS troops out in the hills.

Having seen some of the people who came out of concentration camps, I had no compunction about executing a commandant of one of the camps. I can’t say I was one who actually liberated the camps, but I was there when we opened the gates. Some of these poor wretches running out were so emaciated they actually died from the excitement of being liberated. I saw it happen several times. These people in the camps—they were like walking skeletons. You could see all their bones. The gates opened and the people ran out yelling, “I’m free! I’m free!” And some of them died right there. I was horrified to see what the SS had done to these people.

When the war was over they started a point system to discharge the high-points men early. Some of the men didn’t like the system. You needed eighty-five points to get out. Most of the high-points men in E Company had eighty-five to ninety points, and to reach that you needed to be a three-mission man, wounded probably at least once, and probably have a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. But there were guys in the air force in England who got a cluster of points every time they flew a mission. So it wasn’t a fair deal. I had thirty-six points; I wasn’t going home anytime soon.

At Kaprun we heard of some Russian prisoners of war being kept up on the mountain. We got up there and found two Russian men and three hefty Russian girls, each about twenty years old. The Germans had them up there and were working the hell out of them.

This incident happened a few weeks after the war: We were in Saalfelden, Austria, near Zell am See. A civilian approached us and said every time anybody tried to take down the Nazi flag from a little hamlet up there, this mayor beat up whoever tried to take down the flag. The guy who spoke to us had scabs all over his nose and the back of his knuckles. Several of us rode up there in the back of this six-by-six to check things out. Liebgott and Speirs were in the front of the cab with a driver. Liebgott spoke fluent German. We found out everybody up there hated this mayor’s guts. He was part of the SS. We located the mayor and started to take him back with us.

Coming back, I was riding in the back of the truck with a couple privates and the mayor. The driver stopped the truck. Speirs got out and told us to get the mayor down out of there. We got him down. Liebgott had a German Luger. He jacked one in the chamber, walked around, and looked at the mayor right in the eye. Boy, that Kraut didn’t flinch. He just stood there glaring at Liebgott. Liebgott stuck the Luger between the mayor’s eyes and pulled the trigger. The Luger misfired. Right when it clicked, this German went off running down the road. Speirs said, “Shoot him.” One of our men shot and missed. I shot about thirty feet over the mayor’s head. Another man brought him down. I won’t say who.

When I got home from the war and told my mother we were in Zell am See, Austria, I learned for the first time that she had been born there and lived there until she came to America. Later we found that my Aunt Emily had been put in a concentration camp during the war and probably died there. My Uncle Bill had also been in a concentration camp, but was liberated by the Americans. Uncle Bill lived, and after the war our family took up a collection and sent for him. He came to live with us in International Falls, Minnesota, and got a job in the same paper mill that I worked in. He wasn’t healthy and lived less than a year. The concentration camp had taken a toll on his body.