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$Title{Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps 1945, The
Chapter III: The War Correspondents - Part II}
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$Date{1987}
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Title:       Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps 1945, The
Author:      Various
Date:        1987

Chapter III: The War Correspondents - Part II

Curtis Mitchell

     This is a most solemn occasion and a most difficult one for all of us. We
have heard all the things that cannot be put into words.  We have heard that
words are not adequate in any language to describe the things that happened on
the eastern and western fronts.

     I take exception to that to some extent because there are words that will
describe it to somewhat better effect, but nobody can use them here. Nobody
can use them except in his mind at night when he lies in his bed and he tries
to say what really happened and how bad it was, and then somehow or other
words of such filth and eloquence and pain come through the mind that you
realize you can never utter them, even to the wife you have lived with for 50
years.

     So I think all of us, certainly some of us, carry a burden of sorts.  I
wish I could liberate myself from that burden right here in your ears, but I
cannot do that because of my cultural background, my inhibitions, and also,
perhaps, because it wouldn't really accomplish what I would hope would be
accomplished, because of the shocking effect.

     However, I can tell you, as we have heard again last night and today,
what I saw.  But first, before I tell you that, I want to talk about something
that I think will surprise our first speaker, who probably doesn't know that
Ed Murrow was not originally headed toward the camp where he made that great
report that you just heard.

     I was in the Scribe Hotel also, representing the American War Department,
and had been sent there on a War Department mission to see that the press was
able to cover, with every possible liberty, the elimination of the Nazi system
from the world.  This meant censorship, opening up of censorship.  This meant
assisting in any way that I could.

During this period there came a time when we had crossed the Rhine -
Montgomery in the North had crossed the Rhine; Patton in the South had crossed
the Rhine.  While there was no race literally between the two divisions
because they were all under one command, there was, nevertheless, a rivalry
between the people who wanted to be there first.

     We had heard about these camps.  There had been a few covert stories.  A
great reporter named Jimmy Cannon who published in the New York Hearst press
at that time had hinted at these things.  One day I was in my room in the
Scribe Hotel and Ed Murrow, whom I had known earlier, came to my room.  He
said, "I just heard that Belsen is probably going to be the first camp
liberated."  And I said, "Well, that's what I heard last night.  Some people
have just come down from General Montgomery's headquarters, and he's moving.
There's a good chance that Belsen will be liberated."  He said, "Well, I
understand that you are trying to go in that direction.  Yes.  "Can I go with
you?"

     So we agreed that we would take off for Belsen two days later.  One day
later, Patton broke loose.  The American South front moved forward.  Ed came
back and said, "I'm sorry, but these are American troops.  I am an American
reporter for the American public, and I cannot go north to talk about the
British occupying a camp.  So I'll have to join the American correspondents.

     And that he did.  But for that change of plans, he would not have made
that great reportage.  It certainly is a masterpiece and a crossroads in the
history of broadcasting - television or radio - of what really happened in the
war.

     To follow up on that a little bit, you have just heard that a group of
newspaper editors were immediately flown over.  One general up at the front
had seen this for himself.  I have forgotten his name.  He called General
Eisenhower and persuaded him to go immediately to see for himself.  Then
General Eisenhower sent word back to General Marshall in the Pentagon and
said, "Get the newspaper editors over here as fast as possible." These editors
were the first.  Simultaneously almost, there was a group of, I think it was
10 or 12 congressmen - key congressmen - key committeemen who were assembled.

     You wonder how stories get out.  They get out because some eager beaver
somewhere sees a great disservice to humanity and says, "Let do something
about it."  And that is what was done.  It started with an eager beaver
somewhere down the line, and he said, "We've got to tell this story."

     It went up the line, as it must in all army and military organizations,
and the first thing we knew not only was this story being told in these
interviews with these people who had seen the camps, who had walked into the
extermination department, but we were also being told, "Get other people over
here."

     My station was here in the Pentagon.  In our news division, we had an
operation which consisted of reporters covering [for] the press, covering
[for] the newsreels, and covering [for] the still pictures.  Television at
that time had not been invented it had been invented but not made practical.

     In turn, the Army provided large planes to take over groups of 20, 30 of
these editors.  I was able to also include the representatives of all the
Hollywood production studios and distribution services so that if ever a
picture was made someday, of which somebody would come along and say, "This
never happened," the men around the studios would know what had happened and
would be able to provide an antidote for that.

     What is happening now is that most of my companions of that day, most of
the generals, most of the studio heads, have passed on.  They are dead or
retired.  We are bringing up another generation which doesn't know what really
happened.  That is the reason I want to add my testimony to what I have heard
this morning and last night about the things I saw.

     In kind, my testimony is pretty similar - not too different from what you
have heard already.  You have heard of bodies being heaped like cordwood. It
is amazing that so many stories repeated the line, "They were heaped like
cordwood." Why this is an American way of expressing the horror of bodies laid
on bodies, I don't know, but there it was.

     As I walked down the main street of Belsen after I entered it - have
forgotten the date, but it was early in April - here were bodies before every
single barracks; women on one side, men on the other side, with the bodies
heaped like cordwood.

     Then came a truck the process of removing those bodies.  Do you
understand that here was a world gone wild, a world gone hopeless, a world
gone without any plans for what was happening?  Usually there would be two
Americans, or two, in this case, Canadian or British soldiers escorting the
guards who had been the ones who guarded the camp.  They would march their
detail of these exguards to where the bodies were.  One would get at the feet,
the other at the head.  Then they would reach down, they would grab the
ankles, they would grab the sleeves or arms of the men.  They would carry that
body to the back of the truck, and they would swing it back and forth three
times and then hurl it up into the truck where it was allowed to thump with a
grievous sound.

     That happened until all those bodies were removed, and the next bodies
were removed.  Finally, when my car got down to the end of that street, here
was a huge open ditch which had in it, they told me, between 1,000 and 2,000
bodies which had been picked up from the streets in the last two days.

     Beyond, I looked over and here were heaps of earth raised about three
feet above the level.  On each one was a white sign.  On this sign, "Grave
Number One - 5,000 people," "Grave Number Two - 5,000 people," and on through
Grave Number Three and Grave Number Four.

     It so happened that I had with me a camera crew from the U.S. Army Signal
Corps, and I took some of these pictures myself.  Then it occurred to me, when
they had thrown all of these bodies into this grave, that someday something
like this [denying the existence of the camps and the Holocaust] might happen.
And when it did happen, could anybody stand up and talk about it and have
people believe them?

     So, I told my cameraman, "Look, I'm, going to stand over there by the
edge of the grave, and I want you to take my picture."  That picture is
available in the Army Signal Corps files, and anybody who doesn't believe it
happened only has to look at the picture.  I m not exactly the same face that
I was 35 years ago, but there is some resemblance they tell me.

     I am not saying, by any means, that this was what some people have called
an extermination camp.  We heard this morning that there were no gas chambers,
I believe, on the western front, on the American front.  I don't know anything
about that.  I only know that I saw those unburied dead and all of those
graves.  When I walked out of that place with my cameraman and an associate
and into the first barracks, I saw in the distance something which must have
been written by a medieval torture writer, because one-half of the building
was completely demolished, the other half looked as if somebody had dumped a
freight load of serpents on the floor.

     Again, the words are most inadequate.  As I stood there, they mistook me
and the man with me, because he carried a pail, as the bringer of food.  These
people weighed only about 70 or 80 pounds and were so weak that they could
neither crawl nor walk.  When they saw food or what they thought was food,
they took their mess kits, put them in their mouths, and started slithering
forward on the floor until they had reached our feet.  They wanted to touch
us, and they couldn't.

     One of the great tragedies, of course, in anybody's life is having a
thing like that happen and then realizing that you cannot do anything about
it.  At every one of these camps, you may not know, there was a place where
there was also a big training school where there were loyal German troops. If
there was ever any trouble or a breakout, they could immediately get out the
tanks.  The tank school was right next to Belsen.  They had put these people
those they thought could survive in the empty tank school, and they had been
so degraded, so depersonalized that they could no longer function as human
beings.  They couldn't hold food in their stomachs; they didn't know what to
do.  They broke up the furniture, the beds, and made fires in the middle of
the room to keep warm by.  This was the first chance they had had to do that.

     They had never been outdoors for months or maybe years to go to a toilet;
they used the corners of the rooms, although there were bathrooms down the
hall.

     All this leads me to a point that I think is awfully important and hasn't
really been touched on here, and that is the walking wounded who survived.  We
have heard about the six million dead - gone but not forgotten, but beyond the
pain of living.  But as I circulated through the camp, I saw so many people
who had paid the price of their imprisonment with their reason, their process
of thinking.

     Some of them were crawling around among the potato peelings one day when
I passed by, fighting each other, taking their fingers and running them around
the insides of the cans that the Canadian Army had opened and thrown out.
They were fighting over these tin cans.

     These people were let out of the place with no facilities for taking care
of them.  They wandered down the roads.

     Afterwards, they were to establish things called displaced persons camps,
and I visited a number of those.  These were not organized except by the
Allies.  The DPs had to be taken care of.  As one rode through the roads of
northern Germany at that time, you saw nothing but DPs.  At one corner I saw a
three-story-high pile of bicycles.  For reasons unknown, some general had
given an order that the DPs could not have bicycles.  They didn't want them to
get too far away or they might lose control of them.  They wanted them in
containments where they could feed them, where they could heal them if
necessary.

     So they wandered around.  They became their own law for a while.  Some of
those DPs and the children of those DPs are wandering around today.  I don't
know where they are, but they've got wounds.  They've got wounds that will
never heal.

     If I may add just one more personal note to this.  You may wonder what a
professional newspaper man - who has seen bodies in the New York Police
Department, dismembered, and who is so-called callous to these things - thinks
about all of this?

     There seems to be a psychological reaction called "numbing" -
n-u-m-b-i-n-g.  I see a head nodding because I am sure there are
psychologists and psychiatrists among you.  This numbing apparently preserved
me from the worst. I think I'm lucky to have escaped this mystery, because I
am not too acutely controlled by what I saw and what happened.

     Today we have a Chairman here who married a woman who had been in these
camps.  I met her today for the first time, and I looked at her arm.  There
were the blue, the lavender marks of the prisoners, the ones I had seen on
thousands of people.  Believe it or not, then it hit me.  I began to realize
that there are people all over the world who have these numbers tattooed on
their arms, and that somehow this can't happen again.  We're the only ones who
can stop it.

     So I hope you will join with the spirit with the intent of this meeting
and this organization which has organized it, so that this sort of thing can
never come to humanity again.

Svenn Seehusen

     I have had no time to prepare my speech.  I have not used my pen or my
pencil so I ask you to listen to the sounds of my heart.

     I went to the Danish resistance movement in 1941 as a young journalist.
Denmark was occupied in April 1940.  We accepted the German occupation after
only a few hours' fight.

     Very early, the young people started action against the occupying power.
We started with underground resistance movement papers.  In 1945, there were
over 800 papers with 2.5 million copies in Denmark.  The population at that
time was only four million.

     The Danish underground papers were very important in our fight for
freedom.  We had to give the Danish people the truth.  We had to give
information about what was happening in the world and what was happening in
Denmark so they could fight for freedom.

     The underground papers were important; they made the basis for the Danish
newspaper service in Sweden.  Through the Danish underground papers we could
tell the free world what was happening in Denmark; we could talk about the
Danish resistance movement.

     I will try to tell you how I remember the last week of September and the
first week of October 1943.  At that time there were about 7,000 Danish-
Jewish countrymen.  We didn't know which of our school comrades and neighbors
were Jews, but by the end of September, we knew who the Jews were.

     I saw when I came here a map outside with millions of Jews who died in
Europe during the Holocaust.  But I never saw the numbers in Denmark.  I would
like to try to tell you why no Jews died in October 1943 in Denmark .

     I remember the day we had a meeting of our regional underground group,
and there was some rumor that something might happen to the Jewish people.
About September 28 we got a message through a German officer from some
political party people two of them were later prime ministers in Denmark.  The
officer had gotten the message in his secret paper, and he went to these
Danish politicians and said something would happen in connection with Yom
Kippur [Day of Atonement] on the first of October, 1943.

     The political people went to the resistance people and to the Jewish
organization: "Something will be happening.  Please be careful; please go from
your homes."

     What was fantastic was that our Jewish neighbors and countrymen didn't
think it could be right.  Many of them stayed in their homes.  The resistance
was sure that something would happen in the morning, so on the evening of
October 1, they got a message through the papers and through the resistance
organization out to all Denmark.  The message was delivered primarily in
Copenhagen, however, since most of the Danish Jews lived in Copenhagen.  I
don't know what happened, but all at once the whole Copenhagen population knew
something was going to happen to their neighbors.

     In the night, the neighbors would knock on the door of their Jewish
neighbors and say, "Please stay with us tonight."  Many of the Jews used the
trains in the morning, and the Danes sitting beside them would say, "Please
follow me home.  You can be with me and we will help you."

     I would like to be very honest and say that at that time, October 3, we
in the Danish resistance movement didn't know how we were going to send out
7,000 people in two or three days.  But we got them home.  The truth about the
Danish actions in 1943 was that they were helpful to the whole Danish
population.  Thousands and thousands of Danes were helped.

     We in the newspaper worked very hard that night to send out information
about what was happening.  But there was not only the Danish people; there was
the Church.  The priests in the Church protested against what was happening to
their Jewish countrymen.

     We in the resistance movement went to the coast.  We had a transport
organization at that time.  It was very difficult and very primitive, but
after two or three days of going up the coast from Copenhagen, we got in touch
with fishermen and boatmen and asked them to help us.  I can tell you no one,
no fisherman said no.  They accepted this very dangerous task of crossing the
sea to Sweden.  We in the underground press and in the resistance movement
were the organizers of the operation.  But we could not hide our Jewish fellow
countrymen for more than one or two weeks.

     We were able to save our Jewish countrymen because we had a free Sweden;
therefore, I am very sorry that there is no delegation from Sweden to this
convention today.  For me, Sweden was one of the most important countries
during the war.  It was a free country, a free country with hospitality to
accept 7,000 Jews.  We got them to freedom in Sweden in just one week.

     My participation in this meeting today has been a very great experience.
I have heard about how the Jewish people and the concentration camp people
were forced to wear dirty clothes with lice, but I can say that we could see
our countrymen come back to Denmark after the war, healthy and smiling.  After
listening to the testimony today, I have a little peace in my heart that I was
among the thousands and thousands of people who together did their part for
our countrymen.

     We speak about the past for the future.  Therefore, I am very happy to be
here to attend this conference.  I can promise on behalf of my Danish friends
that we will support the efforts to tell the world about the Holocaust.  But
at the same time, I feel that perhaps what happened in Denmark in October 1943
can be an example for the future.

Fred Friendly

     The report from Denmark, what my colleagues have said, the legacy that
Murrow left on that piece of tape, and what Elie Wiesel said last night, say
it all.

     I would presume on you only to share with you for a moment how I happened
to be there.  If you looked up my Army record, you would find that Fred
Friendly was assigned to the China-Burma-India theater.  I was a correspondent
for the C.B.I. Roundup, which was the Stars and Stripes of Asia.

     General Sultan who succeeded General Stillwell, early in April, said, "We
are not going to win the war in Asia.  We are not going to get to Japan via
the Burma Road.  The 400,000 Americans in India, Burma, China have to know
what's going on there [in Europe]."  I was suddenly called in to headquarters
and given a letter to General Eisenhower.  Two days later I was in Paris, and
five or six days later I was at the front and at Mauthausen.

     I was 24 years old.  No one had ever begun to warn me that there could be
anything like Belsen or Buchenwald or Mauthausen or Dachau.  There I was,
plucked out of China, plucked literally off the Burma Road, and dropped into
Mauthausen, as Murrow went to Buchenwald.

     I wrote a letter which I considered sharing with you, but better judgment
told me to use the tape.  It was to my wife, whom I didn't know yet, and to my
six unborn children whom I could not even predict.  Although I am not a very
religious person, I wrote that letter to my mother, to those other people my
children and my wife and asked that at every Passover it be read. And it is,
every year, by a different member of the family the oldest is now 35.

     When I hear people ask, "Did it happen?" I don't understand.  When I hear
Murrow, and I've heard that maybe 70 times, the moment that clings to my
heart, and I expect to many of yours, is the man from Vienna who asks to feel
his wallet because he was a leather worker and he hadn't felt leather in six
years.

     I believe that little book I carry around, which is the only reference
book I use very much - the Constitution of the United States and the First
Amendment (which is sometimes honored more in the breach) guarantees that
events like Buchenwald - to give it one name, a generic name will be
remembered by history, by people who write about it.

     But there is nothing like that first draft of history.  Murrow didn't
write that report a month later, 10 months later, 10 years later, or in his
memoirs 35 years later.  He was a very young man, and he wrote what he felt in
his gut and his heart, which is what others of us tried to do.

     He spoke in that tape of an epitaph for Franklin Roosevelt.  I have never
seen as many people listen to that Murrow broadcast as I did today.  It's
Murrow's epitaph, in a way.  I would think that he would think that broadcast
more important than what he did during the Blitz and the Battle of London and
the McCarthy broadcast.  I think he would like to be remembered for that, just
as he suggested that we might want to remember Franklin Roosevelt.

     In his speech last night, Elie Wiesel spoke about Buchenwald.  Remember I
said Murrow saw Buchenwald on the I 5th of April.  Wiesel talked about being a
prisoner, a small boy, and seeing it on the 11th.  They are opposite sides of
the same coin, but that same kind of destiny said to all of us, "This
happened."  Wiesel wrote, "What we all have in common is an obsession not to
betray the dead we left behind or who left us behind.  They were killed once:
they must not be killed again through forgetfulness.  We cannot stand idly by,
because what happened once could happen again somewhere, someplace."

     I've never said this before, because I've never felt it before, but
Murrow's voice crying out to you, to my children, to my students, to my
students' children, from his grave is saying, "We cannot let this be
forgotten, because the consequences of forgetting is that we could allow it to
happen someplace again."