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$Title{Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps 1945, The
Chapter IV: The Medical Personnel - Part II}
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$Date{1987}
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Title:       Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps 1945, The
Author:      Various
Date:        1987

Chapter IV: The Medical Personnel - Part II

Douglas Kelling

As far as some of the medical problems [at Dachau are concerned] - and I will
just speak of a few because there were multiple types of diseases - one of the
prevalent diseases there was typhus.  I think everybody in the camp had body
lice, and typhus fever is carried by body lice.  I was told that on an average
each day 270 patients died from typhus fever.  Many patients died from
tuberculosis.  It was rampant.  Many patients died just from starvation, this
forced starvation.

     It looked as if these people were trying in every way to be more cruel,
in any way that they possibly could, thinking of these devious, cruel methods
to destroy innocent people.

     When I entered the camp, the prisoners had taken over.  Now the SS guards
were the prisoners and were being turned over to our military personnel.  Many
of these liberated prisoners were wandering aimlessly about the camp,
apparently not believing what was happening.  Many were crying with joy, and
all were appreciative.  To show their appreciation, they gathered in this
exercise area in the middle of the rectangle in national groups, and that was
a pitiful sight to see these poor, sick, emaciated people in tattered dirty
clothes showing their appreciation.  It made you want to cry, and I did cry.

     They had been treated cruelly, as you know, from the time they entered
this camp.  But the important thing, their pride, self-esteem, was still
there.  They were so happy to be liberated that their foremost thought now was
to return home to their relatives and friends.  But now, the true realism
presented itself.  Their homes had probably been destroyed; their relatives
and friends had probably been killed or possibly were in other concentration
camps.  Although liberated and now free, ill with various diseases, and
emaciated by this diet, many, and naturally so, became quite depressed.  We
all would.  They could not be termed "mentally ill."  They were acting just as
any normal person would act in a similar environment.  I considered them weak
physically, but very strong mentally, to have endured the tortures they had
undergone.

     Having been subjected to such brutal treatment and now liberated at last,
these prisoners could, in my opinion, adjust to their new freedom,
experiencing depression, despondency, sorrow, weakness, physical impairment,
and disease in a better manner than most of us could.  They were naturally
angered, and hated those who held them captive and treated them so cruelly. I
am sure they were all hoping, thinking, and wanting to bring these guilty
persons to justice.  I'm sure they were thinking, how could such things have
happened and what can we do to keep this from happening in the future'?

     As Division psychiatrist, quarters were set up for me in the camp where I
could continue to treat our military personnel when needed and offer my
services to the former prisoners of the camp.  I was consulted only very
infrequently by an occasional former prisoner about personal problems.  It
seems to me that the thought of getting out of this terrible camp probably
suppressed some abnormal mental states and thoughts for the immediate time
being, which might surface later on.

     Some of my other duties were camp inspections to suggest means to improve
the prevailing camp sanitation.  The necessary medical treatment of the
prisoners was cared for by the prisoner physicians and by medical units from
the services, such as the field hospitals and evacuation hospitals, which were
brought in to help with this problem.

     Would that I could erase my memories of Dachau forever.

George Tievsky

     By way of background, I was 28 years old at the time.  I had just
finished my internship at the local municipal hospital, which is like any
municipal hospital in a large city - one sees the bottom strata of society,
the lowest level, sometimes the animal level.  I had seen malnutrition; I had
seen drug addiction; I had seen, I thought, the worst that society could
present.  I was horribly surprised.

     The 66th Field Hospital was a unit which is now known as a "Mobile Army
Surgical Hospital," MASH, for short.  It was used for critically injured
soldiers who could not be transported.  We were outside of small fire range
but within artillery range, so we saw massive wounds.  This was something that
I thought would help me later, although I did not know what I was going to see
later.

     We crossed the Rhine very early, within the first day or two, and
followed the forces right behind the infantry into Bavaria and ended near
Munich.  At the cessation of hostilities, we were bivouacked in a very
pleasant green pasture.  On May 2, we received orders to proceed to a town by
the name of Allach.  Allach turned out to be a subcamp of the Dachau complex,
about 2.8 kilometers, or roughly two miles, from, there.

     We set up our station; within two hours we were receiving patients en
masse.  A field hospital is a small hospital it is divided into three
platoons.  Each has 20 beds.  Each has 11 nurses and, as I recall, about eight
physicians, with an attached surgeon.  So our medical personnel was not great.
We were inundated with patients immediately.

     During this period of time I wrote letters daily to the girl who was to
be my wife, who is my wife of 36 years.  I have a letter here.  We were at
Allach for six weeks.  We were ordered out on June 10th to be shipped to the
Pacific, to the Philippines, for the invasion of the home islands of Japan.
The letter I have here is dated June 4, 1945.  I summarized to some extent our
experiences at Dachau.  I begin:

     "We were sent to Dachau, or perhaps I should say rushed, just several
days after the Americans had taken it.  What they found there was the same as
in any other concentration camp - human beings living in indescribable filth
and utter neglect.  Dead bodies lay about unburied, and the stench was almost
unbearable.  The sick were in buildings called 'hospitals' - revieres they
called them - fifty or sixty to a small room, in beds three tiers high, and
with two, sometimes three, persons to one bed.

     "There were no blankets, even during the coldest part of the winter.
Sanitary facilities were practically nonexistent, and the floor was slimy with
excreta.  The odor was horrible.

     "Food was practically nonexistent and medicines even scarcer.  There were
many doctor prisoners, but they weren't given anything with which to work.

     "These were the conditions in the compound, that is, the main area of the
camp.

     "We moved into the area, Allach, used by the SS guards and other camp
personnel, and this wasn't quite so bad.  In this area were a few buildings in
which prisoners had been housed, and these we used as our hospital after much
cleaning out.

     "Our primary reason for having been sent there was because of an outbreak
of typhus in the camp.  I haven't stressed that because I didn't want you to
worry.  The term 'typhus' that is, of the epidemic type is one of the diseases
that even medical men face with some qualms because of its extreme
contagiousness and severity under these conditions.  During the immediate
postwar period of World War I, millions died of the disease in the Balkans and
Russia.  The Army is quite concerned about the disease and has typhus teams
that work in all areas in which typhus is found.

     "Our first function was to set up a ward, which was formerly a gymnasium
or theater, for the typhus patients.  The diagnosis was made in the compound,
and they were then sent into us.  The 3rd Platoon was in this ward, our
platoon having nothing to do with it.  When the patients were received there,
they were bathed, their clothing discarded, and their entire body dusted with
DDT the new marvelous insecticide.  They had previously been deloused in the
compound, but no chances were taken.

     "We were all surprised at the relative mildness of the disease and few
deaths.  True, the patients would have high fevers 103 to 104 degrees and
severe headaches, but almost always recovery would occur.  The answer was
quite simple we were seeing patients after the disease had been active for
nine months.  Remember the mortality curve in an epidemic?  It always tapers
off after a little while because of a number of different reasons.

     "The 2nd Platoon - ours - took general medical and surgical cases.  The
most immediate problem in these patients was that of starvation; the
complications could generally wait until that was licked.

     "I think I have already written descriptions of the living skeletons that
were carried into our building.  It was incredible to look at them and think
that they might still be living.  We fed them soups and gruel at first and
added solid food little by little.  Some could take nothing.  And to these we
gave plasma, sometimes orally, later.  All of them had very severe diarrhea,
with eight to twenty stools per day.  It was primarily on a nutritional basis,
for with paregoric and a little food almost all of them responded promptly.

     "I had an opportunity to see the vitamin deficiency diseases in their
classical textbook pictures, something that is very rarely seen.  We saw the
hyperkeratosis, thickened skin, of A-deficiency, and the night blindness which
accompanies this deficiency.  One of my patients was totally blind in dim
light.  Most of the patients had bronchial conditions due to A-deficiency.
Thiamine and B-1 deficiencies were manifested by peripheral nerve disturbances
and weakness of the extremities.  I even saw one case of wet beriberi, an
extremely rare condition in this part of the world.  The patient was edematous
up to the clavicles and in addition had much fluid in his left chest.
Nicotinic acid (B-2) deficiency was manifested by his characteristic dark
brown skin pigmentation, diarrhea, and mental disorders.

     "Sevatomic acid deficiency showed up as areas of bleeding beneath skin
and gums.  Most of the patients showed mixed pictures of the deficiency
diseases so our primary problem was that of feeding them and administering
large quantities of vitamins.

     "Things proceeded smoothly for a while, and then the Army which had sent
us there - found out that the patients we were feeding were not GI's and
refused us food and medicines.  That's right!  It sounds incredible, doesn't
it?  We were sent there to salvage a few souls, and we were expected to do it
with our bare hands.

     "The patients were reduced to two very skimpy meals a day, of a quality
totally unfit for persons in their condition.  The black bread they were given
was alone enough to induce their diarrhea again.  This went on for seven to 10
days, and my ward rounds during this time were not very pleasant.  The
patients just couldn't understand what had happened.  All that they knew was
that hunger was gnawing away at them again. 'For six years we waited for the
Americans to come; are we to die of hunger now?' I can still hear ringing in
my ears their 'Nicht essen?' (Nothing to eat?) and the hungry look on their
faces.  It made us all feel so bad and so angry and so helpless, and all
because of incompetence and red tape some place.  That's the Army.

     "Finally, things improved, and by the time we left there was adequate
food.  Medicines we were still having difficulty getting.

     "I took care of about 70 patients, 25 or 30 being women.  I will write
about them more than about the men, as I have written in former letters about
the men.

     "Ward G had 11 patients.  The first bed on the right was that of a pretty
young girl with far-advanced tuberculosis.  I was just about to segregate the
tuberculosis cases when we moved out.  Next to her was a very nice,
intelligent, middle-aged woman who had been brought over with her two
daughters, one 16 and the other 14.  We didn't want to separate them.  When I
left, the mother had been running a fever for some days, and I was afraid that
she had typhus.

     "In the corner on the right was a malnourished middle-aged woman, and
beside her a very pretty 14-year-old child, quite healthy.  Six years of her
childhood had been spent in the ghetto and in concentration camps, and in
spite of it she was still a darling child.

     "Next to her was one of the most vivacious, spirited persons that I have
met in a long time a very pretty woman in spite of all she had been through,
and one with a great deal of spirit.  And that was the most remarkable part,
that her spirit was unbroken.

     "The girl next to her, also young, had an infection of the leg probably
tuberculous in origin.  Also a very nice personality.

     "And then there was the woman who had been wounded in the buttock by
shrapnel.  I always used to tell her that she would get a medal for her
wounds, and she would laugh at that.

     "I walked into the infirmary - the main compound - on another day and met
there a very striking character and one whom I shall remember for a long, long
time.  His name is Dr. Joseph Heller, and he was the chief doctor in the
Jewish section of the camp.  He is an older man and practiced gynecology and
surgery for 20 years before the Germans came.  He was rounded up with all the
other Jewish doctors.

     "In this one compound there were originally 164 of them, of whom only 9
are now living - one year later.

     "The Germans gave him no medicine.  A chimney sweep smuggled these to him
every week.  He improvised surgical dressings.  Gummed paper was used as
adhesive tape.  He had one hypodermic syringe.

     "One night a man with an abdominal wound was brought in, and the
commandant refused to allow him to operate at first.  After much persuasion he
agreed, but meanwhile the patient had been transferred to place 10 miles away.
So Dr. Heller walked the 10 miles at night, carrying his instruments, and
operated.  And he said the patient lived, with a great smile.

     "I invited him to make rounds with me the next day and sent over an
ambulance for him that morning.  He was very happy, very happy, to have a
chance to learn a little of the progress that medicine had made during the war
years in the world outside the Germans sphere of influence.  And I felt
humbled, very humbled, before a man who had done so very much with nothing at
his disposal and with death at his elbows at all times.

     "His first question was about penicillin, and I told him as much as I
knew of its use.  Then he asked me about the yellow fluid the patients had
been receiving intravenously.  For a moment I did not understand, then plasma!
Of course.  We made the rounds and enjoyed it immensely.  I took him to my
room to wash up before dinner, and after he had washed I saw him looking
intently and at some length into the mirror. 'This is the first time I have
seen my face in a mirror in several years.' The white-breaded lunch brought
comment, as did the preserved cherries he had for dessert.

     "My last rounds were quite hurried, as we were to leave in a few minutes,
and I didn't have much time to spend.  A number of the patients were standing
outside, and they stopped me to shake my hand and to express their
appreciation.  They all wished me a speedy return home; they knew that I was
not going back to the United States. 'Time will pass, and it will all be over
soon,' one of them said. 'Yes,' said her friend, 'that is what she told me
when we rode the freight cars for days, and that is what she said all the
months in the concentration camp.

     "'Jews will always live', added the first. 'Auf Wiedersehen!  Auf
Wiedersehen!"'

Discussion

Ray Kaner:  I am Ray Kaner from the Center for Holocaust Studies.  I am a
survivor of Lodz ghetto, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen.  I don't have a
question, but I have a story I would like to tell.

     I was in Bergen-Belsen from late December 1944 to April 1945.  In late
March I was very, very sick.  I had typhoid; I was unconscious, dreaming only
about water.  We didn't have water.  We didn't have anything.  I was in a
barrack, and I couldn't get up, and I was beaten every day.

     I said to my sister "Go to the reviere, go to Dr. Bimko and please see if
I could go into the hospital.  At least I could lie down and nobody is going
to beat me up."

     She smuggled herself in from one camp to the other and pleaded.  She
said, "Doctor, my sister's dying after so many years of living.  Please give
her a chance.  She's a little girl."

     Dr. Bimko said, "No, there is no room.  Do you see what's happening?
Three in a bunk - three in a bed." But then she took pity and she said, "Bring
your sister under one condition you have to wash her when you bring her.  We
have water here."

     My sister came back.  I couldn't walk.  Somehow she dragged me through
from one camp to the other, to the reviere.  We came in, and I felt, "Now, if
I'm in a hospital, I won't get lice.  I'll have some water to drink."  It
wasn't so, but she washed me, and naked she brought me into Dr. Bimko.  They
didn't think I would live through the night.  As a matter of fact, they had
some glucose, and they had to decide to whom to give this injection.  They
decided that I was not good material.  I would not survive, and it was a waste
on me.  They put me on top, because this was the only place.  Somehow, maybe
because of this cold water that my sister washed me in, my temperature
dropped.  I did survive the night.

     On the other side of this place was another survivor from my camp.  Dr.
Bimko saved her.  Her name was Sima Kaplan Heishrick.  She wanted to save me,
too, so she pleaded with the doctor.  She said, "This is my student from high
school.  Would you let her lay next to me so I could keep an eye on her?" It
was permitted, and I was brought in, and I lay down in a bed that was a very
narrow little cot with two more girls both unconscious, both having diarrhea,
and I with them.

     I just want to tell you there was very little that a person could do. But
if a person did so much good in saving others, we have to recognize this
because it was such a bad time.

     [To Dr. Rosensaft] I looked for you for many years - 36 years.

Unidentified Speaker:  This will just take a couple of minutes.  I asked the
chairperson if I could interject my representation on this panel for just a
couple of minutes because unlike all of the very distinguished professionals
that you have heard from, I was a 19-year-old surgical technician.  I had one
semester of pre-med as a freshman and served in five different camps in
Europe:  Hemer; 1, Oberhauf; 5, Branau; 6, Ebensee; 7 of which I have some
pictures at the far end of the room; and Welsk but most of the time at
Ebensee.

     You asked at the very beginning what our reactions might have been, and
as you have seen from the distinguished panelists it is very difficult for any
of us in the room to talk about these things without feeling, without emotion.

     Nineteen years old is very young.  Someone asked me the other day when I
spoke to a group of children of survivors in the San Francisco area, "What was
your first feeling the first day you drove into one of these camps?" And I
said, "Nothing.  Blank.  I felt nothing." I couldn't let myself feel anything,
and I didn't feel anything for 15 years after, emotionally.  Then it hit me
and I got busy in the Jewish community and have been very involved since.

     I think I just want to add this to our medical panel.  Because of our
involvement in these camps, more on a personal basis than as a liberator and I
dislike that word intensely; it's embarrassing think that from this point on
we had better get busy on the outside and see that this never happens again.

Unidentified Speaker:  I also wanted to say I am a survivor of Bergen-Belsen.
I was a witness to getting rid of all the dead people, how they took rags and
tied them to the ankles of the dead, tied them to their necks, and dragged
them.  I was assigned to it, too, but I couldn't do it.  They told me I would
get the next soup to eat, but I couldn't do it.

     I saw a man who cut a dead body open and took something out, and he ate
it.  He was then kicked to death, and he was dragged to the grave, to the mass
grave.  This was where our camp was.  That is where we were sleeping.

Unidentified Speaker:  I have a question, and I don't know whether the people
who are here know the answers.

     We know about the problems as Walter Laqueur's book has it, "the terrible
secret."  In other words, the secret that everybody knew that wasn't shared
appropriately or acted on.  My question is, were any of the medical personnel
briefed in any way as to what to expect, and how to prepare for the camps?
After all, our intelligence people did know about the camps; they had
information.  Were any of the medical people given briefings to know how they
could go in and cope?

Unidentified Panelist:  I can't answer for the entire panel, but I would say,
no.  We were not briefed.  This was an entire surprise and entirely different
to medical knowledge we had experienced in medical education and in practice.
Essentially, no.

Unidentified Speaker:  The question follows the one that Dr. Eckhardt just
asked.  Did psychiatric problems develop in the men who came into the camps as
a result of what they saw?

Dr. Hadassah Rosensaft:  May I answer this?  I am not a psychiatrist, and at
that time I knew even less about psychiatry than I know now.  But at the
beginning of the liberation, we couldn't even deal with these problems because
the disease and epidemics were so great.  There were, for an example, in
Bergen-Belsen, 17,000 sick people who were dying every day, and we had to take
care of this problem first, to stop the epidemics and then to take care of
other problems.

     In concluding, I know that I'm expressing the feelings of all of the
survivors of the camps when I say that the work of doctors and nurses who came
to us from the Allied armies remains a ray of light in our memories of those
dark years.  They may have the satisfaction of knowing that those who remain
alive, thanks to their tireless efforts, are everlastingly grateful to them.

     As for the work of our own doctors and nurses, it remains forever a great
example of self-sacrifice and human devotion.  It is incomprehensible how they
found the strength and energy to care for others when they themselves had not
recovered.