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$Title{Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps 1945, The
Chapter II: The Eyewitnesses - Part II}
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$Author{Various}
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$Subject{camp
army
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area
jewish
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dachau
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$Date{1987}
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Title:       Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps 1945, The
Author:      Various
Date:        1987

Chapter II: The Eyewitnesses - Part II

Dan Hiram

     It is with a mixed feeling of humility and pride that I address this
conference - the humility in meeting the delegates who represent the victims,
that small residue of the Hitlerite hell on earth.  The human tragedy of the
extermination camps was such that the richest human language is much too poor
to give any verbal expression to it.

     For the members of the Israeli delegation, in addition to the human
tragedy there was also a purely personal tragedy for every one of us: Parents,
brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, and families in their totality who
disappeared forever from the face of this earth in this Holocaust, in this
mass murder of six million Jews that was the personification of evil that no
sane mind can ever understand, that Satanic and bloody tyranny called the
Third German Reich, that incarnation des Geistes der stets verneint [of the
spirit that always denies].

     On the other hand, there is a feeling of pride, pride that our delegation
stands here among the delegations of the Allied armies that took part in the
liberation, pride that our national flag here is represented among the flags
of the Allied nations who participated in the great victory of 1945.  To
achieve this, we had to go a long and hard way and breach many an obstacle.

     As of September 1939, over 30,000 Jewish volunteers for the British Army,
out of that very, very small community that was Jewish Palestine at the time,
volunteered to fight shoulder to shoulder with the Allies against the Huns,
against the German hordes.  But, in the summer of 1944, the then-Prime
Minister of Great Britain, Mr. Winston Spencer Churchill, decided to allow us
to fight under our own flag, under the Star of David, within the framework of
the independent Jewish Infantry Brigade Group.  It was under our own Jewish
flag that we met the battered remains of our people in Europe and helped them
in every way we could to reach a safe shore, to find a new home for them in
Israel.  The flag of the Jewish Brigade was also the first and important step
in the establishment three years later, in 1948, of the Israeli Defense
Forces, the armed forces of the free Jewish state.

     Since then, we have had to fight four more wars to secure our lives and
independence, but what gave us the strength in body and spirit to hold out
against all odds and every threat was the memory of Auschwitz, Dachau,
Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Majdanek, and Treblinka.  The mere names make you
shudder, the memory and the reminder that this must never happen again, nay,
will never happen again, in any future generation, so help us God and our own
fierce determination.

Douglas Kelling

     I am here today to relate what I saw and experienced at the Dachau
concentration camp, which was located a few miles outside the city limits of
Munich, Germany.

     At Dachau concentration camp, 30,000 prisoners were liberated by the 45th
Infantry Division and 42nd Rainbow Infantry Division.  I was a physician in
the 45th Division, the division psychiatrist.  The camp was liberated during
the spring of 1945; I believe it was April 29, I do not remember the exact
date.  I entered the camp the morning it was liberated.  This large camp was
shaped in a rectangle form with a large bare center, about two or three blocks
square.  Wooden barracks and other buildings formed the perimeter of the
square, and other buildings were behind these buildings.  The barracks were
one, two, and three stories high.  Outside the camp, on either side of the
streets, were mainly beautiful stone buildings which housed the Nazi SS
officers and officials.

     Electrified fences, walls, many guards, and large, vicious dogs kept the
prisoners confined within this horrible camp.  The camp was filthy, full of
diseases, and literally lousy with body and other types of lice and vermin.
Prisoners were dirty; their clothes were dirty, old, and tattered. The
prisoners were starving, a forced starvation; many were sick.  Their faces
were depressed in a fixed stare; their appearance was one of resigned
hopelessness.  Their gait was listless, slow, and I am sure many at times
wished that they were dead instead of being confined in such a cruel,
unbelievable place.

     Many of these prisoners weighed 70 to 80 pounds.  I was told an average
of 270 cases a day were dying from typhus fever, and many were dying from
tuberculosis which was rampant, from other diseases, and from the forced
starvation.  The prisoners were fed a sloppy type food and bread which was
made from small portions of wheat flour and a major portion of ersatz flour,
which was powdered sawdust.

     Now I take you to the crematoria.  The eight large, vicious dogs which
helped guard this area had been killed by our soldiers and were lying outside
the shower and crematoria area.  This area consisted of a large shower room,
perhaps an area of twenty feet by twenty feet, in a one-story stone building.
The shower room had multiple overhead shower heads; in the shower ceiling,
there were small projections that looked like sprinklers for fire prevention.

Next to the shower area there was a battery of furnaces; about 50 feet away
from this furnace area, there was another battery of furnaces in a separate
building.

     Outside the furnace area were three piles of dirt, in an inclined plane
about 10 feet long.  This inclined-plane area of dirt was used to kill
prisoners by shooting them in the back of the head.  After they had been
blindfolded - some were, some were not - their hands were tied behind them in
the back.  After being forced to kneel down and place their face against this
dirt they were shot.  The dirt was very blood stained.

     When I went to the crematoria area, the shower floor was still wet.
Naked, clean bodies were piled on either side of the door which opened from
the shower room to the crematoria area.  One pile of bodies numbering perhaps
a hundred, and another a few less, were on either side of the door. The bodies
were piled like cordwood, straight.  They were straight because they had been
so recently killed that rigor mortis had not had time enough to set in.  These
bodies weighed perhaps 50 or 60 pounds, all about the same weight.

     Now to the furnaces where the bodies were cremated.  The furnaces were
still warm.  The odor of burned flesh and badly decomposed bodies was still
strong, if that was the odor I smelled and experienced.

     Besides the stacked bodies in the crematoria area, I saw hundreds of
bodies on the floor of many railroad boxcars which were just outside the area.
About 3,000 bodies, it is estimated, were in these boxcars.  They were the
European type boxcars that normally transported German soldiers 40 to a
boxcar.  These boxcars contained the bodies of approximately 100 each.  The
bodies, it appeared, had been thrown in these boxcars just any way, without
any systematic order.  Legs were hanging out the doors, heads were hanging out
doors, bodies were along the side of the boxcars.  They were dirty, clothed in
faded white-and-black prisoner garments.  Since they had been dead for some
time and were brought to Dachau for cremation or disposal from the
concentration camps and other countries besides Germany, rigor mortis had set
in.  They presented grotesque and contorted bodies in every imaginable rigor
mortis state.  Several unconscious prisoners were found among these bodies,
and I was told perhaps one or two of these prisoners were saved, for at least
a short time, by intravenous solutions.

     What I saw and experienced at Dachau the atrocities, the cruelty was
something which if I had not seen with my own eyes, I would not believe had
happened in civilized nations.  Cruel is not a strong enough word to describe
the treatment of prisoners in Dachau by the Nazis during World War II.  I pray
to my God that this cannot happen again.

William Quinn

     I think that Dr. Kelling has pretty well described Dachau.  I was there,
too, within hours after the liberation and saw exactly the same things that he
saw.  What I'll do is go back a little in history to southern France or even
before that to North Africa.  I happened to have been the G-2 or the
intelligence officer for the United States Seventh Army during the planning
for and during the invasion of southern France.  While in Algiers, our
planning headquarters, we received information from G-2 as to the various
prison camps, and we also heard and had reports of certain atrocities, but
nothing in the reports would ever equal what I saw.

     In any event, we invaded southern France and came across the Rhine near
Mannheim, and the Seventh Army, being on the inside track, started down to
Bavaria; then Dachau came in our particular area of interest and also became
one of our targets and objectives for liberation. As Dr. Kelling has told you,
the 45th Division on April 29 liberated Dachau, and oddly enough one soldier
you've heard that it would take a division to take but one soldier actually
caused this outfit to surrender. One G.I. and a jeep walked in, and the guards
in the towers threw up their hands.  They knew it was all over.  They had been
planning an evacuation, and they had partially moved some of the prisoners to
the south of Bavaria.  But transportation was slow, of course, and the German
organization was in disorder.  Consequently, the transportation facilities
were not adequate, and many were not evacuated, as we well know.

     On entering, I made the same tour that Dr. Kelling just told you about.
Oddly enough, the impact was so great on me that I didn't really understand
what I was looking at.  I couldn't believe what I had seen.  I was so
astonished that I decided that right there and then I would document this
genocidal aspect and also the torture and medical aspects of what I'd seen.
After I went back to my headquarters, I called in three groups of people that
worked for me.  One was the captain or the head of the OSS, that is, the
Office of Strategic Services; my prisoner of war and interrogating team; and
the head of my Counter-Intelligence Corps.  And I said, "I want you right now
to get a team of photographers and your best writers, and I want you to go to
Dachau, and I want you to document what you have seen."  And they did.

     I commanded them to break the reporting down into three categories.  I
was interested in the people of the town.  It fascinated me that a peaceful,
lovely town of Dachau could stomach the odors that came out of that camp for
all of those years.  I was also interested in the organization of the camp,
who ran it, where the instructions came from, and so forth.  The third
category, of course, was the internees, what was happening and what did happen
with them.  This report came out two weeks later, and it was so vivid in its
documentation and characterization of the camp that I decided not to weave the
parts into one document.  Instead, I wrote a foreword and left the reports in
the three initial categories.  That book was called 55 and on the front of the
book was the word Dachau.

     It had pictures in it, and I had printed 10,000 copies of it, and some
people in this room may have one or two.  I only have one now, and they're
trying to get it away from me for the museum.  But, in any event, this book
was certainly in all of Europe among the troops.  Dr. Crawford of Emory
University came up to see me, and he had a copy which I believe he has
reproduced because it's public property.

     In any event, my final remark has to do with a group of people who are
decrying the fact of Dachau or the other camps.  It's just that if anyone says
that there was no San Francisco earthquake, or a Chicago fire, he is not
reading his history and he is trying to change it.

Alan Rose

     I would like to say that I was 20 years of 7th age in the British Army, a
sergeant in the Armored Division.  I think those of us in those last few days
of war saw the epitome of heroism on the battlefields after the second front
and the abyss of mankind when we came across Bergen-Belsen.  I can hardly
speak today without being gripped with the emotion that seized me 35 years
ago.

     We had triumphantly liberated Brussels and Antwerp, and the British
Second Army and anyone who served in it will recall the tumultuous welcome and
the touching remembrances of the Belgian people after the liberation.  We had
heard inferentially about what had happened in Europe, but if you're a
sergeant sitting in a tank and worried about meeting a German Panzer division,
one's knowledge of what had happened was but sketchy at best.

     The war was coming to an end.  The invasion of Germany was about to
begin, and the Second Army moved east through Aachen across the Rhine onto the
great northwest German plain headed towards Hamburg and Kiel.  Eventually it
cut off the German forces that were descending across western Germany towards
Denmark.  The town of Celle, which is adjacent to Bergen-Belsen, was taken
after little resistance.  I don't think that any human being could then
conceive - certainly not I as a relatively innocent 20-year old what we saw as
our tanks, almost by inadvertence, passed the gates and the rambling mass of
buildings which was Bergen-Belsen.  I think it would require the words of an
Elie Wiesel or the pen of a Churchill to really comprehend what happened that
day.  I had intended to be an architect, but I decided then to spend my time
doing what I could to restore the remnants of Jewish life.

     The horrors of Bergen-Belsen, the litter of people who had once been
human beings and the abysmal conditions have been described, and I don't
really think there's too much point in redescribing them to those of my
colleagues and others here who have seen them for themselves.  It was for me
an indescribable sight, but I think there are certain things that we should
learn from these descriptions which I will not weary you with.  But I have
certain simple thoughts that I would like to share with you.

     In my innocence at that time, I really believed that any presence of
fascism or anti-Semitism or racism of any kind surely must be expunged.
Unfortunately, that is not so.  As has been referred to this morning and last
night, there is now an active school of revisionism which says, in fact, that
the Holocaust never happened, that the camps never existed.

     If the Holocaust never happened and the camps didn't exist, then all of
us here are fraudulent, are we not, because we are being honored as liberators
of camps.  I think there is a particular duty incumbent on us who were
privileged to liberate camps - if that is the understatement, and I come from
a country of understatement - to perhaps devote our lives to refuting an
abomination and an obscenity of this kind. I think it's particularly incumbent
upon us those who fought the war, those who were really the front-line
soldiers, those who were at the sharp end to do that.  It's a duty we owe
ourselves as much as the victims.

     The other thing that I remember vividly is that for the first time having
served for some years in the British Army I, of all people, had to threaten my
tank driver.  He was prepared there with his submachine gun to wipe out all
the guards that were inside or indeed any German, including the Burger
meister [mayor] of Celle who, I'm given to understand, thought that, although
the trains rumbled through Celle, the Bergen-Belsen SCHACTER camp was no more
than a camp for the rehabilitation of wayward criminals.

     The third thing I would like to say, and I'm sure you will understand me
because I speak not only as a liberator but as a Jew, is that it never
occurred to me in 1945, after the Jewish people had undergone the Holocaust
and after all, it's only existential that I was saved - that I could very well
have been one of those who were in Bergen-Belsen and did not survive had my
parents 100 years ago not come from Russia.  Indeed, instead of sitting in a
rather proud way as we did as tank commanders, I could very well have been any
one of the people who were liberated.  I never believed that I would have to
go off and fight again in 1948 to defend the right of the Jewish state to
exist which had been established not only by historical demand and mandate,
but by international law as a member of the volunteer group that fought from
all the countries of the Diaspora alongside our Israeli comrades.

     So, I am both very happy and honored to have been spared to be among you,
to be, as General Haig said, among comrades-in-arms.  Today we forget the
divisions that there may be between countries, and we come together rather as
old comrades, together with all the survivors and those who are interested in
the Holocaust.

     I am deeply honored that that has happened.  But for all of us who passed
through the Holocaust, whether as liberators or as liberated, it leaves an
indelible mark on us, and I would hope an indelible mark on mankind.

Rabbi Herschel Shacter

     Dear friends, so very very much has been spoken.  All of us here, I know,
have seen so much, have read so much, and yet I am convinced that we can't
begin to fathom the enormity of the cataclysm, of the tragedy that struck our
people and so many other peoples of the world.

     During the Second World War, I served as a young Army chaplain, perhaps
not as young as Leon Bass or Alan Rose, but not much older than they at that
time.  I worked my way across with front-line combat troops through Europe.  I
was attached to the VIII Corps Headquarters of the Third Army.

     The most unforgettable day of my life is April 11, 1945.  I learned from
some of the officers in my unit that early that morning our forward tanks had
entered the notorious concentration camp called Buchenwald, outside of Weimar.
I had heard the name before.  My mind's eye conjured up all sorts of images.
I quickly ascertained the directions and drove at high speed to Weimar and
then to the camp.

     As I drove up to the main gate, I was struck by the large German
inscription over the gate:  Arbeit macht Freiwhat a tragic travesty.  I drove
through the gate into the open Appellplatz [inspection or roll call area] and
there I was in Buchenwald.  This was about 4:00 in the afternoon, just hours
after the first columns of American tanks drove through and liberated that
dungeon on the face of this earth.

     I did not know where to go first.  Happily, a young American Army
lieutenant recognized my Jewish chaplain's insignia, and he approached me
almost reverently.  He urged that I follow him to see first the crematoria.
We've heard descriptions.  As I said, we've read, and we've seen pictures. As
long as I shall live, I will never, never forget that gruesome scene that is
indelibly engraved upon my heart and my mind.  There simply are no words in
the human vocabulary.  Yes, our Polish friend this morning told us how
difficult it was for him to find the words in any language.

     I slowly approached the site of the huge ovens from which the smoke was
still curling upward.  I could smell the stench of the charred remnants of
human flesh.  There were literally hundreds of dead bodies strewn about. Dr.
Kelling, you were right, but many of these bodies were not stacked neatly like
cordwood.  They were just scattered, waiting to be shoveled into the furnaces,
which were still hot.

     I stood riveted to this scene for what seemed like an eternity, tormented
within with searing agony, until I finally tore myself away, my eyes burning
from the smoke and, even more so, from my inner rage.  I walked back from the
crematoria toward the endless rows of barracks still dazed by what I had just
seen.

     I asked the young lieutenant who was there at my side, and who seemed to
know his way around, whether he knew if there were any Jews still alive in
this camp.  He led me to an area called the Kleine Lager - the little camp
within the larger camp.  I hurriedly walked into one of the dilapidated,
filthy, foul-smelling barracks, and there again I was smitten by an
indescribable scene.  There on a series of shelves and again, you've seen the
pictures of the series of shelves were just raw planks of hardwood. From floor
to ceiling were hundreds upon hundreds of men and very few boys who were
strewn over scraggly straw sacks looking down at me, looking down at me out of
dazed eyes. Last night Elie Wiesel so graphically and movingly described how
he perceived our eyes.  I remember their eyes, looking down, looking out of
big, big eyes that's all I saw were eyes haunted, crippled, paralyzed with
fear.  They were emaciated skin and bones, half-crazed, more dead than alive.

     And there I stood and shouted in Yiddish, "Sholem Aleychem, Yiden, yir
zent frey!" "You are free." The more brave among them slowly began to approach
me, as was just described, to touch my Army uniform, to examine the Jewish
chaplain's insignia, incredulously asking me again and again, "Is it true?  Is
it over?"

     Indeed, as Elie Wiesel said, I felt that love, that gratitude, that
admiration.  I ran from barracks to barracks throughout the whole area,
repeating again and again the declaration, the scene, the experience.  As I
moved about, bands of Jews were now following me, pouring out tales of woe,
asking me over and over, "Does the world know what happened to us?  What will
now happen?  Where will we go from here?"

     I stood among them.  As I saw these men brothers, flesh of my flesh, and
blood of my blood I could not help but think of the old cliche, "There but for
the grace of God go I."  Alan [Rose] was so right.  If my own father had not
caught the boat on time, I would have been there.

     Thus started a period of about two months during which I spent every day
in Buchenwald.  I must confess that I paid little attention to the needs of
American servicemen who really, at that time, did not need many of my
services.  I devoted myself - what little energies, what little ingenuity,
what bit of initiative a young man could muster - to my new-found flock.

     While I could never develop any accurate statistics, my estimate was that
there were approximately 20,000 inmates, from every country in Europe, in
Buchenwald at the time of the liberation, of whom only about 5,000 were Jews.

     We know that Buchenwald was primarily built and maintained for the
incarceration of political prisoners and was, therefore, less, less savagely
brutal and torturous than the extermination camps in Poland.  There were no
gas chambers in Buchenwald, only crematoria.  And the inmates who were then
becoming my friends related to me in harrowing detail how every morning dead
bodies were collected in the barracks and in the work stations and were
carried off on wheelbarrows to the crematoria.  And this was the less brutal?
How much more gruesome could the other death camps have been?

     It obviously would require much more time than I can take to describe all
that transpired during the months, the weeks immediately after liberation.
Just to highlight a few, I'll mention some of the programs that we undertook
and developed with the aid of some American servicemen whom I found to be
extremely sympathetic and cooperative.

     The American army medics moved in with remarkable hospital facilities
that literally saved the lives of thousands, but even then thousands perished.
I set up a committee of inmates who were capable of administering some of the
programs.  We gathered lists of names and descriptions of survivors which I
sent through military channels to Paris and then throughout the free world.

     There were no postal services, obviously.  We mailed many thousands of
letters in order to unite families torn apart - to let the world know that
these were still alive.

     Many of them were enterprising, and they began to take off on their own;
some eastward to seek their original home sites in the hope that they might
find a relative, a friend, or to be able to retrieve some property. How sorely
disappointed they were.  Most waited, not knowing where to turn, where to go.
The anxiety and frustration grew anew.  Their eyes and hearts were turned to
the free world to the then - Palestine, to America, to the West, but how?
When?

     We organized a series of religious services which were remarkably well
attended.  The little U.S. army prayer books which I distributed were grabbed
up and treasured as though they were made of gold.  Only last night, Elie told
me that he remembers the mezuzah that I gave him and many others.

     From among the Zionist groups we helped toward the establishment of a
very noble experiment called Kibbutz Buchenwald, which existed, interestingly
enough, until the entire group arrived months later in Israel, and there it
was pulled apart.  The remnants of Kibbutz Buchenwald are still in Kibbutz
Netzer Sereni.

     SHAEF, the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Forces, put
me in charge of a special transport of more than 500 children who were invited
to Switzerland by a special arrangement with UNRRA.  This experience alone
could provide material for books and articles and many more hours than I'm
going to take.  It was only upon my return from Switzerland that I found that
Buchenwald and all that sector of Thuringia had been taken over by the
Russians.

     Buchenwald was now empty of Jews who had all somehow been transported to
West Germany and to the displaced persons camps until they did find their way
to Palestine, to America, and to other lands.

     Now, we are here to remember, to repeat, to keep alive the story.  Why
were we spared?  The problem agitates my heart and my mind as I'm sure it does
the hearts and minds of thinking, sensitive people the world over.

     We were spared for one reason, as has been pointed out by others to deny
Hitler the one posthumous victory.  If we were to forget, if we were to become
estranged, if we were to deny, to minimize, to negate our own Jewish identity
as Jews and others as free human beings committed to the ideals of freedom,
then Hitler will have won the war.

     The Psalmist of old declared: "Lo Amut Ki Echyeh." "I will not die, but I
will live." Seemingly redundant, superfluous repetition, but certainly not. It
is not enough that we happily, gratefully were spared, that we are alive, that
we did not die.  We must live, creatively, courageously, and defiantly to tell
the story to the world about us.

Efraim Weichselfisch

The following comments by Efraim Weichselfisch are the simultaneous
translation from the Hebrew by Gideon Hausner, who prefaced his translation
with these comments: "I have agreed to translate, ladies and gentlemen,
because I believe it is very fitting that the sounds of the language which was
on the lips of the millions of our brothers and sisters at their last march
when they professed the ancient profession of faith, 'Blessed be. Listen, oh
Israel, our God the Lord, our God is one' - be heard in this audience."

     I enlisted in the Soviet army in Vilna, was sent to an officers school,
fought at Stalingrad, then joined the I st Division, named after the famous
Polish freedom fighter on whose flag of their division was written, "For our
and your freedom."

     I bring to you the greetings of the war veterans, Jewish war veterans,
from all over the world, who had fought under different colors in all the
liberating armies.  We were over a million-and-a-half.  Had we fought together
under one color, we would have probably been a very, very great army with
many, many divisions.

     We fought against Hitler who decided to exterminate the whole Jewish
nation.  He didn't succeed, but he did exterminate a third of our people, more
than six million.  We fought against Hitler throughout the Russian front.

     I appeal to the Polish and Soviet delegations here to allow us to bring
to eternal peace in Israel those of the fighters who were brought to burial in
Trekobova.

     I have in my hands a book in which over 2,000 names of Jewish fighters in
the Red Army, among them those who got the highest distinction of "Heroes of
the Soviet Union" are named.  But I will concentrate on the story of my
fighting in the Polish army and how I came to Majdanek.  Not far from Lublin
is the camp of Majdanek where the Germans exterminated tens of thousands of my
people and other nations.  I crossed the big gate which is the boundary
between life and death, and I stood there among the barbed wire.  I smelled
that.  I smelled murder.  I passed next to the towers of the guards who made
sure that none of their victims would escape.  The electrified barbed wire
around the camp made it doubly sure.

     I saw those wooden structures of three tiers on which these people had to
live for years 500 on each structure without any minimum sanitary
installations.  On the walls, I saw names in Yiddish and Polish and other
languages - the last parting message of people condemned to death.

     Every few weeks, new victims were brought here.  Until they were killed,
the last ounce of energy was squeezed out of them.  They had to work like
slaves.  Many broke down.  Many went insane.  I have now before my eyes the
pictures of this and the other camps and all those who fell on the
battlefield.  Among them I remember a rabbi who fell in the battle for Lena.

     I invite you on behalf of the government of Israel and the veterans'
organizations to a congress of amity and friendship of all fighters to be held
in Israel.

Sigmund Strochlitz

     We survivors are often asked, "Do you have to live in the past?" No, but
the past lives in us.  And perhaps not only in us.  Those testimonies today,
this morning, are ample proof that the past is also a dread among those who
entered the camps and were confronted with horrors never recorded in the
history of mankind.