The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (108 page)

Such a moment arrived for the British Army, and the civilized world, on April 15 when the 11th Armored Division stumbled upon the Bergen-Belsen camp, fifty miles south of Hamburg. “We came into a smell of ordure—like the smell of a monkey camp,” a British intelligence officer reported, and a “strange simian throng” greeted them at the gates. Over forty thousand men, women, and children jammed a compound designed for eight thousand; since January they had survived on watery soup, fourteen ounces of rye bread a day, and a kind of beet called mangel-wurzel, normally used as livestock feed. But for the past four days they had received neither food nor water and were reduced to eating the hearts, livers, and kidneys of the dead. Plundered bodies lay in such numbers that it was “like trying to count the stars,” a medic reported. Ten thousand corpses littered the camp: two thousand lined a pit on the southern perimeter and others were stacked four deep around the crude hospital. “Both inside and outside the huts,” the British Army reported, “was an almost continuous carpet of dead bodies, human excreta, rags, and filth.” One soldier recounted seeing “a woman squatting gnawing at a human thigh bone.… In war you see humanity at the end of its tether.” A wire-service reporter admitted to “peeping through fingers like a frightened child.”

The living looked like “polished skeletons,” in the phrase of a BBC correspondent, with faces resembling “a yellow parchment sheet with two holes in it for eyes.” Among the survivors—“these clowns in their terrible motley,” as an intelligence officer described them—medics tallied ten thousand cases of tuberculosis, ten thousand of typhus, and twenty thousand of enteritis. Still others had typhoid. A
Life
magazine reporter described an inmate who hobbled up and muttered something in German. “I couldn’t understand what he said and I shall never know for he fell dead at my feet in the middle of his sentence.” Of those still alive in what British doctors called “the horror camp,” thirteen thousand died of their insults after liberation, passing at a rate of a thousand a day. The dead were bulldozed into pits, or carried to mass graves by barefoot German guards, who were hectored by Tommies and clubbed with rifle butts. A month later, after the last survivors had been evacuated, Bergen-Belsen would be burned to the ground.

An estimated quarter-million concentration camp inmates had died since the beginning of the year in death marches from one confinement to another, murdered outright by their guards or succumbing to malnutrition, exposure, and disease. Allied soldiers found the spoor of these perambulations across Germany, but few discoveries were more appalling than that made by a battalion from the U.S. 102nd Infantry Division on April 15 outside Gardelegen, twenty-five miles north of Magdeburg. In and around a smoldering brick barn lay more than a thousand charred bodies of political prisoners, Jews, and other inmates who had been evacuated mostly from camps around Nordhausen. By the time the columns of prisoners reached Gardelegen, hundreds had already been executed. The remnant was locked into the barn, which had been strewn with gasoline-soaked straw and potato sacks. A fusillade of rifle, machine-gun, and Panzerfaust fire, supplemented by fifty grenades, turned the structure into a flaming abattoir, as dying men screamed for mercy in Russian, Polish, French, Hungarian, and Dutch. Others sang “La Marseillaise,” the “Internationale,” or the Polish national anthem while roasting alive. By the time American soldiers arrived, the flames had subsided, although wisps of smoke rose from the bodies for days. Few of the 1,016 victims from the burning barn were ever identified by name.

For the U.S. Army, the camp at Buchenwald offered a uniquely searing epiphany of liberation because of its size and the clear evidence of systemic evil. Built in 1937 outside Weimar, a city that had once been home to Goethe, Schiller, and Franz Liszt, Buchenwald and its satellites had grown to more than 100,000 inmates by March 1945, with offenders categorized by triangle insignia on their uniforms: red for political prisoners, pink for homosexuals, green for criminals, yellow for Jews. Just after noon on April 11, a warning over the public address system advised, “All S.S. men leave the camp immediately.” Sentries “ran with long strides into the forest,” a witness reported, and at 3:15
P.M.
a white flag rose above the camp. An hour later, outriders of the Third Army’s 6th Armored Division burst through the main gate, which stood beneath a large sign proclaiming
Recht oder Unrecht, mein Vaterland.
Right or wrong, my Fatherland. They found twenty-one thousand survivors from thirty-one nations—engineers, lawyers, professors, editors, and a thousand boys under age fourteen—living on six hundred calories a day. As one liberator said of the liberated, “They were so thin and so dried out that they might have been monkeys or plaster of Paris and you had to keep saying to yourself, these are human beings.”

An intricate, awful world soon was revealed: the cement cellar “strangling room,” where the condemned were garroted and hung on forty-five wall hooks, those still struggling to be bashed with a wooden mallet; Block 46, where gruesome medical experiments were conducted; the dissecting room, where inmate tattoos were excised, tanned, and fashioned into lampshades, wall hangings, and a pair of gloves for the commandant’s wife. “Inmates were beaten with fists, sticks, clubs, dog whips, riding crops, rubber hoses, ox-tail whips, leather belts, rifle butts, shovels, spade handles, and rocks,” an Army report noted. “Also they were bitten by dogs.” Others were strung up by their hands for hours from tree boughs in a grove known to SS guards as the “singing forest” because of the victims’ cries. Music blared from the loudspeakers to mask gunfire at the camp stables or rifle range by the execution squad, “Detail 99.”

The SS had murdered at least 56,000 inmates in Buchenwald and its subcamps. Many then were consigned to six brick ovens that could reduce a “charge” of eighteen bodies to bone ash in twenty minutes. A verse in gold and black lettering above the crematorium door caught Osmar White’s eye:

Worms shall not devour but flames

Consume this body. While I lived

I always loved the heat and light.

Patton marched the burghers of Weimar through Buchenwald, and sent photos to George Marshall. As if to nurture some living thing in this cantonment of death, Patton personally watered the parched plants in a greenhouse. The journalist Edward R. Murrow, rarely at a loss for imagery, found that Buchenwald beggared the imagination. “The stink was beyond all description,” he told his radio audience. “For most of it I have no words.… If I’ve offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I’m not in the least sorry.”

Shocking evidence of German torture and murder had been emerging for many months as Allied armies overran crime scenes at Breedonck prison in Belgium, or in camps like Natzweiler in France and Majdanek in Poland. Yet not until the revelations of April 1945 did the vast criminality of the Nazi regime spark enduring outrage in the West. Hyperbolic propaganda about World War I atrocities “had left an enduring legacy of skepticism,” the U.S. Army acknowledged; a survey in early December found that barely one-third of British citizens believed atrocity stories about the Germans. Graphic film footage from Europe had been suppressed because Hollywood worried about nauseating moviegoers or creating ill-will toward newsreel companies. But photography and eyewitness accounts from Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, and other hellholes now filled newspapers and cinema screens. Warner Bros. and other studios collaborated with the Pentagon in releasing atrocity documentaries. By mid-April, another survey showed that more than four in five Britons were convinced that the Reich had done evil on a monumental scale.

Even war-weary soldiers felt a new sense of purpose. “What kind of people are these that we are fighting?” an anguished GI in the 8th Infantry Division asked after viewing Wöbbelin. If the answer to that question remained elusive, the corollaries—What kind of people are
we
? What kind of people should we be?—seemed ever clearer. Complete victory would require not only vanquishing the enemy on the battlefield, but also bearing witness to all that the war had revealed about the human heart. “Hardly any boy infantryman started his career as a moralist,” wrote Lieutenant Paul Fussell, “but after the camps, a moral attitude was dominant and there was no disagreement on the main point.” A rifleman in the 157th Infantry agreed. “I’ve been in the Army for thirty-nine months,” he said. “I’ve been overseas in combat for twenty-three. I’d gladly go through it all again if I knew that things like this would be stopped.”

*   *   *

Berliners received an extra allocation of “crisis rations” to commemorate Hitler’s birthday on Friday, April 20: a pound of bacon or sausage, half a pound of rice, and an ounce of coffee. Allied planes pummeled the city for much of the day, and citizens risked their lives to queue for the special groceries. “With these rations we shall now ascend into heaven,” one woman told her husband. A commemorative postage stamp also was issued, with a cancellation imprint that read, “We are defending Europe against Bolshevism.” Both stamp and slogan seemed uncommonly ironic for a regime not known for its wry humor: the Red Army now squeezed the city from north, south, and east. Soviet artillery, delivering a long-range birthday salute, hit downtown Berlin for the first time this day. Soon enough, firing became general, massacring shoppers outside the Karstadt department store and shredding the Reichstag cupola. “No express trains are moving in or out,” a Berlin diarist wrote. “All transportation is at a standstill. Postal and telegraph services have ceased. We are cut off from the world, for better or worse at the mercy of the oncoming catastrophe.”

In April, almost four thousand suicides would be reported in Berlin; an SS report noted that “the demand for poison, a pistol, or other means of ending life is great everywhere.” “The pastor shot himself and his wife and daughter,” wrote a sixteen-year-old girl in the Friedrichshagen district. “Mrs. H shot her two sons and herself and slit her daughter’s throat.… Our teacher, Mrs. K., hanged herself; she was a Nazi.” A shortage of coffins meant that the dead were sometimes wrapped in newspapers.

Still, a birthday parade meandered through the Olympic Stadium, where German girls sang, “Lift our banners, in the fresh morning breeze.” Some of the party faithful celebrated so exuberantly with schnapps that vomit stained their uniform tunics. Slogans on broken walls around the capital declared “We Will Never Surrender!” and, more ambiguously, “For All This, We Thank the Führer.”

The man himself took the passing of another year in stride, accepting murmured birthday greetings from his staff in the thirty-room bunker complex beneath the Reich Chancellery. Much of Hitler’s life since leaving the Adlerhorst had been spent in this labyrinth, with its storerooms of canned beef, incessant ventilator hum, and pathetic tongue of red carpet in the foyer. Here he had been joined by his mistress, Eva Braun, a Bavarian
Mädchen
who supposedly danced the Charleston well. Ashen and stooped, wrapped in a gray field coat that cloaked his trembling left arm and leg, the Führer on his birthday climbed up thirty-seven steps to the bomb-pitted Chancellery garden to present a few Hitler Youth skirmishers with Iron Crosses and pats on the cheek. It was his last ascent to the surface world.

Back behind three steel doors in his bunker late that afternoon, he convened his paladins for what would be their final conference together: Göring; Goebbels; Himmler; the architect Albert Speer; the foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop; the Wehrmacht chiefs. Hitler waved away suggestions that he flee the city, as so many privileged “golden pheasants” had fled. “Jodl,” he told his operations chief, “I shall fight as long as the faithful fight next to me, and then I shall shoot myself.” That evening, a few adjutants and secretaries toasted him in his study. “Führer’s birthday,” his secretary, Martin Bormann, noted in a diary. “Unfortunately not really a birthday atmosphere.” When Hitler retired for the night, the party moved upstairs to the ghostly Chancellery for champagne and dancing to the only gramophone record available,
“Blutrote Rosen Erzählen Dir vom Gluck.”
Red roses bring you happiness.

The U.S. Seventh Army marked the day by conquering Nuremberg, a city of astronomers, printers, and toymakers, now designated on American maps as “Nazi Circus Town.” Here the party had held its crepuscular rallies, and here the Germans had concocted the laws stripping Jews of their citizenship. For three days General Haislip’s XV Corps had bored into the city. The 3rd and 45th Divisions, together since the invasion of Sicily, attacked from the north and southeast, respectively. Battalions abreast, the assault cracked the German gun ring. GIs then battled room by room and cellar by cellar, before breaching the medieval walls of the old city to overwhelm two thousand last-ditch soldiers, 150 armed firemen, and squads of civilian snipers. By Friday at four
P.M.
, all resistance had ended but for two hundred subterranean fanatics whose extermination would take another six hours.

Little remained of the city other than “alluvial fans of rubble,” an officer scribbled in his diary. At 6:30 that evening, 3rd Division soldiers gathered in Adolf-Hitler-Platz to raise the national colors on an improvised flagpole and sing the division anthem, “The Dogface Soldier.” Their commander, Major General O’Daniel, whose son had been killed in Holland during
MARKET GARDEN
, rocked on the soles of his boots and bawled to his men: “Casablanca. Palermo. Anzio. Rome. The Vosges. Nuremberg.”

A quieter commemoration unfolded a day later. On the southeast edge of the city, Zeppelin Field had been designed by Speer to accommodate a hundred thousand true believers, who in the 1930s were delivered here over a special rail spur for Nazi rallies. Modeled on the Pergamon Altar, the grandstand was crowned with an immense swastika encircled with a copper-clad wreath. Here the XV Corps rabbi, David Max Eichhorn, arrived in a jeep emblazoned with a Star of David and bearing a Torah from the shattered Jewish community in the Alsatian town of Haguenau. A second jeep carried five Jewish GIs from the 45th Division. Halting before the Zeppelin podium, they carried the holy ark up the steps, removed the Torah, and offered God prayers of thanksgiving and deliverance.