The Liberators: America's Witnesses to the Holocaust by Michael Hirsh Page A

retired in Orangeburg, South Carolina, where he does physicals five days a week on recruits coming into Fort Jackson. He was twenty-two when he got orders to go see Nordhausen, which had been liberated by the 414th, and he’s never forgotten what he saw there. “It didn’t look too bad from the outside, but when you got inside there were just stacks and stacks of corpses. All of them had apparently starved to death. There were a few people up that I remember, and they greeted us like we’ve never been greeted before. Most of them, I think, were French.
    “They were in rags. They, too, were starved, but for some reason they had survived a little bit. They just greeted us like we had saved ‘em, which I guess we had.” Rheney didn’t go into the tunnels at nearby Dora, but he went fairly deep into Nordhausen, where the bodies had been accumulated for disposal. “It shook everybody. I’d read about the Civil War and the slaughter that took place there, and the camps they had such as Andersonville, but even those were not like this was.”
    Corporal Forrest Robinson was a military policeman with the 104th. That’s probably why his commanding officer asked that he accompany him into the barracks buildings at Nordhausen. On a visit to the camp fifty years later with his son to participate in the dedication of a museum at the site, the now-ordained minister had a full-blown flashback. “In a searing flash, horrid memory swept over me, and I could see it all once again—row upon row of devastated human bodies, emaciated, starved, mutilated, gray, and rotting in the hot sun. There were open pits in which bodies were burning. The stench was horrid, doing almost final violence to the senses.”
    Questioned (in writing because of his extreme hearing loss) about his experiences on April 12, 1945, he writes of being nearly overwhelmed, feeling he would lose it all having just walked with his CO through the open yard. “You would have thought that the previous moments would somehow have prepared me for what I was to experience [inside the barracks], but it was even worse.
    “Along the full length of the wall to our left, iron cots had been jammed together, and on the cots were the dead and the dying, side by side. I’m certain some of the dead had been so for weeks, their grotesque and distended bodies emitting the foulest of gases. Occasionally a figure on one of the cots would stir and cry out for help. But we were helpless. We weren’t medics! The horrid stench of it all is indescribable.

    Corporal Forrest Robinson was a military policeman with the 104th Infantry Division at Nordhausen. After going inside buildings and finding survivors lying among dozens and dozens of dead bodies, he suffered what he now describes as “total physical and spiritual exhaustion.” Now an ordained minister, Robinson says he has no memory of anything that occurred in the two weeks after Nordhausen .

    “Under a stairway, there were bodies stacked like cordwood. I simply could take no more and suddenly bolted and ran out the door back onto the concourse, grabbing the side of our commander’s jeep to steady myself. But a strange thing was happening. One of our men had managed to sneak overseas a portable radio and it was playing in the back seat, and of all songs, Glenn Miller’s ‘Sunrise Serenade.’ It was hideous.
    “Utterly overwhelmed by this crushing mixture of circumstances, I literally lost it. I raised my head to the heavens and cursed God in the vilest of language. I screamed there could not be a God who could allow a thing such as the Holocaust, and dismissed civilization as but a thin skin covering a basic savage. Suddenly, in total physical and spiritual exhaustion, I fell over the side of the jeep and vomited.” Reverend Robinson writes that he has no memory of anything that occurred in the subsequent two weeks. “That period is a total blank in my mind.”
    Chicagoan Arthur Leu was part of a military police company of