The Liberators: America's Witnesses to the Holocaust by Michael Hirsh Page B
Authors: Michael Hirsh
Tags: History, Psychology, 20th Century, Holocaust, Modern, Psychopathology, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
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about 175 men, broken into three units: one guarded headquarters, one dealt with traffic control, and the third, his section, handled POWs. He was in a forward compound; his unit’s job was to take prisoners from the advance units and contain them, have them questioned by intelligence officers, sort out the SS from the Wehrmacht and Volkssturm, and then ship them to the rear.
By the time Leu got to Nordhausen, the first units in were already starting to bring survivors out and, at the same time, moving bodies from inside buildings to the open area. Leu says there were hundreds and hundreds of bodies. “You can’t believe it. You cannot absolutely believe that the human body can be that thin, that devoid of any substance. You can’t believe that people could be treated like that, that a human being could exact that kind of punishment on another human. You’re horrified.”
Leu watched survivors being carried out on stretchers, “and there were some of them sitting against the walls that had been brought out, that were obviously alive and barely so. Men and women. Most of them naked.” In the early hours, he says, there were not enough medics on hand, because no one had expected to be confronted with the horrors they found.
“It was very busy, but it was quiet,” he recalls. “These people were hardly even capable of being noisy, their moaning or whatever it was. There was no shouting, there was no screaming, none of that going on. But they must have been grateful that there was an activity there that was being of help to them as opposed to what they were going through before.”
Arthur Leu’s unit probably spent less than an hour inside Nordhausen before leaving to set up a prisoner compound not far from the camp.
Almost as soon as the 3rd Armored Division medics arrived at Nordhausen, they notified the 104th Infantry Division following behind them that a full-blown medical rescue operation would be needed if any of those still living in the camp were to survive. The weight of that mission fell on the 329th Medical Battalion, with its four companies of personnel plus a headquarters unit. One of the men there was Ragene Farris, who, in 1996, described that day in exquisite detail for the division association’s newspaper, Timberwolf Howl:
Going immediately to the scene, the Timberwolf medics found a square of bomb-scarred buildings, reminiscent of a large college campus, which until six weeks previously had housed the motor shops of the German SS troopers. Upon entry, litters in hand, the men saw rows of bodies stretched out the length of the large concrete floored room. Grotesquely still, evident that they had hung tenaciously to a last breath of life, these prison-marked men lay in an indescribable symbol of death. The initial shock of the bestiality, the inhumane cruelty of this deed, did not register with the men. Their job was to evacuate the living; to hospitalize and nourish; to bring men and women, and children back to the realm of human decency.
In many cases the living had been too weak to move the dead from their sides. One hunched-drawn French boy was huddled up against a dead comrade, as if to keep warm, having no mental concept that the friend had died, and unable to move his limbs…. In their prison garments of striped coats, huddled in rags or old dirty blankets, it was like reaching into another world apart, to bring these shadow-men from their environment onto a litter, and into a clean American ambulance.
Not long after the evacuation of the living had begun, troops were sent to the nearby town to bring back several hundred German civilians to assist with the rescue effort. Many of those same Germans would be pressed into burial details in the days to come. Farris wrote:
These were the people who lived in unconcern as thousands of people had been driven as slaves, then left to die. Each medic learned several German words: “schnell” (hurry) and “tempo” (the same—hurry) and with a
By the time Leu got to Nordhausen, the first units in were already starting to bring survivors out and, at the same time, moving bodies from inside buildings to the open area. Leu says there were hundreds and hundreds of bodies. “You can’t believe it. You cannot absolutely believe that the human body can be that thin, that devoid of any substance. You can’t believe that people could be treated like that, that a human being could exact that kind of punishment on another human. You’re horrified.”
Leu watched survivors being carried out on stretchers, “and there were some of them sitting against the walls that had been brought out, that were obviously alive and barely so. Men and women. Most of them naked.” In the early hours, he says, there were not enough medics on hand, because no one had expected to be confronted with the horrors they found.
“It was very busy, but it was quiet,” he recalls. “These people were hardly even capable of being noisy, their moaning or whatever it was. There was no shouting, there was no screaming, none of that going on. But they must have been grateful that there was an activity there that was being of help to them as opposed to what they were going through before.”
Arthur Leu’s unit probably spent less than an hour inside Nordhausen before leaving to set up a prisoner compound not far from the camp.
Almost as soon as the 3rd Armored Division medics arrived at Nordhausen, they notified the 104th Infantry Division following behind them that a full-blown medical rescue operation would be needed if any of those still living in the camp were to survive. The weight of that mission fell on the 329th Medical Battalion, with its four companies of personnel plus a headquarters unit. One of the men there was Ragene Farris, who, in 1996, described that day in exquisite detail for the division association’s newspaper, Timberwolf Howl:
Going immediately to the scene, the Timberwolf medics found a square of bomb-scarred buildings, reminiscent of a large college campus, which until six weeks previously had housed the motor shops of the German SS troopers. Upon entry, litters in hand, the men saw rows of bodies stretched out the length of the large concrete floored room. Grotesquely still, evident that they had hung tenaciously to a last breath of life, these prison-marked men lay in an indescribable symbol of death. The initial shock of the bestiality, the inhumane cruelty of this deed, did not register with the men. Their job was to evacuate the living; to hospitalize and nourish; to bring men and women, and children back to the realm of human decency.
In many cases the living had been too weak to move the dead from their sides. One hunched-drawn French boy was huddled up against a dead comrade, as if to keep warm, having no mental concept that the friend had died, and unable to move his limbs…. In their prison garments of striped coats, huddled in rags or old dirty blankets, it was like reaching into another world apart, to bring these shadow-men from their environment onto a litter, and into a clean American ambulance.
Not long after the evacuation of the living had begun, troops were sent to the nearby town to bring back several hundred German civilians to assist with the rescue effort. Many of those same Germans would be pressed into burial details in the days to come. Farris wrote:
These were the people who lived in unconcern as thousands of people had been driven as slaves, then left to die. Each medic learned several German words: “schnell” (hurry) and “tempo” (the same—hurry) and with a
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