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TEXTS Nordlager Ohrdruf We drove through the gate and halted. A circle of dead men lay there, in the striped slave uniforms which we now saw for the first time. These cadavers were fleshless; in back of each tight-skinned shaven skull was a bullet hole. The Pole opened the door of a shed. There was a cordwood stack of stiff naked human bodies, a stack as high as we stood.The bodies were flat and yellow as lumber. A yellow disinfectant was scattered over the pile. We had known. The world had vaguely heard. But until now no one of us had looked on this. Even this morning we had not imagined we would look on this. It was as though we had penetrated at last to the center of the black heart, to the very crawling inside of the vicious heart. We walked through the dead concentration camp. Eric uttered not a word. So it was like this. So his mother had been in a place like this. I somehow knew that I had had to find and experience this without anyone 's having told me what it would be like. This was part of my personal quest. This was the source of fear and the guilt in every human who remained alive. For human beings had had it in them to do this, and we were of the same species. There was more to see, the Pole told us. On top of the hill there was a rut that gave out, and then nothing. We drove there and got out. We saw nothing special. There was indeed a half-dug pit as large as a swimming pool, filled with ooze. Some sort of work had been going on there. Perhaps excavation for a building foundation. The survivor picked up a long pole terminating in a grappling hook, and now he was pushing it around in the ooze in the pit. Presently he levered it up just far enough for us to see what was on the hook. Then he let the half-decayed human body fall back into the slime. Now we knew. Nothing afterwards told us more. |
Night fell as we reached Weimar, and we were directed to the renowned Elephant Hotel, in the central square. Goethe 's hostelry stood intact amidst ruins, and in the lobby the white-jacketed clerk greeted us with cosmopolitan hauteur, regretting that no rooms were available. Then, out of force of habit — for there had been only one day of change in his world — he added, to prove his point, that everything was occupied except the Fürer's personal suite. Eric pounced on this. "Open!" Realizing he was now helpless to prevent a sacrilege, the clerk led us silently up to the second floor. Obsequious now, he informed us that these rooms had been guarded for the Fürer's occasional visits to Weimar. No one else had used them. It seemed the last obscene irony to come to Hitler's bed directly after Ohrdruff, and we felt it should have been the typhus-ridden wraith that had crawled out from the straw who should sleep here, tonight. |
In the morning we entered Buchenwald. There were two Buchenwalds, the upper and the lower, separated by a high barbed-wire fence; and the upper camp meant possible life, and the lower camp was death. In the upper area, the "permanent" camp, were the early political detainees, the criminals, the perverts, and the power-holders of the camp. The lower camp received the transports from Auschwitz, and sent out transports to places like Ohrdruf; it was from this well of utter misery that the about-to-die tottered forth to replace the dead. As one entered the lower camp the very atmosphere, even outdoors, assaulted one as the atmosphere of a closed charnel house. Here were barracks where man lay on shelves one atop another, where the dead sank to the bottom during the night and the living lay on top of them, where the same tin served for body waste at night when one couldn't go out, and for feeding in the day; back of these barracks the dead lay heaped as the garbage, and the gaunt creatures who wobbled past the cadavers mentioned to us that the livers and other edible parts would disappear, if the bodies lay there overnight. As we entered one swarming barrack I unthinkingly brought out a handful of chocolate bars; the creatures were upon me, shrieking, tearing at each other and at me, and I was astonished at the power, the tenacity of their fleshless limbs. Their violent eyes; their mouths would have devoured me. These were nearly all Jews. From Hungary, for the Poles had been taken earlier and were dead. No one will ever truly know, outside. |
It was a comfortable little house much like a shopkeeper's little home in, say, an Indiana town. The watchmaker was pouchy, quite characterless; his wife was a film version of the small-town pillar of righteousness: plain, somewhat work- and worryworn, and with the habit of nodding to punctuate with approval everything her husband said. The daughters, fourteen and seventeen, stood silently by papa. The father was smiling, almost smirking, oozing friendliness. He was glad the war was over for his family. Quite casually Eric asked him what was his party number? Oh, he laughed, in the millions. You understand, it was just a matter of business, to join the party. Actually he felt most bitter against those bandits who had betrayed Germany. The wife now daringly added a curse against lying Fuhrers. The daughters seemed proud of how papa was explaining things and winning American friendship. All were solicitous for our comfort. We mentioned Buchenwald, Dachau. Ah yes, they knew there were such places where criminals were taken -- people who were against the government. But the watchmaker didn't concern himself with the details of such matters, as he was not a political man. Did he know, we asked, that six million Jews had been assassinated, their bodies burned by the Nazis? He smiled even more broadly. Now we were joking. |
We told the watchmaker more. We described a slave barrack we had seen that afternoon in the yard of an aircraft factory; just before our troops came, the SS, aided by Hitler youth -- kids -- had set fire to the barrack and merrily shot the Polish and Czech slaves who tried to jump out of the windows of the flaming cabins. We had seen the twisted, burned corps still in their attitudes of flight. The smirk came off his face. He saw that we were perhaps not altogether friendly. "But that is the work of bandits. We are not responsible! …A man like myself -- I am a little man -- what can I do?" The little man, der kleiner mann. Perhaps, he said, he had to believe what we told him of these horrors. The German people did not know they existed, he assured us. And it became apparent that in his small-town cocoon he really didn't know. Sensing that he had made a point, the little watchmaker resumed his smile, and went over to the attack. "Why do you Americans come here to fight us?" he said. "We have no quarrel with you." We blinked. He repeated the remark. Now his daughters sparkled with pride as papa brought forth his final, incontrovertible observation. "You know what I think," he said, with his sly, intimate smile, "you know what I really believe?" He beamed ingratiatingly, as one who is about to utter the secret binding password. "America is bound to fight Russia. Pretty soon. Tell me, isn't that so?" His smile embraced us now as allies. His wife nodded, smiling again, as though all her worries were over -- her husband had, infallibly, provided. He had known the key. |
With the Seventh United States Army, May 7 (ONA) -- A last-minute superthriller was fought around ancient Itter Castle yesterday for the liberation of the most prominent French prisoners, even while an armistice was being signed arranging the surrender of all troops facing the Sixth Army Group. Capt. John Lee, of Norwich, N.Y., a tank company commander , told the Jerries in his road that the war was over, knocked off five German 88s and took hundreds of prisoners. Among them was a Wehrmacht major who offered to talk the Itter castle guard into surrendering. Riding a tank in the company of only 5 GIs, plus his tank crew, Capt. Lee reached the castle, which was built in the 11th century and is a hilltop affair in a setting of snow and mountain peaks. He found that the castle commandant had taken to his heels, leaving only some guards to cover the high-ranking prisoners. All went well that night. But in the morning, one of the guards, an SS man, changed his mind and sneaked off into the woods and gave an SS group surrounding the castle the position of the captain's tank. The group promptly landed two shells on the American tank. There then began a siege of the weird castle garrison, composed of Capt. Lee and his men, two French Generals and 20 Germans. The Jerries were firing side by side with the Americans, against the besieging SS fanatics. "Even the servant girls manned rifles to help us out," the captain said later. |