The Liberators: America's Witnesses to the Holocaust by Michael Hirsh Read Free Book Online

gone. I got out of my jeep, and this tank was buttoned up—the hatches were closed. I opened up the hatch, and there were two Germans sitting there, burned to a crisp. It was like black toast. Those were the first two Germans that I ever saw, dead Germans. We’ve hit German tanks, they burned. I saw my tanks burned, I saw my men burned. I went back to the aid station one day, and a guy’s lying on the table, and you talk about guts being—” He paused, as if recalling that scene, then continued, “So we saw some terrible things.”
    Stanley Friedenberg had been an accountant in Manhattan before being drafted. He volunteered for Officer Candidate School (OCS) and in 1943 graduated as a Signal Corps officer. Ultimately, he was recruited into the Counter Intelligence Corps and at the end of 1944 went to Europe, where his supervisors at CIC Headquarters on Avenue Victor-Hugo in Paris sent him on what the now-retired attorney describes as “the grand march across Europe.” Friedenberg and the men traveling in his jeep wore uniforms with no identification save for the U.S. pins on their collars; they showed no rank, and their ID cards referred to them as “Mr.” He spoke a bit of French and passable German, which he says was nowhere near good enough for interrogation. His unit was assigned to the 65th Infantry Division for rations and quarters, but they essentially freelanced around Germany, gathering evidence of war crimes.
    Late on April 4, they got word via radio that a camp at Ohrdruf had been discovered, and they drove there, arriving on the morning of April 5, probably around the same time that Lieutenant Colonel Irzyk entered the camp.
    Speaking on the patio of his winter home in Placida, Florida, Friedenberg recalls seeing the barbed-wire enclosure and what he describes as shabby buildings. “As I walked through the gate, there was a pit the size of this swimming pool, fifteen by thirty, that was filled with naked bodies of men—real ninety-eight-pound skeletons, bones protruding. And I couldn’t tell how many because they were piled one on top of the other. I would guess there were several hundred bodies there. Someone had started to pour lime on the bodies at one end to decompose them. I took one picture—that’s all I could take because it was such a horrible sight. I was going to take more, but I couldn’t. I was just overwhelmed by the sight. I didn’t throw up. Smell is horrible; decomposing bodies. It’s astonishment, really, astonishment.”
    Even as a member of CIC, Friedenberg had had no idea about the concentration camps. At that point in the war, news of them had not made it down the chain of command. Some officers in the line units knew the Russians had run into them, and Irzyk says there were “undercurrents about concentration camps, but I don’t think the impact—it never came until we got to Ohrdruf. To see it, to see it”—he pauses, searching for the right word—“it’s staggering, staggering.”
    The questions raised for Friedenberg that morning in Ohrdruf still trouble him today. “How can one human being do this to another, no matter how much you hated them? These people were just used and worked and given very little food until they dropped dead in their tracks and were thrown in the pit. How could it be? Is there a god? What causes this? You just can’t believe that it could happen to human beings.”
    The camp that the 4th Armored Division’s 8th Tank Battalion found had been built just five months earlier to house prisoners brought from Buchenwald, thirty-two miles away, to work as forced labor on the underground Nazi communications center or the railway leading to it. Just weeks before the liberation of Ohrdruf, the prisoner population was around 11,700, but mere days before the arrival of the Americans, the SS evacuated most of them on a series of death marches to Buchenwald. Many who were too weak to walk were loaded into trucks, and when the trucks were full, the