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

remainder were shot to death. The bodies at the entrance had all been killed with pistols by the last contingent of SS guards to leave the camp—a farewell gesture, no doubt, in observance of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler’s order not to permit concentration camp prisoners to fall into enemy hands alive.
    But there were survivors at Ohrdruf. Some had hidden inside the many barracks that had housed the prisoners; others had taken advantage of the inevitable confusion that ensued as the Nazis attempted to force march thousands of prisoners away and hidden in the nearby woods. When they revealed themselves to the American soldiers, they pleaded for food, and, as would happen thousands of times in the final weeks of the war, the GIs gave everything they had, often with tragic results. The high-calorie military rations were too much for digestive systems that had been systematically starved for months or even years. Prisoners who had survived to be freed died even as they were being fed by their liberators.
    Three days after liberation, Yank magazine correspondent Sergeant Saul Levitt arrived at Ohrdruf. In his article published on May 18, 1945, he wrote:
The men in the camp included Belgians, French, Russians, Serbs, and Poles. There is one sixteen-year-old Jewish lad among the survivors. There are also three Russian officers who made it. Two of them are doctors … the doctors worked as laborers until a few days before the evacuation of the camp. Then, just before the end, they were put to work on some of the sick in an effort to get them ready for the movement.

    Harry Feinberg, who has detailed memories of Ohrdruf, kept the Tri-State (New York, New Jersey, Connecticut) Chapter of the 4th Armored Division Association going for years .
    Levitt continued:
    The Americans going through this camp are very quiet. They have already seen much death, but they stare at this death, which is uglier and harder to look at than the death of war, with impassive faces and big eyes.
    Major John R. Scotti of Brooklyn, N.Y., Combat Command A’s medical officer-in-charge, burst out in a loud voice, not speaking to anyone in particular. He just stood in the middle of the camp and shouted out what he felt and no one acted surprised to hear his voice booming out big like that.
    “I tell you,” he said, and his angry voice was shaking, “all that German medical science is nil. This is how they have progressed in the last four years. They have now found the cure-all for typhus and malnutrition. It’s a bullet through the head.”
    Doc Scotti was the man Harry Feinberg was looking for shortly after arriving in the camp at Ohrdruf. Feinberg says, “I started walking around, and these bodies laying all over, some were clothed, some had just this striped thing. Their heads were all shaven and none of them are breathing. And I look, and I see one guy, his eyes back, and he’s laying. I don’t know if he was Jewish or what, but he had no face; everything was just”—at this point Feinberg scrunches his face, looking pained. “And I see him just gasping for air, so I looked at him, so suddenly he looks up at me. I don’t know how he opened his eyes, and he says, ‘Amerikaner?’ I says, ‘ Ja, Amerikaner.’”
    The man acknowledged the information with a labored sigh. Feinberg recalls looking at the other bodies surrounding him. “Nobody else is breathing, just this one guy. I ran over to the tank, got on the horn, I said, ‘Medics, medics, come out here, I’m in so-and-so area. Get Doc Scotti here.’ He was our battalion surgeon, an Italian guy, he was the greatest. He was the salt of the earth, had a heart as big as a whale. And he came over in his jeep, and I motioned to him.
    “I said, ‘Doc, the guy’s still breathing. I see him gasping.’ So Dr. Scotti, he gets on his horn and says, ‘Ambulance, come here, we’re in this sector.’” While they were waiting, the doctor examined the prisoner. Harry recalls how gentle he was.