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

“Somehow he just touched here, touched here, and he listened. Didn’t take his stethoscope out, he just touched. He says, ‘Get the litter carrier’”—it was just two oak poles and OD canvas stretched between them. “Then Doc Scotti said, ‘Very, very carefully, pick this guy up.’ This guy didn’t have any strength, just enough to say ‘Amerikaner.’ So evidently he was one of the guys who knew that we liberated him. But that’s the only one I saw.”
    After helping rescue the lone survivor, Feinberg and some other men from his unit began to walk through the camp. “All of us took our handkerchiefs out, and we had to cover ourselves. It was impossible to breathe because the odor was terrible. At one point, I even went over to one of the barracks. I opened the doors, and there’s bodies laying over these wood beds, two-decker beds. I had to close the door. Dead, dead. I didn’t go inside; I couldn’t go inside. They were just, all of them the same, heads shaven.”
    Feinberg also saw the trench with the bodies. He remembers it as “a big hole about fifty feet by maybe two hundred feet with railroad ties shoved in there. They were going to bulldoze the bodies in there and then set the thing on fire and then cover it up so the Americans can’t see what they’d done.”
    Continuing through the camp, Feinberg came across the commander of the 4th Armored’s Combat Command B, Lieutenant Colonel Creighton Abrams, who would go on to become the U.S. commander in Vietnam from 1968 to 1972 and then Army chief of staff from 1972 until his death in 1974. “I see him with tears. I couldn’t believe that. He’s a very nice guy. He didn’t try to show you how tough he was or anything. And gets on his tank and says, ‘Okay, guys, let’s settle here.’ We found out that the troops that were guarding the camps, they took off, so he had a few tanks go down the road. The little [spotter] airplane was up above, he called the plane and said, ‘Let us know [if] somebody’s trying to escape. Get their position.’ And he got a platoon of tanks, five, six tanks, had them go after them. I understood that they put on full steam ahead and got them and just annihilated these guys. I didn’t see them.
    “But anyway, Abrams gets on his tank and says, ‘Don’t touch anything. The best bet is to get away from this area because there must be a lot of disease floating around.’ He himself had had no idea. The colonel in charge of a whole battalion had no idea what was going on, had no idea there was concentration camps. And that surprised me.”
    Bernard Diamond, from the Bronx, was only eighteen years old when his unit, the 89th Infantry Division, came into Ohrdruf to relieve the 4th Armored. He was a member of a weapons platoon: mortars and machine guns. And he had fought in the Battle of the Bulge near Bastogne almost immediately after arriving in Europe. “You know, I was eighteen years old. Was I terrified? I think I was just stupid.
    “When I got to Ohrdruf, and I’m walking into a courtyard, and I see piles of shirts and piles of suitcases. And what I thought were baskets of pebbles, but when I looked closer, they weren’t pebbles. They were teeth with gold in them. And I said, ‘What the hell is this?’ You know, I didn’t know anything about [the camps]. But when I saw some prisoners there, the first thing they wanted was my weapon because the Germans were still running out and escaping.”
    On April 8, several days after liberation, while the 4th Armored was still waiting to be relieved by the 89th Infantry Division, Combat Command A’s Colonel Hayden Sears ordered his men to go into the nearby town of Ohrdruf with trucks and bring back the citizens to the camp. In his Yank magazine article, Sergeant Levitt describes Ohrdruf as “a neat, well-to-do suburban town with hedges around some of its brick houses and concrete walks leading to their main entrances. The richest man in Ohrdruf is a painting contractor