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3 - Ohrdruf & Hemer Camps

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Where did they take you after that night and what did you do ?

Well, we went to this camp, Lucky Strike, which were the repo depos. We were suppose to wait there until we got our orders. So we were there for about five weeks. And then all of a sudden one day, they said, "come on load up, we've got our orders." We didn't know where we were going—again it was the unknown. We just drove and drove and finally we got to a concentration camp called Ohrdrof—O-H-R-D-R-O-F. And this was the first concentration camp that was liberated in Europe.

Note: the common spelling of "Ohrdruf" is used throughout the transcript.

Exactly when did this occur and what did you see?

It was late March or early April of 1945. We didn't know anything about concentration camps. We got off the trucks and walked up to the gates—these barbed wire gates—that we later found out had been electrified, so that if any prisoners got up to the gates, they would be executed. And I stood at the gate there and the U.S. Army had guards at the gates so that the liberated prisoners wouldn't get out. Because if they got out, and went into any little towns near there, they would have slaughtered the civilians. I'll get into that in a little bit.

I will just tell you what I saw when they opened the gates. It was not a very pretty picture. The first thing I saw in front of me was a chimney with the smoke distributing the ashes of our mothers and fathers, and sisters and brothers, and children—blowing the ashes all over the countryside. I didn't know exactly what that meant but the stench remains in my nostrils to today. Next to this high crematoria—the ovens—was a pile of bodies that was higher than this room with naked bodies of people I soon learned were Jews stripped of their clothes, and their hair, and the gold in their teeth. As I have said in many talks to kids in high school, they were stripped of the dignity of death.

The reason they were piled up there was that the Germans, after they [the victims] were gassed in the gas chamber, they wanted to get rid of the evidence. So, they thought the best thing to do was to burn the bodies. But there were still ashes around. In the many camps that I served in, people in the towns—even as close a mile—denied that there were concentration camps, when you could smell it three miles away. In this camp, there were bodies strewn all over the camp.

And there were big open graves—they called them mass graves. And a very strange thing about this, is that three weeks ago—this is fifty five years ago that this happened—I'll show you the impact this had on me. Three weeks ago, I dreamt that I was in that position. The first thing that they had us do in camp was to pick up these stiff, pathetic bodies and throw them into the open graves. And I hadn't thought about that in 55 years. The feelings that I had were so repressed that it wasn't until ten or fifteen years after the camps, after the war, that I started to think and remember what went on there—what I saw, what I smelled. There were bodies all over the camp.

They were living in barracks with three or four to the bunk with one laying on a wooden bunk. The bunks were about five or six high and just covered this whole building. They had no latrines, no bathrooms, no facilities, and everybody had diarrhea. It was a mess. The stench was just horrible. These people were emaciated. They were weighing like sixty or seventy or eighty pounds. Their bodies were sunken in, and their faces were like skeletons. One of the first things I remember going to the camp, was seeing a man down on the ground drinking from a mud puddle because they hadn't had any water. He was just down there drinking this water—lapping it up with the mud.

Fortunately, I think the human mind is able to compensate in a very strange way. And that is, if you let yourself go, and let shock take over, and realize what you are looking at—just dead bodies that have been beaten, and worked to death, and then put in gas chambers and then some of them burned, and they even put people in there who hadn't died yet, and I had talked to people who saw that happen, who were prisoners—if you let that sink in and react to that, it could just blow your mind apart. It would just destroy you.

Somehow we went about our job of throwing these bodies in the graves. After all of that was done they called in the town's people, this Ohrdruf, being the first camp that was liberated was one where General Eisenhower, who was my boss way up there, went to see this camp a day or two before we got there. And he was so disgusted that he called in General Patton, who was one of the real tough generals in the army. They called him "Blood and Guts." He came into the camp, the stories that they told us, he came into the camp and took one look and went over to the barbed wire fence and just threw up. It was so horrible. Then he got up on top of a jeep and he yelled out to all of our soldiers, "this is what you are fighting for. Look at what these son of bitches did."

It was horrible. This was the worst form of persecution in such a large mass in the history of our world. I can still remember looking at this pile of bodies. Their faces were so sunken in, that all I could see were these eyes. And to this day, I can remember the eyes. That's had a very big impact on me. But we were able to go about our jobs, I don't know how. What they wanted us to do was to spray these people that were still alive, barely alive suffering from malnutrition, and TB and typhus. I worked with a lot of prisoners who had typhus. We lined them up and they took their clothes off. What little clothes they had was usually just a jacket, and pants. Some had shoes. We sprayed them with DDT. This was a powder that was supposed to kill all bugs and everything, disinfect them. Then we turned around and we did it to each other, our soldiers—we sprayed each other with DDT and got our hair all white—little knowing that this was in later years known to be a cancer, a cause of cancer, the DDT pesticide.

Well, we weren't in that camp too long. What I found out in the long run, was that our company, our clearing company, instead of going up and being in battle, we had a very peculiar assignment, you know. Our assignment was to go into concentration camps and labor camps as they were liberated and render medical emergency, medical attention to the (kriegees.) The (kriegees) were prisoners who were liberated.

Were you told about your assignments before you went to Ohrdruf the first time?

Never knew about it.

What were you told about the situation before you walked into those gates?

Here we are. We don't know what it is.

Do you remember the first time the word concentration camp was used?

When we got there. When we walked in they said, this is a concentration camp. We didn't know how many more there were, we didn't know how bad it was, we didn't know anything, who these people were. Later we found out that there were twelve million people killed in these concentration camps in Europe. Half of them were Jews and half of them were not Jews. They were homosexuals, they were gypsies, they were prisoners, and they were political prisoners.

What Hitler wanted to do in the overall picture was to create an Aryan state—a pure blooded Aryan state. I used the word before, and I am going to say it again, he was a son-of-a-bitch. He had decided the only way you could get up in the world was to step on somebody else to boost yourself up. He picked on the Jews. He just pushed them right into the ground. He wanted to eliminate Germany and the whole world and make it Judenfrei, that means free of Jews. Along with it, I have always said this to all of the kids I have always talked to, and all the speeches I have made for fifty years—that there were an equal number of non-Jews who were killed. I don't think the world really knows that about the Holocaust.

There were like two hundred concentration camps and labor camps in Germany, and Poland, and Austria, and all over the place, in France. People only know about ten or twelve names of Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz and Birkenau and Mauthausen and the other popular names, if you can attach that word. There were two hundred ghettos all over Germany and Poland in towns where they would squeeze the Jews into a very small area of living. From there they would they send them to the camps. Getting back to me, I worked in—it's a little vague, in my mind now, but I know some of the names of the camps—in six or seven camps, three of them were concentration camps, and the other three or four were labor camps without names. They named them after the towns they were in.

Reactions to Ohrdruf

What was going through your head when you entered the camp? What was your emotional and mental reaction? What do you remember?

It's hard to remember just what was going through my head at that time. There is only one word I can use, it was so overwhelming, I had hardly ever seen anyone dead in my life and to walk in and see a whole pile of bodies and bodies all over the camp. They had rooms there because they didn't have time to burn all of the bodies. They just threw these naked bodies into these little like shacks and wait until they had time to burn them in the crematoria. It was a picture that I still have in my mind, of seeing these bodies stacked up with arms and legs flailing. The dehumanization of civilization and just knowing that after I found out that they were Jews, I had an affinity to these people. These were my people. Our family had relatives in Europe that were all wiped out, and you could pick this one or that one and this one, and it could have been ours. Just like I am doing now, the muscles in my throat are tightening up, and you just look at them and think, those are bodies, those are dead people. I couldn't help them.

What was your primary physical reaction? How did your body react?

Numb. I was just numb. I didn't cry. I didn't say anything, I just looked at them. They said, throw these people in the pit over there. Finally one of the officers came along and said, "Wait a minute. You can't throw them in the pit." This was part of my dream a few weeks ago. Here I am seventy-nine, this is still going on in my head. He put a couple of our soldiers down there, and we had to hand the bodies down, so they would stack them up neatly in the pits. When it was full, they’d throw lime on them. There were some tractors that would push dirt over the bodies. Imagine to be eighteen years old, and to never have seen a dead body and walk in and see thousands of them - emaciated, starved, beaten, and not be able to feel. It’s indescribable. You can't think about them.

We went about our daily work trying to help those prisoners who were still alive. Although they were no longer prisoners, they were liberated POWs. Most of them were going to die. Out of the millions that were in these camps, only a hundred thousand ever lived beyond the concentration camps. Some of these people that you have been talking to from your school, two of them I really know very well. I don't know how they ever lived through it. To go through, four or five or six years without food, without touching anyone, being beaten everyday. They turn into—I am sorry to use this expression, I apologize for it—but they become animals. The only thing they could think about was food and not being killed. So they couldn't complain, and they couldn't react to the German SS or the Nazis, or whoever they were beating them. They just tried to stay alive.

I think I looked at them like I would look at a forest—inanimate objects —without feeling, without reaching a hand out. Some of the men who were older felt this. I remember our mess sergeant one time was feeding them. This was a big problem because we couldn't give them too much food, the ones who were still alive, because it killed many of them. Feeding them just the food that we ate, they died from it. It was too much, their stomachs couldn't take it. This mess sergeant, who was Jewish, who I met years later in New York, Sam Tower. One day I went down to get some food for the people in a barracks that I was in charge of. He said, "Kenny, we've got to work our ass off. These are our people." It took me a long time to figure what he was talking about. I don't know if I was hypnotized, in a catatonic state, and still walking around, and seeing these people.

 

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