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Section below transcribed Logan L (2008), edited by Joseph Werhan (intern). Please report errors to: info@tellingstories.org.

What's an example of a question—that would be the question that you would be gearing up for—and then ask to get the answer?

Talk about families, talk about all sorts of things that have nothing to do about what it is you want to hear.

What would be the real kernel of information that you were trying to trick them into giving you?

“What actual unit were you with and what was that unit doing? When and where and why were you assigned to that particular place at that time?” We knew that at certain times, certain camps were set up where certain things were happening—or certain atrocities were happening. Nobody wanted to talk to us. Nobody ever served in a concentration camp. It was always somebody else. Once you learn what units they were in, and where they were stationed—they didn't know that I knew where Mauthausen was or where Auschwitz was really. I was in Linz, Austria. Linz is across the river from Mauthausen. “He was in Linz, okay. So nice. Linz is a nice town. You can eat Linzer Torte. They're very good cakes.” The more you make clear to them that you knew what they were talking about, the easier it was to talk to them. After a while they said, "I can't put anything over on this son of bitch."

When you were being taught about where each unit was and what the German Army was doing, did you have any idea about the concentration camps? Did they tell you about that?

We had ideas. We had heard about them. There had been Polish escapees who'd ended up in London who had talked about it, so we had some idea. Quite frankly in many ways we didn't believe it. It was so unbelievable. It was inconceivable. The first one we walked into, I can tell you I threw up for three days straight. I'll never forget that.

Arrival in Europe

You said you landed in Liverpool. Do you want to draw out a map?

Sure. We landed in Liverpool—roughly there—spent probably a weekend in London just as soon as we could get off easily. Then they took us to a train, I think from Liverpool. We landed in northern France, went to Paris—where we were issued our jeeps and equipment and guns and you name it—and were assembled in groups that were going to stick together. From there—this is about Alsace-Lorraine—we ended up there. From there, we went from there, up, across there, down into Austria. That was the southern Seventh Army area. Third Army—under General Patton—was further north. First Army— which was under General Patch—was where the British were. We joined up with some of the French North African troops and one of the fascinating things was when we went into a little German town. We were with big, tall, six-foot-six pitch black Senegalese troops. The Germans were scared shitless—I mean they were scared because these guys were big.

You joined up with the 36th Infantry Division?

We ended up in Paris. In Paris the whole ninety of us—who had come together overseas—were separated out into small detachments of five, six, seven people, and then were assigned two front line divisions. I happened to be assigned to the Texas National Guard 36th Infantry Division. The first night we got there was in the little town of Brumath—B-R-U-M-A-T-H—just north of Strasbourg. The night before we had stayed in a church in Colmar in France, and had slept on a marble floor with thin army blankets. This was February—This was cold. It was a little nippy. We got to Brumath and got to the headquarters of the Division's TIC unit—to which we were attached—and that was a life of luxury. They'd taken over a farmhouse and they ate and they took care of themselves. It was the next to first night they took me over to a neighboring farmhouse where I had been assigned to sleep. Before I went over to my place, Sam Krause—one of my buddies originally from Brooklyn—he'd been tired so he was going to go over to his landlady in her farmhouse just before that. Five minutes after he went over there we heard this loud screech and in comes Sam with his landlady in front of him, shaking. He had his pistol out and she was going to kill him. Why was she going to kill him? The poor lady—this is cold, winter weather, no heat in the buildings—she'd taken this metal hot water bottle and made hot water and put it into his bed. That metal hot water bottle is round and has a nob on top, and looks just like a teller mine—a mine that the Germans put on the roads—to blow up Jeeps and things. Well he was sure this poor, little old lady was going to blow him up when he got into bed. He was just shaking, and the poor lady was shaking even more.

When was this event?

November-December '44. Give or take a week. At that point we also hired ourselves a cook, Al Har. Al Har had been a cook in one of the fancy restaurants and hotels in Strasbourg and Al was fabulous. We got K-rations—we got all these prepackaged rations that the army provided us. God forbid we shouldn't be hungry, terrible stuff. He would take these K-rations—that were very full of fat and ground meat—and he would render them and he would separate the fat out and the meat out. Then he would sell those things to some other farmers because they didn't have enough fat and they didn't have enough meat. He would take in trade a little calf—or a little pig or something—and then he would go and butcher that and we'd eat that. Then he would sell the K-rations. Al was a wonderful cook, he was constantly chewing gum because gum was the currency we had.

We also had a little French liaison officer—Guile—who had been through three German prison camps, three different times. He had served in North Africa and Equatorial Africa for the French Army. He had become our liaison—getting us housing and other things that we needed in France—because we were foreigners. I remember him sitting on the back of my jeep riding with me—he was constantly chewing gum. As we were driving down one road one day a little mortar shell—mortars are the ones that shoot up and loop over—landed about twenty feet in front of us on the road and bounced around. It didn't explode, but it could have. I remember turning around to Guile and he had just swallowed his gum—very quietly but very solidly.

Some of these things are funny and some of these things are so absurd. If you saw them in a movie—there was a show in a German prison camp, its Sargent Schultz' Hogan's Heroes—you'd never believe that stuff, but it was real. It was absolutely real. You'd drive down a road and they told you go east and you see this guy nailing up a sign. You ask him, "Where are we going?" He says, "I don't know. They told me to nail up signs." He had no idea where we were going, neither did anybody. There were times when we ended up behind German lines because we had passed them.

They didn't know. I remember—oh a cute little one—it was March. It had been very nice and warm, and it had just snowed again. There were two main roads and I look at the map and for the main road the division is going this road—and another division going this road—and I see this little village in between. I said, "Let's check it out." So Fred and I drive into the little village—five, ten, eight houses—little place. We're stopping and we pull up to this little village hall. As we stop, out comes this little group of German burghers out of city hall saying, “We surrender, white flag, we surrender. Take them away.” “Take what away?” There had been a German squad in that little village—and when they heard all the American troops on the main highways—the mayor of this little town had told the squad, "Hey. It's enough. Give up already. Why don't you give us all your weapons. We'll put them in this basement. We'll put you in this other basement and when the Americans come, enjoy. We'll turn you over and everything will be okay. You're living at least.""Okay." So we get there and these guys come out and he says, "Take them away." We got the weapons—put them on our jeep—and there were eight or nine German soldiers. One of them was wounded so we fixed the weapons on the back of the jeep so it became a sort-of-bed. We put the wounded on that and we told the other eight or ten of them, "Walk in back of us and we'll drive slowly and when we get to main highway we'll turn you over to the MP's.""Okay." Its Cold, wet. They were tired. They had enough. By the time we got to the main highway—which must have been all of three or four miles—there were forty-seven German soldiers in back of us. They'd come out of the woods. They were cold in the woods. They were wet, they were tired. They just lined up. We never bothered to look around. We started with a dozen of them. There were fifty of them in back. We turned them over. You see that on Hogan's Heroes—"Oh it's a great story, but it never happened."—it happened.

What time did this happen?

This was late March, '44. They knew the war was over, practically. A lot more people got killed in the meantime, but it was over already.

There's a beautiful resort lake in southern Bavaria—the Tegernsee—and it had several German Army hospitals, which were full of soldiers. When we got near there we sent somebody in to see if they could just give up and somebody in there said, "No, we're going to fight." So we pulled back and Lieutenant Colonel Ciccolini—who was one of our battalion commanders—said, "Okay, they want to fight. I'm not going to lose any more men. We're going to call in an airstrike and if they want to get bombed, tough shit." Seven o'clock in the morning—shortly before the airstrike—somebody came through the lines and told us that they had pulled out. They were not going to defend, so we quickly called the airstrike off. They would have bombed that hospital all to pieces, but this sometimes ten minutes difference of making lives or not.

We're at Tegernsee at night. We've gotten ourselves a place to stay, and Fred and I are walking out to get some fresh air. Moonlight—you can see the lake—everything else is pitch black. All of the sudden we hear “clomp,” “clomp,” “clomp,” “clomp”—hobnail boots down the road so Fred and I step aside, off the road and in the dark there's one MP—American MP—MP on his helmet with a sub-machine gun coming down the road with rubber soles. No one can hear him. In back of him a German division, 16,000 men— officers, men, everybody—and in back of them one more MP marching them off to prison camp. They'd given up. They were all fully-armed. Again you hear this or you see this in a movie, "Oh come on. That's ridiculous. That could never happen." There it was. You hear this “clomp,” “clomp,” “clomp” down the road, and there were two MP's and the two of us.

Is that the story you wanted to tell earlier about the boots? You were talking earlier about the marching.

Yes, that's probably the one. The thing that scared most German civilians was Americans' rubber soles. They couldn't hear anybody marching. They were so used to military noise that the idea of “shew,” “shew,” “shew,” “shew,” just coming down the road—not hearing anybody—scared the hell out of them. When those are black that made it even worse. We had not only the French Senegalese, we had some black troops who also scared them. They really couldn't figure out what that was all about because they had heard all about American blacks being slaves. Well these slaves, with guns.

Landsbert Concentration Camp

Maybe it would be helpful if we looked back at the map and went to the first concentration camp that you encountered.

The camp that I went to was really only peripherally a concentration camp. It was an outlying labor camp to Dachau. Dachau was the main concentration camp. Dachau must have had twenty outlying labor camps in different factories and different fields and people were assigned out to work. The one we went into was the one at Hurlach, near Landsberg. Landsberg is a town in southern Bavaria which had this old prison that Hitler was in, in 1923.

Could you spell of Landsberg?

L-A-N-D-S-B-E-R-G.

And the spelling of the other camp?

Hurlach, [Correction: H-]U-R-L-A-C-H. That's just a little village that the camp was next to. As far as I know it wasn't on any map—there weren't any list of things—it was just one of the labor camps. Ciccolini's battalion drove up to it and found this camp. The camp was about as primitive as it could be. They did not have barracks, but they had this hole in the ground with the roof on it.

I want us to slow down now, and I want to make sure we build the story moment-by-moment, day-by-day. This is the most important part of the story. Coming up to Landsberg, what was going through your head? Was it visible that it was a camp?

The camp was just off the main highway.

You could see it from the main highway?

You could see it, and it had fencing around it, but not as much as we now know of various concentration camps. There must have been a few thousand prisoners there, mainly to work. When they got to be too old—or too weak to work anymore—they got shipped back usually to Dachau to be taken care of. When we got there the German commander had heard us coming—trucks and guns and the noise of war—and had tried to get rid of all his prisoners. What he was trying to achieve by that I don't know—maybe he was trying to hide what was happening—but the barracks were not really barracks above ground. They were holes in the ground with shed roofs over them.

How big were they?

About twenty by sixty roughly in feet, with shed roofs and entrances on either side. When the camp commander heard us coming he herded all the prisoners that he could into these “barracks,” if you will—into these holes in the ground—blockaded the entrances, poured gasoline on the roofs and lit them. There were very few people left alive. There were a few prisoners left who—when they saw us coming—came out and they had in the meantime overtaken the camp commander and we had to rescue him from their fury. We arrested him and he ended up being convicted. He told us he, “was a very nice man, had a family and they were living in the camp.”

His entire family?

He and his family. He loved his kids and he loved his dogs and he would take them walking around the camp on weekends because it was such a nice place.

This is a conversation you're hearing?

He's telling us. In the meantime we'd heard from the prisoners who he was, and we had protected him from the prisoners. This shift in mindset—it's almost impossible to comprehend. I have no idea what eventually happened to him. I'm sure he was in prison somewhere. What we did do—and I have to give credit to Ccicolini, the battalion commander who was there—he took all his trucks, emptied them out, outside the camp. Then he took the trucks empty—drove them into the city of Landsberg— rounded up all the citizens he could pick up. He loaded them in his trucks, brought them to the camp, drove them around the camp, and took them back out again to Landsberg. His rationale was they should never be able to say they didn't know. Unfortunately, he was not that typical of American commanders.

Prior to Hurlach, you didn't exactly know what was going on in the camps?

Not that specifically, no. I think it's fair to say that in our wildest imaginations we could not have, and Hurlach wasn't one of the worst!

You weren't still under the impression that they were prisoner of war camps?

No. We knew that they were not prisoner of war camps. Those we had found.

If you were going to describe walking into the camp—smells, sights, every sense you can imagine—how would you describe it?

Let me jump a little ahead because frankly, we were much too busy, involved, active to think or feel much about anything at that point, and overwhelmed by what was there.

But before you jump ahead—I know you want to—what we're trying to get from you is a little more physical description of what you saw at Hurlach.

Basically a barren, fairly desolate area with these shed roofs on top of the ground, which by that time most of them had burnt or been demolished. In the holes in the ground—bodies, in various stages of decomposition, burns, etc. It was overwhelming. The point is that by the time we got there most of this had happened so recently—within a day or so—that the smell of destruction had not yet materialized. That's why I was trying to jump ahead a little bit. Just after the war finished, my mother for some reason contacted me, and I don't know how she ever managed...

I'm sorry to stop you again, but we don't want to jump to Mathausen yet. In part because we are running out of time here and we want to make sure that anything else—we promise we'll get there—but is there anything else? When you looked in the pit, how many bodies were in there?

Countless. Fifty, a hundred.

What kind of people?

What kind of people? By that time we really couldn't tell. They were bodies. Probably gypsies, probably some Jews, probably some communists, probably some Russians.

What were the ages? Children?

I don't remember, I don't know. I doubt it because this was a work camp. This was not the place where they would have kept children—they didn't keep children very long—they got rid of those fairly quickly.

How many holes, or barracks were there?

A dozen or so, it was a small camp. It was one of these outlying labor camps. It was a nothing, just a lot of bodies.

Do you remember how the people who had escaped had survived the burning of the buildings?

They had been on outlying work projects. As far as I know, none of them who had been at the camp remained alive. On a daily basis people were marched out from there to nearby factories, to nearby fields, to nearby whatever it was to work—to clean the streets in the city of Landsberg—all sorts of jobs.

Do you recall anything that the prisoners had said to you?

Wait, what?

Can you recall anything that survivors—the prisoners—had said to you when you walked in and saw this? You saw some folks who were still there alive.

No, I know we tried. We were torn. We tried to figure out what we could feed them because they were all starving, but we didn't want to feed them things that would make them sick because they had been starving so long. We all had candy bars—we all had K-rations—was it the right thing to give them and kill them that way? Because that happened. People were fed and died because they couldn't eat.

How did you know that that was a problem though, because so many soldiers did help.

We had heard some of the experiences in other places.