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Buchenwald and Concentration Camps

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In fact, when we took Buchenwald—Buchenwald was a terrible camp—and I received cable after cable from relatives in New York that said, "Please look for this one, look for that one". And I took all the stack of cables and went to General Patton and said, "You know I have to be allowed to go into this camp" and he gave me a red pass that I still have.

I was in the camp the day after we took it while the SS was still in there, while the bodies were lying around the crematorium - they had not been burned yet - and so I saw really with my own eyes and photographed what I saw. And when I came back at night General Patton wanted to know what I had seen and I said, "If you don't put up—a - we have to take three cities that surround this camp: Jena, Eisenach, and Erfurt and make the people go through the camp now when the SS is still in there, where they can talk to the SS. The Germans were forced by the MPs to go through this camp so they cannot come afterwards and say that we did this. And they fainted right and left. And that's how we liberated, you wanted to know about liberation, well that is how we liberated a camp. The people in there were worse than animals were treated. I mean it was the cruelest thing I've ever seen in my whole life. An experience that you never forget.

While you were in the camp, did you have the chance to talk to any of the inmates?

I talked to many of them.

What did they say?

If they still could talk. You know they were all bones. A little boy was twelve years old; he was maybe this high. He said, "Here is where my sister was thrown alive into this fire," he said to me. I don't know if it's true or not or if he imagined it, but I'm sure it was true. And you know, it's so cruel that nobody today would believe even that this is possible, that you could use this kind of treatment to human beings, other human beings, even if you didn't like them, even if you hated them. I cannot understand another group of people like the Germans who claim not to have known this. Hitler must have had helpers. He cannot have done all this by himself and the Germans deny that. Even today they say that "Our parents didn't do these things," I mean, but they did.

When you first came to the camp, how did the people react to you guys being there?

They come around you, you know, and each one had their story to tell.

Did they try and tell you everything? What did they try to tell you?

Well you know I came there in the morning. I left as quickly as I could. I didn't stay around to hear the stories. I needed to look at them and see what happened. It was enough. You don't need to be told; you can see it.

Tell us more about what you saw.

I saw carriages full of bodies and I saw the crematorium where the gas chambers were. And we saw the SS who did all this, always saying, "It's not our fault. We were listening. We obeyed orders." Every German told you that he obeyed orders, but that's a story; they didn't have to do this. If they had been Americans they wouldn't have allowed that. Any other country, I can't imagine that any other country would want to live even after such a situation. How they still could look themselves in the face, in the mirror I have never understood. Humanly, knowing that they did these things.

As a Jew you could connect on some level your fellow people in the army with you did they respond in a similar way?

I had a driver from Tennessee and when he saw this the only thing that he could think of is, "My mother will never believe me." He repeated to me sixteen times, "My mother will never believe me that I saw a thing like that." This is a simple soldier who was my driver, who said that.

Did General Patton go see for himself after he talked to you?

I don't know that. You know, we were 12 people we lived by ourselves. We were groups of various functions; we weren't part of the general army. We took over a house the mayor of the town we would throw him out and take over his house or something like that. I had found our cook and he had been the cook in the Bremin, a big boat a German boat. Hanz was his name and I took him as my, as our cook and at Christmas he went around and "organize". He says "I'm going to organize some very good food." He brought it all in that was right in Bastogne where we were fighting our last battle against the Germans.

We lived by ourselves as a matter of fact. Many of the interrogators had terribly German accents. And that was at the moment that Germans infiltrated our lines in American uniforms. So two of my friends who were interrogators took the jeep and traveled on the road and they picked up two American soldiers with their carbines who were going into town. And they heard them speak, he says, "Now Doodle, what we going to do tonight?" And they arrested them. The two soldiers arrested our interrogators. I was alone in the house and the phone rang, and they said, "This is the MPs, we have two spies here by the name of Mentheim and Butler and we would like to know, do you know them? I said, "You took our star interrogators away, bring them back please." That was about Christmas in 1944.

Did you experience any anti-Semitism in the American military?

No, absolutely not. But my name is Newton, maybe if it had been any other name. You know it depends, it depends on the sergeant that you, that if you were a soldier or on the next officer or so. In a camp where I was, Ritchie, there were so many foreigners, that they could not possibly be discriminating against it. But you know it's not in the American way, it's not in the American way to even think that way. I have never found that people were nasty to you for one reason or another, even if they didn't like you.

There is a certain elegance between Americans that Europeans don't know about. You know when you come to America, they stay eight days in New York or so, or Chicago, they go away they say, "Wow, we did this, we did that", but there are many differences between Europe and America. In the education of people, in the manner of behaving, some better, but mostly, some worse. In America, people have a natural liking for each other. You know you speak to an American in general, I don't know how many, but I came into contact with people from Montana or from somewhere." My father is English, my mother was Scottish, my grandmother was Jewish", I mean in the end, you don't know what they were, that you don't have in Europe, because everybody is German, or Belgian, or you are something and they type you. In America, you don't have that. There are many things here, that you can only learn when you experience them.