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04 - Landsberg Concentration Camp
How many camps did you visit, did you actually see?
I went to Landsberg, and Mauthausen and then there was one other, Ebensee I think was the other one. There were at least three that I actually saw.
And was Landsberg the first camp that you visited?
Yes.
And could you describe that a little bit? What is was like to arrive, when you first got there?
We were in a convoy in trucks and jeeps coming up the road and what looked like one-story barracks types buildings and then as we got closer and we got there, it looked like there was cord wood stacked outside the buildings against the walls. We got closer, we realized it wasn't cord wood, they were bodies. The limbs were like, the thigh was like this, this big around probably. That was the first time we really, really saw. It was hard to believe that people could to this to each other.
Were there any Germans left at the camp when you got there?
There were a few. By that time, most of them had left that particular one, but we came across others. Everyone of them said, "Oh, I didn't know what was going on. I wasn't a Nazi. It wasn't us." Which is why I absolutely refuse to believe them. When I came back after the war I made up my mind that I would never buy a German car, for example. Which I never did, just one example. Of course, the people there, today most of them weren't even living then, but you still have strong feelings about what went on there.
When you went in at Landsberg, when your unit went in, were you the first to go in after the Germans left?
Yes, there was one of our units that went in the day before we got there, but we were the first there. There weren't a lot of survivors at that time. Early on, when the Americans were coming into these camps, the Germans were trying to take the prisoners out and get them to other places. And if they couldn't, they would kill them so there would be no witnesses. Bodies all over the place. Or they locked them into their buildings where they were staying—wooden huts basically—and they would lock the doors and the windows and throw gasoline on them and then set fire to them so nobody could get out.
Did that happen someplace that you saw?
Yes, we saw that. Before they put the prisoners—before they killed them, they took any jewelry they had when they were dead. They knocked out the gold teeth that people may have had and they melted it all down. People cannot believe what the Nazis did. It's just impossible for a lot of people to believe. To this day, there are still deniers, but there is plenty of proof.
When you first got to Landsberg, did you have a specific mission? Were you there to liberate the camp? What did they tell you beforehand? Did you know why you were going there?
To clear out any Germans that were there and we tried to take care of the survivors, but that was very difficult. One of the things we did learn early on, they were starving and we would try to feed them. We would give them a lot of food, but it was the worst thing. That actually killed a lot of them. They could not handle all of that food in a short time. And it took a long time before we realized that. So it had to be done very, very slowly.
How many survivors were there?
I don't remember at this particular camp.
More than a hundred, do you think? Were there several?
I think I may have some figures on Landsberg. I'm not sure.
We're just trying to get what you remember at this point.
It was in the hundreds of survivors, thousands in some cases.
Do you remember when you first got there, what did you do when you got to the camp?
The first thing we did was to go through to try to clear out any Germans that were still there. We'd try to capture them. If they didn't want to be captured, we'd shoot them. They would shoot at us, we'd fire back at them. By that time we were outnumbering them. Some of them were just die-hard. By that time, many of them were just surrendering. We'd send them back to prisoner-of-war camps. We'd try to take care of the survivors of the concentration camps—feed them, give them clothes. We had medical units with doctors who were trying to help them, trying to get them together. A great many of them obviously did not survive.
How long did it take for the survivors to start trusting the American soldiers?
Some of them immediately welcomed us. Others were very leery of us—they felt we might be enemies—and others were so far out of it that they didn't even realize what was happening. So it was a whole, wide variety of survivors and how they took it.
Did you have personal interactions? Were you able to have conversations?
There were a couple of them. I didn't speak the other languages, but there were a couple we found who did speak English. We had translators, of course.
What did they tell you about life in the camps?
They told us what happened. They would tell us about their families, where they came from, that most of their families were killed in the towns they lived in. Others were put on trains in box cars and sent to these camps. And they were separated—women and the men were separated. If the men were in good shape, they went to one area where they could work. The women, if they were young and attractive, they sent them someplace else, and they made slave laborers—they made sex laborers out of them. And children, if they had young children, they killed the children, because they didn't want to bother with them—infants in arms, that the Germans would kill. They would take them from the mother's arms and just dash them down on the ground.
Larry, amidst all this horror, amidst all this inhumanity, do you remember any cases of triumph and courage? Any cases that are uplifting, any stories that you remember?
That encouraged them?
Yes.
There were some, but at that time, our major area was to try to save as many of those as we could. You'd try to separate them, and then you'd get their stories. And people did not want to believe what went on. That was one of the problems.
At Landsberg, where were most of the people from? Do you recall?
I have a note here on that, just very quickly. I've forgotten a lot of these details, because it took years before I could talk about it, so a lot of it just left my mind at the time.
Did you come across any Russians? I know that area had a lot of Russian prisoners of war.
Yes, the Russians were sent back, we repatriated them. Russian prisoners were sent back to Russia. The survivors to their various countries. Landsberg was a sub-camp of Dachau.
Was it mostly Jews at Landsberg?
A great many of them.
Do you remember how long you were at Landsberg?
Just a matter of a couple of days, then we moved on. I have notes on Mauthausen. Mauthausen was the concentration camp outside of Linz, Austria. I went through Ebensee. That was a sub-camp of Mauthausen.
We'll talk about that in just a second, but just trying to get back to Landsberg, when you first came in, you talked a little bit about what it looked like when you first came in to Landsberg.
There were just a lot of one-story barracks-type buildings, very plain. One after the other, one or two larger buildings that housed the Germans who ran the camps. It was just one—these barracks-type buildings held anywhere from fifty to three hundred, I remember, prisoners. And they were just living on—there were wooden planks that they slept on, and no blankets, no pillows, no anything. Just wooden planks, three deep in this particular one.
Were there any sounds or smells or other things that you remember?
Oh, absolutely. You smelled them before you got to them, from all the bodies. There were so many bodies there that were rotting, you could smell them way before you even got there.
Could you describe that a little bit more?
We came close the first time. We didn't really know what it was. "What stinks?" we would say. Then we saw the bodies that were rotting. Kind of a sour-sweet rotting smell. Something you never forget.
Were there other facilities at Landsberg besides the barracks? Was it a work camp?
It was one of the work camps, yes.
I was just wondering if there were facilities there?
Yes, it was a work camp. There wasn't a lot of stuff down there. Not much that we could see.
Do you know, from talking to some of the survivors, what they'd been doing there? Was it mining or farming?
Mining, digging, that sort of stuff. Mauthausen, in particular, by the way, because that was at this quarry—a big stone quarry. And they used to work the quarry. There were thousands of prisoners who died there. They were down in the bottom—just the bodies.
Did you get to see the quarry?
Oh, yes. Absolutely.
How big was it?
The quarry itself was at least two hundred and some feet deep. It was just stone steps going down into it, and it was probably a hundred, two hundred yards across.
Were they actually using that rock for anything?
Yes. They used to bring up the rocks, so they would use that to build things. They were even building tunnels with it, and they used the granite that they got out of there to build things. And these prisoners, they had to carry these blocks of granite on their back or in their arms up these stairs. They didn't last very long.
