This past week I have been reading first-hand accounts from soldiers who helped liberate concentration camps in Germany. These two accounts below will truly make your heart sick and proud of these American soldiers’ part in the war. An estimated six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis during World War II.
“We visited a German political internment camp. The camp had been liberated only two days and the condition of the camp has changed very little. The American Red Cross just arrived.
The inmates consisted of mostly Jews, some Russians, Poles and there were six American pilots that they shot almost immediately.
When we first walked in we saw all these creatures that were supposed to be men. They were dressed in black and white suits, heads shaved and starving to death. Malnutrition was with every one of them.
We met one of them that could speak English so he acted as a guide for us. First we saw a German monument that stated 51,600 died in this camp in three years. They were proud of it. Second we went in the living barracks. Six sq. ft. per six people. Hard wood slats six ft. high. Then we went down through rows of barbed wire to a building where they purposely infected these people with disease. Human guinea pigs for German medics.
In this medical building were exhibits of human heads in jars and tattooed human flesh or skin on the walls.
After that we went up to the torture dept. Here were beating devices that I won’t explain. The clubs, by the way, are still lying there with blood on them. In another room in this building were 8 cremator furnaces. The doors were open and in one I noticed one body ½ done. A horrible sight. After I snapped a few pictures I walked out side and noticed a truck with 50 naked bodys piled up six deep. Turning my head away from that I looked over against the wall and here were about 30 more. Their eyes open, their mouths open, blue, purple, cut and some with holes in them.
The guide told us that he lived with some of these men for years. He said most of them died with-in the past 24 hrs. In fact a Red Cross man told us they were dying like flys. Nothing can be done for them. It’s too late. They are much too far gone.
There is another place I never told you about. The latrine. I won’t tell you about it, because you won’t believe me. It’s unbelievable.”
1st Lt. James Carroll Jordan writing to his wife about the Buchenwald Concentration Camp,War Letters.
“You have heard the stories over the radio – I don’t want to add much more – the most striking picture I saw was the ‘death train’ – I saw picture, no not picture, but carload and carload full of corpses, once upon a time people who were alive, who were happy and people who had convictions or were jews – then slowly but methodically they were killed. Death has an ugly face on these people – they were starved to death – the positions they were lying in show that they succumbed slowly – they made one move, fell, were too weak to make another move, and there are hundreds of such lifeless skeletons covered by some skin.”
1st Lt. Fritz Schnaittacher, a German-born Jew serving with the U.S. Army writing to his wife about the Dachau Concentration Camp.
