Horrifying Discoveries
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
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When we think of the Holocaust, it’s easy to think of the horrors. Visions of doctors abusing women’s unborn children, and emaciated men in concentration camps, to weak to even lift their heads flood the mind in such a way that we don’t even want to think about it.
Rarely, then, do we think about the effects of the liberators, the fighting men who discovered these camps and saw first-hand these horrors.
Imagine for a moment that you are an American soldier drafted into World War II. You fought to the beachheads at Normandy on D-Day, you survived the hedgerow country of France, freed Paris and fought your way to Germany. You’ve seen the horrors of war first-hand, you’ve seen civilian casualties. You’re in a special kind of mental state, a hell that comes from three years of constant combat. You’re so far from your family, you were just a kid when this all started, and you know the stress and duress that combat places on warfighters.
After all this, feeling the hope that the war may soon be won, you chance upon the wholesale slaughter of 10 million people. As the Wehrmacht and Waffen SS retreated through Germany they forced the Jews on death marches or killed them in the camps and left others to rot. You find the piles of corpses, you find the corpses that littered the trails of these death marches. You find huts with the inhabitants burnt alive.
During the war, newspapers printed stories of the camps, but the civilian populace wrote them off as absolutely ludicrous, indeed, Nazi Germany was an effective and brutal aggressor state, but no one could be that evil, correct?
There are reports of French resistance fighters describing in detail, to American officers that freed Paris, reports at which the officers balked and dismissed ruefully. These were people who had fought and killed their way to Paris and even they denied the existence of such camps. After all, no one could be that evil.
I have spent a great deal of time reading the letters of soldiers sent home describing the conditions of the camps, being moved to tears, and begging the American people to send such simple items as overcoats and shoes.
If seeing is believing, then Dwight D. Eisenhower, General Patton and Omar Bradley had to see for themselves. They personally toured the camp at Ohrdruf to verify these reports. They found 3200 naked and emaciated bodies “flung into shallow graves.” Eisenhower insisted on seeing the entire camp. Patton became physically ill behind one of the Barracks. Eisenhower felt that it was necessary for his troops to see for themselves, he wanted them to tell the story to the world of the inhumanity. This day, April 12, 1945, ended with the news of the death of President Roosevelt.
Many American soldiers did not know what they were fighting. His message to Washington read: “We are constantly finding German camps in which they have placed political prisoners where unspeakable conditions exist. From my own personal observation, I can state unequivocally that all written statements up to now do not paint the full horrors.”
Imagine what this does to the psyche of the average fighting man, however, to fight so long and so hard and not even know who you’re freeing. To see this kind of slaughter after all you’ve seen and done must have been immeasurably hard. Then to properly dispose of the dead and try to nurse the survivors back to health. It must’ve felt good to be able to help save and free these people at the same time that the horror would’ve taken it’s toll, both in brutality toward the remaining Nazis and in their personal lives. A soldier wrote: “The thought of suicide was entertained by nearly everyone, if only for a brief time. It was born of the hopelessness of the situation, the constant danger of death looming over us daily and hourly, and the closeness of the deaths suffered by many of the others. I spoke of the many opportunities of giving life a meaning. I told my comrades that human life, under any circumstances, never ceases to have a meaning.”
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