The Liberators: America's Witnesses to the Holocaust (39 page)

Stories abound of angry American soldiers taking no prisoners after they’d liberated one of the concentration camps. Many soldiers, both enlisted and officers, have said that the Geneva Convention rules against such activities were never mentioned. As one former first lieutenant, an infantry platoon leader, said, “It was war.” His implication was that rules of engagement were irrelevant to the realities on the ground.

The life span of captured SS was especially short in GI hands. So why didn’t Delbert Cooper retaliate? Why didn’t he shoot when urged to do so by his fellow soldier? It’s something he’s thought about for years. “I think that you are either a murderer or a killer. And I can be a killer, but I discovered that day, I wasn’t a murderer. And there is a difference.

“When I walked up to that fella in the barn lot, had he raised his arm to attack me—I walked right up and put this pistol right here, almost against his chest, and that man knew he was dying because I was going to kill him. I needed resistance; you just don’t run out and shoot somebody. Even right in the middle of the war, even after you’ve been in a place like that the same day. I didn’t anyway, and neither did these other guys, ‘cause this other guy couldn’t kill him either. But I was hopin’—in plain language, now, exactly what I thought—
raise your arm, you sonofabitch
. That’s what was in my head. I wanted him to give me some resistance. And when he didn’t, I’m not just gonna shoot him down.”

It’s impossible to adequately convey what both the rescued survivors and their liberators were feeling during those first hours in Guns kirchen. In “The Seventy-first Came … to Gunskirchen Lager,” the public relations officer for the division, Major Cameron Coffman, describes it as best he could in a lengthy essay that was published shortly after the liberation. He wrote:

A little girl, doubled with the gnawing pains of starvation, cried pitifully for help. A dead man rotted beside her. An English-speaking Jew from Ohio hummed, “The Yanks Are Coming,” then broke out crying. A Jewish Rabbi tripped over a dead body as he scurried toward me with strength he must have been saving for the arrival of the American forces. He kissed the back of my gloved hand and clutched my sleeve with a talon-like grip as he lifted his face toward heaven. I could not understand what he said, but it was a prayer. I did not have to understand his spoken word.

MAY 5, 1945
WELS, UPPER AUSTRIA
5 miles west-northwest of Gunskirchen

A
fter elements of the 71st Infantry Division liberated Gunskirchen, they moved east toward Linz, meeting moderate resistance as they approached the village of Wels five miles away. The town’s railway tracks and station had been destroyed by recent Allied air raids. What they didn’t know is that they were about to discover another of the Mauthausen subcamps, this one actually a subcamp of Gunskirchen known as Wels II.

According to the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945
, the camp was established on March 24, 1945, with the arrival from Mauthausen of about a thousand male inmates, the majority of whom were metalworkers. They were probably destined to be enslaved by the Flugzeug und Metallbauwerke Wels (Aircraft and Metal Construction Company, Wels). The next day, another thousand inmates arrived from the Ebensee sub-camp. Initially, the inmates were used to clean up the damage at the train station. They were housed in a factory hall that was not fenced and lacked a kitchen and sanitary facilities. The slave laborers were guarded by SS and Volkssturm (home guard) soldiers.

As the Nazis were pressed by Soviet forces, they grew desperate to ship inmates from the easternmost camps to facilities in Austria and Germany. That’s the likely explanation for the presence of Hungarian Jews at Wels on the day the 71st and Private Leonard Lubin of Miami, Florida, arrived.

Lubin, with the 609th Field Artillery Battalion, was not quite twenty when he walked into Wels. When interviewed, he was eighty-three and had recently retired as a solo practice attorney who spent years doing appellate law. He talked about his experiences on that nice spring day in early May 1945 and about how it affected him, as though he were representing clients before a panel of feisty judges. He spoke with precision and intensity, with the knowledge that overt emotionality could undermine his case. Pounding his fist on the lectern never helped. Nevertheless, there was no doubt that what he saw had affected him at both a brain and a gut level—in the
kishkes
, as Jews of his generation are wont to say.

Private Leonard Lubin of Miami, Florida, was not quite twenty years old when his outfit, the 71st Infantry Division, liberated Wells II, a subcamp of Mauthausen. He had one experience there that, at age eighty-three, he described as “the content of my nightmares.”

There were things he didn’t remember about that afternoon, and even under persistent questioning, he wasn’t inclined to fill in the blanks. He was also aware that soldiers
know
only what’s immediately surrounding them. Rarely is a private in a position to have even a moderately big picture. That said, Lubin recalled walking down a street, perhaps the equivalent of a four-lane American boulevard with two-and three-story brick apartment buildings on either side. There were a few automobiles parked along the road, and every few yards saplings had been planted.

“I heard sounds before I saw
them
. The sounds that I heard were
‘Ungarischer Juden.’
Hungarian Jews. I had a smattering of street German; I didn’t know all that much but enough to know what it was. I got behind a car, and I was able to identify three men coming toward me in obvious prison clothing, that kind of striped clothing, and they pointed behind them and said there was a
‘Konzentrationslager,’
a concentration camp, down the street, very excited. I motioned them to continue going in the direction they were and told them in pidgin German with sign languages we all spoke that there were American soldiers behind me who would help them.

“The fact that they were ambulatory, they were not the skeleton kind of prisoners that the photography of the era shows us, the living dead, tells us they were more recent arrivals at the camp.” Lubin’s later study taught him that at labor camps such as Wels, “people went in the front door—new people who are normal people, recently captured—and they were put to work. Out the back door, if that’s the way to put it, are the dead people when they died from work.” But as he walked toward the
Konzentrationslager
, he knew next to nothing about what he would soon confront. (His unit had not been among the outfits from the 71st that had recently liberated nearby Gunskirchen.) “We knew that the Germans had been persecuting minorities, especially Jews; we’d heard some rumors about killing but had no concept whatever of this. The military had taught us nothing, told us nothing, had no training or expectations, and so much of this sounds crazy.”

Within hours it would become clear to him that the Army knew, at least in general terms, what its men would be uncovering. His officers were to tell him that “We had to go, and they’re telling us that there are units behind us to take care of these people. Well, if that were true, how come we soldiers weren’t oriented to the proposition we were going to be encountering concentration camps? You would have thought if they knew as much to have units prepared to take care of these people, we would have known to expect it.” The question is reasonable, considering that American forces had discovered the first occupied concentration camp almost a full month earlier.

To be precise, Lubin recalled knowing the words “concentration camp,” but only in the same context that America’s civilian population knew them—“a jail facility where you hold people, like we held the Japanese Americans in the United States in World War II. We called them concentration camps—that didn’t mean that they’re killing fields.”

With his carbine at the ready, he continued down the boulevard toward a structure at the end. As he began seeing other American soldiers out of the corner of his eye, he realized that the street he’d been walking on was just one spoke of a wheel—fellow soldiers were converging from other spokes—and in the center of that wheel, inside the traffic circle, was a wall, perhaps fifteen or sixteen feet high. And in the wall was a big gate with two swinging doors. “As I got there, I saw that the doors were ajar and people were pouring out through the gates, out onto the street, into the circle—people of all descriptions, many who could walk. It wasn’t until I got in I saw that there were many more who couldn’t walk. And various degrees of debilitation, some in far better shape, like those three I first encountered a block or two or three up the street, who were the most recent arrivals and therefore the healthiest. And then some who were less well, and less well and less well diminishing in stages and degrees; some extremely feeble, probably close to falling down.”

The sights and sounds rendered his mind blank. “I’m embarrassed to say it, I was stunned, and I can’t tell you I was thinking of anything. It’s like when [you come upon] an automobile accident, if you’ve ever been—I was stunned. I couldn’t formulate much in the way of thought; I wasn’t thinking as much as I was reacting. We soldiers shouted at each other—what to do? ‘Grab them!’ somebody says, ‘Stop them, grab them.’ While all of this was happening, more American soldiers were pouring in, and they started chasing down the people. The people who were escaping, we concluded later, were running from us like crazy in a panic. They saw our uniforms and may not have been able to distinguish us from Germans. That or freedom, I couldn’t tell you, but they ran like hell.”

Lubin stopped talking for a moment and audibly took a breath before continuing. “Here comes the big moment for me, which to me sums up the whole, the whole war, the whole Holocaust, which is the content of my nightmares. Not dead bodies; I’ve seen a lot of dead bodies. I wasn’t in combat all that long, a few months, mostly chasing like crazy up the highway. But I’d seen plenty of dead bodies—theirs and ours. So it wasn’t that. This was something different.

“Here was this guy, and he had found a food can, a tin can—the larger kind that tomatoes sometimes come in. It had been opened with one of those old-fashioned push-and-lift can openers. You punch a hole in it, and then you lift it all the way around, it creates a horribly jagged edge you didn’t want to handle. You didn’t take it all the way to the end, you would get it close to the end of the circle of the can and then push the lid back so it stands up, and you would empty the contents and then push the lid down and throw the can away so you didn’t cut yourself, because it would make brutal cuts very easy.

“This man had found one of these cans and was trying to get the contents out of it. He had it with both of his hands jammed up against his face, trying to get his tongue into it to lick the contents and lick the top lid and the sides of the can, and the blood was pouring down his face, and he was acting totally insane, and that vision is what’s in my mind. If I were an artist and could paint a picture, I would, but I can’t. Didn’t have a camera. So in my nightmares, that’s what I see. And to me, that’s what the Holocaust was…. It wasn’t the death, it was a torment of the kind that can reduce a human being to subanimal status. To be willing to lacerate himself to get a slight bit of nourishment.

“My guy with the tin can, I tried to knock the can out of his hand, to stop him from doing that, and not let the can be there so somebody else can pick it up and do the same thing.”

He saw other examples of the level to which the Holocaust had reduced civilized men—for he realized years later that all he had seen were men, no women, no children. “There were miserable puddles of water at the street edge, the corner of the curb, not large puddles—they must have been old, they were filthy, dirty puddles, and small. Some of the people were falling down on their face to lick up the water from the street. And others ran to the closest trees and were trying to rip bark off and eating the bark. And amid all of this was screaming and crying and carrying on. And American soldiers looking confused, not knowing what the hell to do.”