“Dear Betty Anne,” James Carroll Jordan wrote from Buchenwald, Germany, to his wife, serving with the Signal Corps in Washington, D.C., “I saw something today that makes me realize why we’re fighting this war.” Jordan, a twenty-three-year-old P-51 pilot from Saint Paul, Minnesota, was with the 109th Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron (attached to the Ninth Army). He continued his letter, dated April 21, 1945, to Betty Anne:
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 tatooed 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, and purple, cut and some with holes in them.
The guide told us he lived with some of these men for years. He said most of them died with-in the past 24 hrs. In fact a medical Red Cross man told us they are 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.
It was about time to leave so we started out the big gate. As we were nearly out we saw one of the men that looked like a ghost, fall over. They put him on a coat and headed for the truck.
One of our pilots is Jewish and as you know the Jewish language is somewhat similar to the German language. He stopped one of the men in the striped suits. He was a young boy. The pilot asked him several questions such as, how long has he been here. Three years he said. How old was he. 16 years old. He asked all type of questions about the camp which was exceptionally interesting and no doubt true.
We gave him some cigarettes and candy. He forgot how to smile, but you could see the happiness in his sunken eyes.
We still had about an hour before leaving so we went back in. We wandered in to a barracks. What kept us from getting sick I’ll never know. On some of these wooden slabs were half alive, half dead men, lying on some dirty rags and clothes. It was the sick barracks, you might call it. These men were cut deep in the flesh with knives, infected of course. Some of them were not off of these beds for days. They were lying in their own body waste. Yes, for days.
The Red Cross was there and were removing one of the men. They told him they were going to take him to a hospital and make him well again. He didn’t want to go. He thought they were going to take him out and kill him. I doubt if he even knew who they were.
Naturally, the Krauts had to benefit by these people for bothering with them at all; so they had a factory in which the men had to work 12 to 15 hours a day. If they refused to work or couldn’t work, Well—there was always more.
We were naturally interested in the six American pilots and crew men, so we inquired around. We couldn’t find out very much; only that these bomber crews were shot down from a bomb run over the town. The inmates said they were put in a barraks by them selves. If they were tortured or not they didn’t know, but they did know that they were dead in a few days. One man stated that their clothes were taken away from them so they couldn’t escape.
We found a Russian that could speak a little English and he told us some incidences that took place.
He said that if the guards were feeling good they would get soup, very greasy soup. He said that he survived because he would warm the soup by putting his hands in it and melt the grease. If things weren’t too good for the guards they wouldnt eat anything for 8 days. The men naturally wouldn’t be able to walk so they put about 50 hungry dogs in the camp and let them gnaw on the dying men.
When the American tanks charged through the prison gates the guards naturally evacuated deeper into the father land, but the inmates caught one of them. I saw this SS guard among the dead bodys. When I saw him I thought he was odd, because he had long blond hair. His head was all bruised, his neck was slashed with a knife. The inmate watched him kill himself just 48 hours ago. They drove him mad.
Our time was up so we boarded our truck and rode home, just thinking.
Enclosed you will find some pictures that I took while going through the camp.
All my love darling
Carroll
One by one the Nazi concentration and extermination camps were liberated—and exposed to the world—by Allied forces coming from the West and Russian troops arriving from the East. Fritz Schnaittacher, a German-born Jew who fled to the United States in October 1933, was nearly imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp as a young man. Schnaittacher had left Europe just in time; millions of Jews who tried to escape the full fury of the Nazis beginning in the mid-1930s discovered it was too late. Immigration quotas prohibited the majority of them from entering the U.S., and many consequently perished. In 1942 Schnaittacher joined the U.S. Army and, being fluent in German, served as a military intelligence officer with the Seventh Army as it tore through Germany in 1945. In the middle of April, a German POW Schnaittacher was guarding begged to be released so he could return to his wife in the village of Forth, only a few miles away. “Who is your wife?” Schnaittacher demanded. “Gunta Has,” the prisoner told him. “Oh yes, Gunta Has.” Schnaittacher said, “She lives in house #35, and if you look across the street there is house #52, and the Protestant minister’s house is on the left, and the firehouse is on the right.” Flabbergasted, the prisoner exclaimed, “If American intelligence has all this information, how can we win the war?” The POW was unaware that Forth just happened to be Schnaittacher’s hometown. Weeks later First Lieutenant Schnaittacher was at the gates of Dachau, and on May 1, 1945, he sent the following letter to his wife, Dorothy, in Brooklyn. (The “SS,” alluded to in Schnaittacher’s letter, is the abbreviation for the Schutzstaffeln, the Nazi security force infamous for its sadism.)
My dearest Dottylein,
Twelve years ago to day I came to Munich—yesterday we took it—to day we were in the heart of it—another coincidence. The past few days were some of the greatest and saddest in my life. Our regiment took Dachau or should I say liberated the human wreckage which was left there. This I consider one of the most glorious pages in the history of our regiment, not because the fighting was tough, it wasn’t, but because it finally opened the gates of one of the world’s most hellish places.
Twelve years ago I missed it by the skin of my teeth. This time I saw it—I shall never forget it, and nobody will, who has seen it. You know that I had never doubted the truth of all the atrocities, of which we have been reading—I know they could never be exaggerated, but at the same time I could never visualize this insane cruelty until I was confronted with it now, and now I cannot comprehend it, and it almost seems more unbelievable than before I had seen the victims of Nazi German culture.
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 say 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. I tried to find out the origin of this train. Some of the stories corresponded—whether this train was to leave Dachau or had just arrived is not essential—essential is that they were locked into these cattle cars without sanitation and without food. The SS had to take off in a hurry—we came too fast—it was too late to cover up their atrocities.
Yet there were even worse scenes at Dachau than the one I tried to describe. And still Dachau was considered only a drop in the bucket in the eyes of an experienced observer, a high ranking SS officer. He had been in a hospital in camp as a convalescent. I was called in as an interpreter, and first when I met him I was unaware of his identity, but expected him to be a political prisoner who was anxious to help us in the elimination of those who were guilty for all these crimes. I greeted him accordingly. Then I found out he was an SS officer—my hand, which had shaken his, felt as if it wanted to shrivel up. I told him so too. Then he made the following statement, take it for what it’s worth “Yes I am an SS officer, not because I wanted to, but because I had to—still I am proud to have been an SS officer, only as such I was able to see the true face of Hitler and his system, and only as such I was able to help the unfortunate ones a tiny bit.” Then he told us about the Concentration Camp near Katowicz—Dachau is just child’s play in comparison to Katowicz.
Dottylein I hate to close this letter so abruptly—this is all dark, but there are some light aspects in all of this nightmare too—they will follow shortly.
I love you my Dottylein with all my heart and soul.
Your Fritz
On the very day First Lieutenant Schnaittacher was writing home, a staff sergeant named Horace Evers, also with the Seventh Army (Forty-fifth Infantry Division), was walking through Dachau after Gen. Dwight Eisenhower ordered American troops in the vicinity to bear witness to what the Nazis had done. “The things I saw beggar description,” Eisenhower wrote to Gen. George C. Marshall on April 15, 1945. “I made the visit deliberately in order to be in a position to give firsthand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’” While setting up a command post in early May during the Allied invasion of Munich, Evers and his men found themselves in none other than Adolf Hitler’s private apartment. (This was the same residence where Hitler’s niece and lover, Geli Raubal, killed herself in 1931.) In an adjoining room Evers noticed a long wooden conference table, where sheets of Hitler’s personal stationery—with the Nazi swastika embossed in gold over Hitler’s name—lay scattered. Evers sat down in Hitler’s chair and, still sickened by Dachau, wrote the following letter to his mother and stepfather back in Long Island. (“Weeds,” mentioned in the beginning of the letter, was 1945 slang for cigarettes.)
2 May—1945
Dearest Mom and Lou,
Just received your 19th April letter and was glad to hear you are all well and the tractor business is still intact.
So you went to N. Y. and had a big time. I’d give most everything I have to be able to see Lou with his pants rolled up and a baby cap on.—Gawdamighty! Did Mom get a jag on and smoke weeds?—Have you ever learned to smoke, Mom?
A year ago today I was sweating out shells on Anzio Beachhead—today I am sitting in Hitlers’ luxuriously furnished apartment in Munich writing a few lines home.—What a contrast.—A still greater contrast is that between his quarters here and the living hell of DACHAU concentration camp only 10 miles from here.—I had the misfortune of seeing the camp yesterday and I still find it hard to believe what my eyes told me.—
A railroad runs alongside the camp and as we walked toward the box cars on the track I thought of some of the stories I previously had read about DACHAU and was glad of the chance to see for myself just to prove once and for all that what I had heard was propaganda.—But no it wasn’t propaganda at all—if anything some of the truth had been held back. In two years of combat you can imagine I have seen a lot of death, furious deaths mostly. But nothing has ever stirred me as much as this. I can’t shrug off the feeling of utter hate I now hold for these people. I’ve shot at Germans with intent to kill before but only because I had to or else it was me—now I hold no hesitancy whatsoever.
The first box car I came to had about 30 what were once humans in it.—All were just bone with a layer of skin over them. Most of the eyes were open and had an indescribable look about them. They had that beaten “what did I do to deserve this” look. Twenty to thirty other box cars were the same. Bodies on top of each other—no telling how many. No identification as far as I could see.—And then into the camp itself.—Filthy barracks suitable for about 200 persons held 1500. 160,000 persons were originally in the camp and 32,000 were alive (or almost alive) when we arrived.—
There is a gas chamber and furnace room in one barracks.—Two rooms were full of bodies waiting to be cremated.—In one room they were all nude—in the other they had prison clothes on—as filthy as dirt itself.
How can people do things like that? I never believed they could until now.
The only good thing I noticed about the whole camp were the scores of SS guards freshly killed.—Some of the prisoners newly freed could not control themselves and went from German to German and bashed their heads in with sticks and rocks—No one tried to stop them for we all realized how long they had suffered.
I guess the papers have told you about the 7th Army taking NURNBERG and MUNICH by now.—Our Division took the greater part of each place and captured many thousands of prisoners. We also liberated Russian, Polish and British and American prisoners by the thousands—what a happy day for those people.
Well enough for now—
Miss you all very much
Your Son
Horace
An estimated 6 million Jews—nearly one-third of world Jewry—were murdered by the Nazis. Millions of Gypsies, homosexuals, Catholics, children and adults with mental illnesses, and others deemed “socially undesirable” were also targeted, but not as relentlessly as the Jews. In October 1946 ten of the highest-ranking Nazis were sentenced at Nuremberg to hang for “crimes against humanity.” Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister, were not among those tried and executed. At the end of the war Goebbels poisoned his six children and then instructed an SS guard to shoot him and his wife. On April 30, 1945, as Soviet tanks rumbled into Berlin, Hitler and Eva Braun, the woman he had married only the day before, ingested cyanide. Hitler simultaneously put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. On his orders, their bodies were carried to the chancellory garden, doused in gasoline, and set on fire. Hitler wanted his corpse cremated before the Soviets got hold of it.