CENTRAL GERMANY
1945
In the waning weeks of the Second World War, as the German defenses retreated into ever-shrinking circles around Berlin, the Nazi concentration camps sitting in the outer reaches, once heavily fortified, lay pregnable in the path of the Allies’ advance. The German high command knew that liberation of those camps was imminent, but they steadfastly refused to release their grip on the Jewish prisoners. They intended to finish implementing their Final Solution of the Jewish Question. In pursuance thereof, Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler ordered the SS to transfer the Jews from the outlying camps to locations inside Germany.
Just before abandoning each of those camps, the SS guards corralled as many prisoners as they could and marched them deep into Germany in what came to be known as the Nazi death marches. Already weakened by disease and malnutrition, tens of thousands of men, women and children were forced to walk long distances in the throes of winter to other camps within Germany’s interior. Buchenwald was the largest of those camps.
On the eighth day of April 1945, at approximately the noon hour, a frantic message went out from the underground resistance in the camp. It was sent by Morse code and repeated several times in English, German and Russian.
“To the Allies. To the army of General Patton. This is the Buchenwald concentration camp. SOS. We request help. They want to evacuate us. The SS wants to destroy us.”
The response came quickly. “KZ Bu. Hold out. Rushing to your aid. Staff of Third Army.”
The Sixth Armored Division, proudly known as the Super Sixth, was the first division of Patton’s Third to reach Buchenwald. The soldiers entered the vast complex through the main gate and were shocked to find inmates but no guards. They quickly discovered that a contingent of SS had marched some prisoners north. Other guards had fled and were scattering through the woods like rats from a foundering ship. In their wake, thousands of inmates had been abandoned and left alone to fend for themselves with no food and very little water. Some had found clothing. Some had not. Some were too weak to do much more than lean against a wall, sit on the ground or lie on the wooden slabs that served as beds. Some were merely apparitions. Ghosts and skeletons.
The bewildered GIs, their helmet straps hanging loosely, their field jackets partially unzipped, their trousers bloused above their leather boots, had come upon a vision of human deprivation that would haunt each of them for the rest of their lives. These were not weak men. They were battle-hardened soldiers. They had landed on the Normandy beaches, secured a bridgehead across the Seine, cut across France for seven hundred miles and reached the German border on December 6. They were a tough, confident bunch. But they were not prepared for what they saw.