Mannheim to
Landsberg
Six Horrendous Concentration Camps We hurried
over the pontoon
bridge across the Rhine to Mannheim, where,
oh joy!, we had our second shower. Though Mannheim was rather heavily
bombed out, there was a more or less intact factory with showers for
the workers—one large, high-ceilinged room that could easily
accommodate our whole platoon—some 45 men. Pipes descended everywhere
from the ceiling with faucet handles and shower heads at the end. Warm
water! Heavenly! The only word to describe it.
Outside, winter was not yet dead. It was deadly cold inside, too, except in the showers. Fully clothed women circulated among us with soap and towels. Yes. No big deal, apparently, to them. As nearly as I could determine (I didn't want to look their way), they didn't bother to avert their gaze. I would have turned my back but then my front would have faced others. Next to the shower room was a toilet with squattie potties. Nothing more than holes in the concrete connected to sewer pipes. The only time in all my months of combat that I didn't "go to the bathroom" outside in the great outdoors. Effete Europeans sometimes assure comfort-loving Americans with their padded toilet seats that squatting is the only way to "go." It facilitates elimination. Could be. I didn't know diddelly squat about that. Nonetheless, the notion was like a sudden revelation to me. Nothing but squatting for months—bare butt barely clearing primarily snow, if not mud—and then realizing that it was approved posture—not enemy shellfire and such—that had been abruptly liquefying the products of digestion and salutarily moving my bowels. Isn't that the dumbest expression? I mean, even pet dogs "go to the bathroom" in American English! Oops! On second thought, I remember using an outhouse side-by-side with an empty pigpen back at the abandoned peasant farm where Corporal -ylie (name partly suppressed to protect the innocent) started to fill his canteen cup with barnyard Schnaps. How could I have momentarily forgotten a luxury like that? The inhabitants of Mannheim, quite naturally, feared the worst from this forward thrust of our troops but soon discovered that we respected civilians—and for that matter the German soldiers too, only doing what we had to do and deeply regretting the resultant injuries, deaths and destruction. We were particularly fond of the little children and wouldn't harm them for the world. In Mannheim the troops were given the job of flushing out Wehrmacht deserters. The biggest joke of my life. Our platoon was assigned to a large apartment complex, unscathed somehow by bombs and artillery fire. We were supposed to go door to door and git 'em. Have you ever seen a Germanic door? When I was at the University of Vienna on a Fulbright scholarship (1952-53), where we roomed with Frau Telisman (on Breitegasse, right off the Ring near Mariahilferstrasse and Parlament), the thick, heavy door had one large lock, a solid dead-bolt, a chain, a clasp, a sliding bolt, and a rod from the bottom of the door into the floor. Obviously it was that way in Mannheim. I knocked on door after door. With metal knockers. There were no doorbells. Dozens and dozens of doors. No response. Dead silence. In my mind's eye I could see movie heroes smashing in doors with one kick or one crash of a shoulder.... Photogenic heroes smashing open locks with one pistol shot. Someone behind the door could get hurt or killed, and having survived that far, I wasn't about to do the same to myself with a ricocheting bullet. In any case, I could see it would be useless. Let the poor deserters go, I thought. Why tie up men to guard them? They were out of it. It was over for them. Not a single deserter, not a single soul, was seen by our platoon in that complex. If the high command had bothered to research the terrain, including German doors, they could have forewarned and forearmed the combat troops, providing the wherewithal to not botch up the vital task of blowing up or smashing in every remaining intact door, carrying forward and onward the work of total terrible destruction. And it would have given the troops more to do. We could have earned our dollar a day. When forewarned and forearmed, chances are that a necessary job might get done. Not.... not. Oh, we had great training for combat. I recall exactly two days of target practice with M1 rifles (I was rated Expert) and one day with pistols: Colt 45s. Rating: Totally Inexpert. Nobody could hit the silhouette at a distance of 20 paces. Everybody said that in combat they wouldn't shoot the thing at the enemy—they'd throw it! Before the war was over, however, we were pretty good shots with them. With Lugers, too. A number of these were liberated by our platoon—especially near Landsberg, in Bavaria, west of Munich. After lobbing a few anti-personnel shells at a cadet school far up a mountainside, we found that everyone had taken a powder by the time we got up there so guys helped themselves to weapons and stuff. Dwight D. Eisenhower, our commander in chief, had declared "No Looting!" "No Fraternization with the Germans!" Do you think Private First Class Hall took even one of those terrific German officer caps? (Hmmm. It's been claimed that I did. Well, if so, where the heck is it?) No, and not a Luger, either. I still had a subserviency streak in me almost equal to that of servile little me back in that music class.* I preserved a fairly clear conscience, though, which I figure is worth something, even at today's excessively discounted rates. Whenever we were behind the lines for even a very short interval, we would plug away with Colts and Lugers at bottles, empty K-ration boxes, a tiny knot on the trunk of a tree, or any possible target. ust prior to that, at Landsberg itself, three forever memorable things happened. First, a Hungarian regiment surrendered to the 411th Infantry Regiment, having endured enough misery, suffering, and death in Hitler's war after he maneuvered Hungary into an alliance with the Axis (Berlin-Rome-Tokyo). I remember well standing at attention with my company as the Hungarians marched past and formally laid down their arms at the feet of Colonel Donovan P. Yuell. Second: Just by chance (I don't recall exactly how it came about) a number of us with knowledge of it had time to rush over before our units moved on to have a look at the prison cell where Hitler wrote Mein Kampf (My Struggle). Just a plain unadorned downstairs cell, with a commemorative plaque, a cot, a washstand with a water jar and a porcelain wash basin on it. A fairly large framed photo of der Führer on one wall. A small table with a potted plant on it. One chair. All very plain. And, of course, there was a first edition copy of Mein Kampf on another stand. Colonel Yuell seized Hitler's flag, on display there, and added it to the regiment's trophies.  Third: Hard to
believe, but no one had the slightest inkling of the
existence of concentration camps. Our 411th Infantry Regiment liberated
the one just outside of Landsberg. Correction: Our company went
directly past only one of what turned out to be six concentration
camps there, as we found out later reading our 103rd Division history.
The Gestapo officers and men in charge had fled, but the regiment
compelled the citizens who had remained in the area to "neatly" lay out
the corpses until they could be identified, if possible, and given
proper burial.
Our company had to move on, but as we passed by, restrained tears burning in our eyes, our hearts filled with horror at the thought that such inhumanity was possible, we threw K-rations to the survivors. To our continuing horror, we realized that the poor living skin and bone corpses able to crawl or stand were too far gone to ingest solid or even liquid food and had to be fed intravenously by the medics. I sorely wanted to stop to investigate—to the extent possible—just what it was that we were seeing. At the same time, I was glad to make tracks away from the awful, unspeakable horror of it. So most of what I know about this is found in the official wartime history of our division: Report After Action, The Story of the 103rd Infantry Division. Just looking at the photos of the concentration camp within its pages still makes me sick to the stomach—more than that.... about to throw up.... about to heave up even my bowels of mercy toward the perpetrators.... and that without the stench that pervaded the actual site. Nazi skinheads and others who claim that the Holocaust is just a fiction, a myth....! Those who were there and survived, those who liberated them, justly seethe with uncontained disgust and disbelief that such perfidy can exist. But there is a God. There is judgment and justice. A note added in December, 2006: Vicious, evil deniers of the reality of the Holocaust are still releasing their vile, noxious poison into the atmosphere. The president of Iran, while proclaiming that there was no Holocaust, threatens to create his own by wiping Israel off the planet. This letter to the editor was my response to this:  Everyone
in the civilized world should have a look at pages 132-133 of this
division history. Throwing up will do us good.... Purify us. Of
insouciance, of forgetting. It will fill us with a terrible
determination that such things will never be permitted to happen again.
Yes, you do not need to bring to my attention the fact that similar
things are happening right now. But we must not despair. We must not
give up the fight. We must non-violently fight our own politicians, if
necessary.
The intensity of my feelings was far surpassed by that of Lou Lifson, Paul Yesenow (the remaining best friend among the four that have been mentioned) and Martin Feldstein. The realization had struck them in the face that these corpses and living corpses were Jewish. (Though Gypsies, religious dissidents and others were also there, according to the division history.)  
|
