Liberation and the Aftermath

 

 

The Liberators

*  Fall, ’42:  Montgomery stopped Rommel at El Alamein

*  Nov:  Americans landed in N. Africa

*  May, ’43:  Rommel surrendered in Tunisia

*  Spring, ’43:  U-boat menace in the Atlantic was substantially reduced

*  1943:  intense Allied bombing of German cities

*  Battle of Stalingrad:  Russians lost more men in this battle than USA did total in WWII

*  Germany surrendered with less than 1/3 of the forces that entered USSR

*  Kiev, Leningrad soon freed (Winter, ’43-44)

 

Here you have reflected the two major turning points in the European war, which allowed D-Day to take place.

 

*  June 6, ’44:  D-Day

*  Aug. 25:  Paris reclaimed

*  Sept. 3:  Brussels freed

*  Dec. ’44:  Battle of the Bulge

*  Last great German offensive

*  Initially successful

*  Russians pushed hard from the East

*  Apr. 21, ’45:  in the Berlin suburbs

*  Apr. 29:  Hitler committed suicide

*  May 8, ’45:  Germany surrendered

*  The 1000-Year Reich had lasted 12 years; it had resulted in horrendous death and suffering

*  Jew-killing went on as the Germans were being defeated

 

I think we’ve mentioned how the killing went on even after the armistice – the story about the hospital that continued to euthanize even in a village the Americans had occupied for 30 days!

 

*  1944:  Hungarian Jews deported

*  Germany sensed Hungary was approaching Soviets for peace

*  March 19, ’44:  Germany invaded Hungary

*  Eichmann and his “Jewish experts” set up HQ in Budapest

*  May-July:  deportations

*  Halted temporarily due to pressure from Allies, Red Cross, and Vatican

*  Jews (400,000+) sent to Auschwitz where most died immediately

 

Stop and do the calculations on what would have been required of the ovens, elevators, and crematoria during these 90-some days…

 

*  Ghettos continued to be liquidated

*  Kovno (July 44) evacuated before approaching Russians

*  Lodz (Aug. 44):  Jews sent to Auschwitz

*  July 23, ’44:  Russians overran Majdanek

*  Nazis hadn’t been able to destroy all their evidence

*  Russians brought in Allied journalists

*  Himmler ordered that no camps or inmates were to fall into enemy hands

*  July, ’44:  Stutthoff camp continued to be built for slave labor near Danzig

*  Fall ’44:  evacuations from Auschwitz

*  All camps in the area

*  Death marches began as Germany tried to bring all prisoners inside German borders

 

Again, why was this done?  -- To cover their evidence.

 

*  ¼ million perished on the marches

*  Oct. ’44:  Sonderkommandos revolt in Auschwitz

*  Jan. 18, ’45:  last large evacuation from Auschwitz

*  Wiesel was in this group, working at the I.G. Farben factory

*  One march from Birkenau lasted 6 weeks

 

We began viewing the film, “Liberation 1945:  Testimony”.  All teachers in attendance at the Mandel Conference in 2002 received a complimentary copy of this videotape, which was produced by the Museum.  I was particularly excited to see Nesse Godin, who had addressed the Fellows, commenting on her liberation, as well as a virtual quote from the film that plays as the elevator makes its way to the starting point of the Permanent Exhibit.  The film opens with still photos shot by the Allies as they came upon and entered various camps.  It then moves into various themes surrounding the liberation as narrated by the survivors and their heroes, the Allied soldiers.  Student interest was very high for this film, as it gave them a contemporary feel for the events we’ve been discussing for almost ten weeks.

 

*  Western camp liberation –

*  Communication between the SS in Berlin, their camps and satellite camps had broken down due to Allied advance

*  Junior officers in the satellites were often forced to make own decisions

*  April 4, ’45:  Americans arrived at Ohrdruf, a sub-camp of Buchenwald

*  Shock, horror, devastation

*  Patton at one time removed himself and got violently ill

 

I asked how many had the seen the film “Patton” starring George C. Scott – several had.  I reminded them of what a hard man Patton was; that drove home the above thought even more.

 

*  Messages were sent to Allied forces of what to expect in the camps

*  Request to London and Washington to send gov’t officials to view them

 

I told the students that one of the major stumbling blocks to action was unbelievability of this situation, of the reports.  I emphasized the point that even with these new, eyewitness, most trustworthy accounts, that any who would come on these scenes still would not be prepared for what they would see…

 

*  April 9, ’45:  US troops liberated slave labor camps at Dora

*  No gas chambers or instruments of torture

*  Site of the area where Nazis were building the V-1 and V-2 rockets

*  Rockets built in great underground tunnels

 

Is this an important fact?  -- Yes, it shows that the Nazis knew the Allies were taking aerial photos of their military and industrial installations.

 

*  Before US arrived, Nazi scientists and troops were evacuated to Bavaria

*  One death march ended with the death of hundreds of Jews in a burning barn

 

So even while they were scrambling to save themselves, the killing continued??

 

*  April 11, ’45:  US reached Buchenwald

*  Still 20,000 inmates alive

*  1 of our meals = 4 day’s rations in that camp

 

I asked those who happened to have a bottle of soda pop or a candy bar to check the calories on the label.  We then talked about what a normal day’s diet would consist of in terms of energy.  Dividing that by 3, we saw what the prisoners ate over four days: 1/12 the calories of a normal person.

 

*  April 15, ’45:  British liberated Bergen-Belsen

*  Anne Frank had died in Belsen only weeks before

*  British found 1000’s of unburied bodies

*  17,000 died in March

*  55,000 inmates alive

*  10,000 corpses

*  13,000 died in first few weeks after liberation

*  it was Hell on Earth…

 

This was a point hammered over and over on the film “Liberation 1945:  Testimony” that we’ve been watching.  Both survivors and liberators continually comment on this terrible misfortune – to have survived the horrors of the camps so as to die sometimes on the very day of liberation.

 

*  Belsen had begun as a holding camp for German prisoners in ’43

*  April 15, ’45:  death marches from Sachsenhausen and Ravensbruck (women’s prison)

*  April 27, ’45:  massacre at Marianbad

*  2,775 Jewish laborers

*  1,000 were killed by machine guns and grenades

*  1200 were killed at Thereseinstadt

*  500 were killed upon arrival, south of Prague

*Only 75 survived the march…

*  April 29, ’45:  US troops reached Dachau

*  1st of the camps (the “model camp”)

*  Medical experiments had been performed

*  Railway cars piled high with dead bodies

*  US troops at Dachau shot some SS guards outright

*  Some prisoners were allowed to work their will on the SS

 

This is another topic the video covered.  Students thought this was an example of true justice.

 

*        May 5, ’45:  Mauthausen last camp US liberated

*  “Category 3” camp

*  Harshest designation

*  The rock quarry camp

 

Students who researched Mauthausen for their term paper assignment were helpful in volunteering information about this camp.  They detailed how guards would sometimes make the slaves run and jump off the top into the quarry, and place bets on which would hit ground first.  I told the classes of a scene in the film “Uprising” where the Nazis have set the ghetto ablaze.  A woman is cradling a baby on the third-story balcony of a burning building.  Several soldiers have their rifles trained on her, yet no one fires.  The officer turns to Fritz Hippler, the filmmaker, and tells him that the game is to wait until the victim leaps, and see how many rounds one can get off before the body hits pavement.  The students were aghast at the mentality of such actions.

 

*  Ebensee nearby sub-camp

*  30,000 inmates

*  Prisoners were ordered into tunnel loaded with explosives

*  They refused to go in

*  SS guards had fled and had been replaced with older soldiers and police

*  New guards let the prisoners go

 

We compared this story to what we’d studied about resistance, as well as to the Browning chapter on older soldiers.

 

*  May 29, ’45:  Kaufbeuren

*  Mental hospital/sanitarium near Bavaria

*  Upon capture of the town, Allied troops didn’t enter the hospital for 33 days!

*  At 1:10 pm on May 29, the doctor recorded the death of a 4-year old boy due to “typhus”

*  Euthanasia continued for 30 days after German surrender

 

This is a story I’d related several times over the course of our discussions.

 

*  US troops returning home found that people wouldn’t listen to their stories, people couldn’t understand…

*  It wasn’t until the late 1970’s-early ’80’s that liberators began to be heard

 

We again watched another 15-20 minutes of “Liberation”.  As in the past day or so, the students’ attention has really been held by these first-person testimonies of the experiences of the end period of the Holocaust.  From time-to-time we have stopped the tape to talk about various accounts.  One of the poignant stories that gripped the kids was a nurse saying how difficult it was to move the survivors out of the camps; it took three staff to move a person who might have only weighed 100 pounds.  This was due to the risk involved of potentially tearing the skin of the former prisoner.