In Germany, too, the Allies found and freed thousands of the hapless, anonymous civilians whom the Germans had hurled into their mass butcher shops at Dachau, Buchenwald, Belsen, and Luckenwalde. Many of these were Russians whom the Allies liberated at once; but there was nothing to do with them until the Russian Government could arrange for their repatriation.
For a while they were left at liberty, but their random roamings were a constant hazard to military movements and a perpetual source of friction with the German civilians who had so long tortured them. The Allies were finally compelled to set up centers for them almost as if they were prisoners. These “prisoners” said they were receiving food and clothing in generous amounts and their only complaint was that they were not at home.
What the Americans found in the various concentration camps, large and small, sickened even the most calloused fighting man among the liberating troops. None of them had imagined that
such brutality on the one hand, and such refinements of exquisite torture on the other, could exist anywhere in the civilized world in the twentieth century.
In one camp east of Salzburg, for example, prisoners no longer strong enough to work were picked up from the place where they had fallen exhausted and, screaming feebly, were
tossed alive into roaring furnaces.
All the horrors that war prisoners had experienced were mere trivia in the political prisons.
The accounts that follow have been vouched for by eyewitnesses who included prominent editors and publishers of the United States, invited by General Eisenhower, with a group of Congressmen, to see the savagery for themselves. They are also vouched for by such generals as Eisenhower, Bradley, Simpson, Patton, and many others.
Army movies taken on the spot are silent witnesses. The Germans themselves professed ignorance of the existence of such camps, even then the stench from their crematories hung over miles of the surrounding countryside.
Belsen, one of the worst of these torture houses, was among the first to be overrun. Soldiers of the British Second Army could not believe the things they saw there, but, having seen them, could not disbelieve the terrible tales they heard from the victims who had
survived the holocaust.
Josef Kramer, the Elite Guard commander of the camp, had graduated tortures.
Naked men and women were forced to parade for hours in winter rains;
other prisoners, fully clothed, were turned into locked compounds with vicious dogs, made half-wild by deliberate starvation.
Vivisection on prisoners was common.
Women were flogged on their breasts.
Men and women alike were lashed on the sensitive soles of their feet.
Attractive women were compelled to submit to the lovemaking of their captors.
There were 29,000 living prisoners in the camp at Belsen when the British took it. The number of dead was unknown. The survivors were suffering from typhus, typhoid, tuberculosis, and starvation. Vast mounds of unburied corpses lay everywhere, stripped of their clothing and valuables.
In the nearby town, everyone was eating far better than the civilians of France and Britain; in the prison itself
there were piles of untouched Red Cross packages that the authorities had deliberately sequestered.
Kramer,
the ringmaster of this gruesome circus, had served his apprenticeship at Oswiecim [Auschwitz] in Poland.
In Belsen, Kramer kept an orchestra to play him Viennese music while he watched
children torn from their mothers to be burned alive.
Gas chambers disposed of thousands of persons daily. Prisoners were starved first as a punishment then as a sport.
SS women under his command would
tie a living prisoner to a dead one and chain both to a pyre of slow-burning materials.
When this practice and the cremations were cut short by the lack of fuel, the bodies were piled on the grounds and occasionally buried in huge pits.
At Gardelegen the fuel shortage was overcome by the simple expedient of herding a thousand or more prisoners into an old building soaked with gasoline and setting it afire while guards were stationed outside to machine gun any who might succeed in making their escape from the flames.
Buchenwald was also a hellhole of diabolic torture. Soon after its capture, SHAEF sent its own inspectors to report on the German camp. They described it an an
“extermination factory”.
In addition to all the horrors of Belsen, the Buchenwald directorate practiced murder by toxin, using the prisoners for all kinds of chemical experiments.
SHAEF’s inspectors confirmed the often-published story that SS personnel at Buchenwald kept
tanned human skin as souvenirs.
It was known definitely that at least 51,000 people had died in the camp. The “parchment” practice — the collection of tanned skins — was initiated by the twenty-eight-year-old wife of the prison’s commander. She was an ardent athlete with a terrible mania for tattoos. Whenever a prisoner with unusual markings was brought in, she ordered the art-work removed from his body. Many of her trophies she had
made into lampshades.
A five-hour roll-call starting at 3:00 a.m. was commonplace.
Recalcitrant prisoners, on winter mornings, were made to stand under hoses for hours. Or they
would be tied naked to stakes and covered with honey and jam before a hive of bees was thrown on them. Bodies and parts of bodies of victims were kept in a museum for the delectation and study of their masters.
The late Harold Denny of The Jew York Times visited the camp shortly after its liberation. A veteran of two wars and a man who had traveled all over the world, Mr. Denny was not given to credulity or naivete. Yet he found himself compelled to say:
“I had not intended to write about Buchenwald, for some correspondents wrote about it when our troops first took it. By nature I am cautious about atrocity stories, and I merely wanted first-hand knowledge so that, if anyone ever asked me about German concentration camps, I could tell him the unexaggerated truth.
What I saw was so horrible that I would not have believed it if I had not seen it myself …The world must not forget such things.
Here I saw with my own eyes enough to confirm every hideous story I have ever doubted about German concentration camps.”
Mr. Denny told of the death house where hangings were conducted.
”A multiple gibbet faced a rustic settee where the SS boys could sit and sip their wine while they watched the inferior races strangle.
There was also a chute down which Jewish prisoners were dumped. At the bottom stood two SS men: one clubbed the victim while the other slipped a noose over his head. Then he was dragged to a large elevator. There were other punishments, said Mr. Denny, so depraved and so obscene that I could never tell them except to other men in whispers.”
One thing is certain: the worst savagery of the Japanese has its peer in these German camps.
A British White Paper listed many more practices that combined the ultimate refinements of physical and mental torture.
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dl ... q=chambers
