Undeniable

THE OVERLOOK

By Tom Clavin

“The Overlook” can be found at tomclavin.substack.com. If you enjoy the column, please “like” it and let me know what you think by commenting. All support is appreciated. Don’t forget to hit the ‘Subscribe’ button – it’s free!

Recently, for the second time, I watched the movie Nuremberg. The story centers on efforts during the Nuremberg Trials in 1946 to get Herman Goring, the most senior survivor of the Third Reich, to admit he knew about the concentration camps where millions of people died. I’m also wary of the directive from the Trump administration to compel the University of Pennsylvania to compile and provide lists of Jewish employees and students. Perhaps it is a coincidence that Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, is an ardent critic of the administration and Jewish.

Never Forget: So much of what happened during the Holocaust began with lists. Then the government-backed goons moved in.

It was 81 years ago this month that American soldiers opened a gate in Germany and found something that changed them forever. They had no word for what they were looking at. Nobody did. The word wouldn’t exist for another year.

In early April 1945, the war in Europe was almost over. Everyone knew it. The Third Reich was collapsing on two fronts — the Soviets driving from the east, the Americans and British pushing from the west. General George Patton’s Third Army was moving fast through central Germany, fast enough that the front lines were fluid and the maps couldn’t keep up.

One morning, soldiers of the U.S. 4th Armored Division and the 89th Infantry Division came upon a camp near the town of Ohrdruf, in the Thuringian hills of Germany. It should be noted that by April 1945, word had spread about the existence of Nazi labor and death camps. The Soviet forces had liberated several camps, including Auschwitz in January, and the British had liberated camps too. But for American soldiers, Ohrdruf – a subcamp of Buchenwald -- would be a new experience.

Don Timmer was just 18 years old, a private in the 89th Infantry. He described what he saw when they drove through the gate: “Between the gate and the barracks were 30 dead, the blood still wet from departing German guards. Bodies were stacked in a shed like cordwood, sprinkled with lime. Others were partially incinerated on pyres outside — the SS had tried to burn the evidence before fleeing and had not had time to finish. A pile of naked men, starved to bone, were found in one room. Prisoners who were too weak to be marched out to Buchenwald had been shot in the head where they lay.”

Every American officer on the scene gave the same order immediately: Leave everything untouched. Don’t move anything. Don’t touch anything. This needs to be documented. They understood, without being told, that someone would try to deny it.

The news reached General Patton — “Old Blood and Guts,” the man who had driven tanks across North Africa, who had slapped a soldier for cowardice and nearly ended his own career, who had seen more violence than almost any American alive. Patton arrived at Ohrdruf and walked through it.

Within half an hour he vomited against the side of a building. He could not enter the shed where the bodies were stacked. The smell and the sight were beyond what even he could bear.

Word reached General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe, in Belgium. He flew to Ohrdruf, accompanied by Generals Omar Bradley and Patton. A survivor led them through the camp as a guide. They viewed the charred remains on the pyres. The gallows. The torture devices, demonstrated by prisoners who were still there. The shed filled with bodies.

Eisenhower said he had never been so angry in his life. He said the English language did not have words to describe what he saw. He wrote to Winston Churchill, “Everything you read in the paper does not adequately describe what has really happened here.”

And then Ike said something that has echoed across the eight decades since. He said he 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.

Eisenhower knew. Standing there 81 years ago, surrounded by the evidence of what human beings had done to other human beings, he already knew that someday people would try to say it hadn’t happened. He was building his testimony in advance.

The Supreme Commander ordered every American unit not engaged at the front to be brought to Ohrdruf and walk through it. He cabled Washington to request that members of Congress and prominent newspaper editors be flown to Germany to see the camps with their own eyes.

He also ordered German civilians from the nearby town of Ohrdruf to tour the camp and bury the dead. The mayor of the town and his wife made the tour that evening. The next morning, they were found dead in their home. A note said: “We didn’t know. But we knew.”

Ohrdruf was a small facility built to provide forced labor for a Nazi construction project. It was not Auschwitz. It was not Buchenwald. It was not even close to the largest or most lethal installation in the Nazi system. And yet what the men of the 4th Armored Division and 89th Infantry found there in April 1945 was enough to make the toughest general in the U.S. Army physically sick. Enough to change Dwight Eisenhower permanently. Enough to make a small-town German mayor and his wife unable to live with what they finally, fully understood.

In the weeks that followed, American soldiers would open the gates of Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthausen, Nordhausen, Flossenbürg — camp after camp after camp, each one a fresh confrontation with the same monstrous machinery. Thirty-six U.S. Army divisions would be designated as “liberating divisions” before it was over.

The Allies and the Soviets were kept busy: According to research by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Nazis established approximately 44,000 camps and incarceration sites between 1933 and 1945. This vast, interconnected system included around 980 concentration camps, 30,000 slave labor camps, 1150 Jewish ghettos, and several dedicated killing centers.

After the inspection at Ohrdruf, Eisenhower gathered his generals and declared, “We are told that the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for. Now, at least, he will know what he is fighting against.”

Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 25 books. The latest one with Bob Drury, The First to Go West, has just been published in paperback. To purchase a copy, please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, BN.com, or tomclavin.com.