Free The Liberators: America's Witnesses to the Holocaust by Michael Hirsh

Weimar, we asked the people, ‘Where’s the booze?’ You gotta have booze. But the people in the city did not have booze compared to what farmers had. So we went out to a farm. It was on a back road, the guy told us there’s two farms on that road. He says, ‘Check them out.’
    “We kinda sneaked around. When you’re stalemated, that’s when you do all that.” He explained “stalemated”: “It took two regiments to take that Weimar. Well, we had three regiments that did leapfrogging, okay?” The implication is that he was in the regiment that was in reserve, and therefore a search for liquor in an appropriated vehicle was well within the bounds of off-duty activity.
    “So the next day, we inquired again, and they told us about the farms. These farmers make schnapps. Powerful schnapps. And so we was drivin’ down the road to the second farmhouse, and I’d say it was about, let’s see, from Weimar to the camp was about ten kilometers. We got just a little over halfway, and I told the other guys, I says, ‘Corporal Billman,’ I says, ‘Corporal, they got monkeys over here?’ He says, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Well, what’s them up in the trees ahead of us?’ And he says, ‘Oh, they’re civilians.’ Whatever they had on, their outfits were blacker than … it was dirty.”
    Brockman says the trees were a little bigger than scrub oaks. “And they was up there where you could grab ahold of the branch. So they was up in there, and there was about ten or fifteen of ‘em in different trees.
    “We called ‘em down, and of course with our broken German and their broken English, we got along pretty good. There’s quite a few of them who talked English. They didn’t look like people. They was, at the end—emaciated and everything else. They had all kinds of disease.”
    Brockman had no idea how the prisoners had found the strength to climb the trees, let alone to stay alive all that time. “To answer that question is to know what man’s like. But they went up there, we saw them. And they explained what was ahead of us. They told us the guards had left. The camp was already empty of German guards three days before.
    “We took ‘em down there to the gates. The gates were open. And [the inmates] started rushing us. I said, ‘Whoa. We can’t go in that camp whatsoever.’ So we beat it back to Weimar, got ahold of Captain Root, which is our CIC [Counter Intelligence Corps] officer. We never went back to the camp.”
    But Brockman did see former prisoners again, in both striped and black outfits, a day or two later, in Weimar, where his unit was billeted. They were tearing up the city, looting it under the watchful, even protective eyes of American troops. “We were in apartment buildings there in Weimar, fairly decent apartment buildings—they hadn’t been touched by the war. And [the former inmates] come down the street and they started shoving people aside, actually making them get off the walk and walk in the road. And some Germans resented that, and they started fightin’ them back, and then that’s when we stepped in. Usually we’d fire a shot in the air, and that’d settle it. Everybody’d be calm. It seems strange, though. The Germans would not run. You fired that shot in the air. But those poor PWs, when they’d hear a shot, boy, they’d scram. Because they didn’t know if they was gonna get shot or not.”
    Unlike Clarence Brockman, who deployed overseas with the 80th Infantry Division and served his entire tour in the same outfit, twenty-six-year-old Gerald Virgil Myers of St. Joseph, Missouri, went over the loneliest way, as a replacement. Every place he went, he was with strangers. He landed at Omaha Beach in October, four months after D-Day and had the hell scared out of him. “There was a packet of officers and young Army men that were being loaded on the boat that I just got off of that looked like they were, well, we called it ‘battle fatigue’ at that time, because they just