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

February 12, the men of Myers’s unit got an emotional boost: they entered Germany, crossing the Saar River near the town of Dillingen. He recalls thinking, “Now we’ve got them on the run,” but that was before they encountered what he calls “those damned hills. More like up in Georgia, north, northeast of Atlanta. They’re not really mountains like the Rocky Mountains; they’re more like the Ozarks in Missouri.” There was still no discussion of concentration camps.
    On March 26, while under fire from 20mm antiaircraft guns mounted in quads, they crossed the quarter-mile-wide Rhine River at Mainz in plywood boats with paddles and a small outboard motor that the combat engineer used to bring the boat back to the western bank to pick up more troops. After an interlude where he single-handedly captured fifty-six German soldiers along with the enemy’s map of artillery installations in the area, earning a Silver Star for what still, to him, seems to be an amusing episode, they made their way through Wiesbaden to Kassel, down through Erfurt, and into Weimar, where they were assigned to police the city and maintain order. It didn’t take long before they spotted “fellows in striped suits walking around, skinny as hell.”
    His company commander was able to communicate in Polish with the men, and he called Myers’s first sergeant over and said, “This guy says there’s a camp outside of town here. Go out and see what it is.” That’s how First Sergeant Percy Smith, Myers, and Don Smith came to be driving a jeep toward Buchenwald. “As we rounded the hill and came up behind these trees, here was a camp that had, we estimated, over thirty barracks up there. And the people were standing, holding on to the fence, and they could see you, but they were looking right straight through you. They just were so malnutritioned that they could hardly stand up, and they were nothing but skin and bones.
    “And there was a couple of guys that was taking a bath from a wash pan, just using a cloth. And they had their shirt on, but the rest of it was bare, and you couldn’t believe that people that were so skinny could still stand up, but they did.”

    Skeletonlike survivors of the Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald wash themselves, probably for the first time in months or even years, with pans, soap, and water provided by GIs of the 80th Infantry Division .
    Myers recalls that First Sergeant Smith found an inmate from Lithuania who could speak some English and asked him about the place. The man said, “This is a labor camp. This camp furnishes labor for all of the industry that is within thirty kilometers of here.” The man said he’d been captured when the Germans invaded Lithuania. “They took everybody from sixteen years old on up that was healthy and could work and sent us all to different labor camps.”
    Myers says the inmate also explained to the GIs that most of the SS guards had fled the day before when they heard that the Americans had taken Erfurt, a city just thirteen miles to the west, adding that the inmates had caught seven or nine of the guards and had them “locked up downstairs.” Then the Lithuanian said, “There was a tank that pulled up here yesterday, but they just asked us what it was, and we told them it was a Nazi labor camp, and they just went on. Nobody even stopped.” The man described three Americans in a small tank. Myers’s best guess is that it would have been a recon car from the 6th Armored Division.
    “When we were out there, we saw six guys that were pulling a cart, and it was a two-wheel cart, and the inside of that cart had a zinc lining or some kind of metal. They were going around to the different barracks, picking up dead bodies that they would lay outside. The cart had at least six or eight bodies laying in it. And they were taking them to the crematory. And at that time, they had four crematories there. And they claimed that that had been running seven days a week,