Herb Stern – The Texas Liberators

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May 31, 2012

I feel—it is so important since so many survivors, either Holocaust survivors or people like myself, feel that we’re at the end of our lives and possibly, in another few years, there are no so-called eyewitnesses that have been through all this. Since you’re talking about the Holocaust itself—over six million people that died in one form or another plus the huge casualties during World War II—that I think it’s so important for younger generations to at least have some knowledge that in past—many years prior to all this—World War I, Civil War, whatever the wars that you’ve had—that you have the benefit of a lot more detailed recordings for history that were not to that extent available. I’ve studied a lot about the Civil War. I minored in history and majored in economics in college and continued to be interested to a great extent in oral history. So I feel that the—anything that we do in publicizing that period which was so traumatic in the thirties and forties and even into the fifties is, I hope, of a great deal of benefit for future generations.

I arrived in this country on August 26, 1936, to New York and was met by . . . my uncle and his wife in New York and stayed with them for about a week at that particular time. Talk about sweating it out. I was staying with my father’s closest friend, who was an attorney. His entire family died at Auschwitz. My sister—when the Germans marched into the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia, they fled to Prague. My aunt and her family first were taken to—flew to Italy temporarily and then to England. My sister was on the last plane out of Prague before the Germans marched in.

I didn’t realize, obviously, at the time that my moving in 1936—how lucky I really was to be able to start a whole new life. We had nothing to look forward to in any way, shape, or form. It was just a dead end for us. It was almost like being snared some-where. You know, you’re in a maze and you can’t get out. You felt sooner or later you would be taken away. It wasn’t that long thereafter. There were—I think in the midthirties there were people who just plain disappeared. And you never heard from them again. To tell you that, if you were in an apartment building and you looked downstairs, particularly on weekends, and you’d see thousands and thousands of brown shirts marching. They were always just doing—the SA and SS were always marching in these huge formations. You may have seen pictures of Nuremburg where they had a hundred thousand uniformed people and Hitler speaking to them and this kind of thing. We all saw this, whether it was on the news or in pictures or actually in person. It was frightening, because you felt this was a new force.

At the time I set foot in Nordhausen in March 1945, I had no specific knowledge of slave labor or extermination camps. On the other hand, in the mid-1930s, while I still lived in Berlin, we heard instances where prominent Jewish residents of Berlin were taken away by the Gestapoin the middle of the night. In some instances, they were released after brief periods of detention in Berlin. Others disappeared. Around 1940–41 (I was then in the US about to enter the US Army) some of us heard about what came to be known much later as concentration camps. My father had written from England that he had received word that a number of cousins and my maternal grandmother had been sent to a detention camp in a town called Auschwitz in Poland. Unfortunately, no one ever heard from them again. By 1942, it became known to the Allies that “The Final Solution” had been instituted by the Nazi High Command. This was the expanding roundup of thousands of Jews, political opponents, Gypsies, and homosexuals, and others, not only in Germany but also in the newly occupied countries. I also remember, in 1942 in England, my father knew friends who owned shortwave radios that picked up the daily clandestine French Resistance Calais calling, and, on occasions, they heard of mass killings in camps. But not until the camps were liberated in 1945 did anyone become aware of the extent of the barbarities that were taking place.

From testimony submitted to the Texas Holocaust and Genocide Commission

The capture of Nordhausen Slave Labor Camp April 1945. To the best of my recollection, the American First Army—its VII Corps had no specific plans to “liberate” the Nordhausen slave labor camp. For historic purposes, the events in which I was involved and will describe took place during the period of April 11 to April 14, 1945.

I was a member of the Ninth Infantry Division and assigned to the G2 Section of the Division. Since I spoke German and French (I was born in Berlin, Germany, and lived there until age sixteen. I escaped from Germany in 1936 and came to the US to live with distant relatives in Cincinnati, Ohio), much of my work in the division was interrogation, document interpretation, and in liaison assignments with Battalion S-2’s, medical field personnel, engineers, etcetera. Some of these assignments were in forward combat areas. (I was twice wounded in combat.) In specific instances, there were contacts with resistance fighters in Normandy and, at times, I was on detached service in Tunisia and Algeria with native Goumiers under the command of Free French forces, actually also called Corps Franc d’Afrique.

Between April 11 and April 12, 1945, we were clearing pockets of resistance in the Ruhr industrial areas. At one point, an estimated 30,000 German soldiers surrendered to us. The newest assignment was to start a 150-mile motor march to the Harz-Nor-dhausen area. In this area, remnants of the Eleventh SS Panzer Army was bottled up, refusing to surrender. German High Command had also formed three new divisions. They too were among the holdouts. Two elite divisions began facing the Ninth.

The Harz Mountains had few equals for national fortifications: approximately twenty-two miles across and sixty-eight miles long, up to 4,000 feet, excellent observation posts. Unquestionably, the Hitler government chose this area to become a highly industrialized enterprise. According to my recollection, the First Army planned to bypass the Harz Mountain Fortress then encircle the area. The reduction of this pocket constituted the last major obstacle facing the VII Corps of which we were a part.

As we were motoring, mostly in two-and-a-half-ton trucks, towards the town of Nordhausen, we came upon a railroad yard and saw, on flatcars, fins and other large components of V-2 Rockets. Approximately a quarter-mile from the railroad yard was a well-camouflaged entrance to a mountain tunnel. Inside the tunnel were rows of highly placed electrical lights. We could also see small-gauge railroad tracks, long steel tables, some benches, scattered chains, and other unidentified paraphernalia. There were no signs of human beings inside the tunnel. I recall that we walked about 400 to 500 yards to the slave labor camp coming face to face with one of Germany’s most notorious concentration camps. The carnage and horror had been uncovered earlier that day by tankers of the Third Armored Division and infantrymen of the 104th Division.

Here, the living and the dead were lying side by side. The living were too emaciated to move their limbs. The dead were unburied or half-buried. SS troops had stacked bodies in ditches. The stench was unbelievable. Many of us threw up. Yet, we took photos with newly acquired cameras (while fighting on the Ruhr, we uncovered a German AGFA plant with large inventories of new cameras, tripods, and lenses). We learned that one group which could not walk had been chained in the mountain tunnel for three months without seeing daylight. I also spotted a bank of very large ovens on the premises. There was no doubt that camp personnel burned the dead in these ovens. On the grates, you could see bones.

I recall that we commandeered the mayor of nearby Nordhausen to round up able-bodied men to dig additional long trenches to bury the skeletal bodies. I also remember that several towns-people exclaimed that they knew nothing about the slave labor camp. This infuriated us even more at the time.

In due time, we learned that Nordhausen had a long, drawn-out system of torture. One method was to crowd several hun-dred prisoners into a courtyard. There, on a raised platform, the condemned were hanged. Others were taken to the mountain tunnel, chained to work benches, and worked to death or beaten to death. They were there to assemble parts of the V-2 Rockets. Almost all prisoners were simply starved to death.

It is of course well known that the British Royal Air Force in 1942 bombed the original V-2 Rocket assembly and launch facilities in Peenemünde on the Baltic Sea. The entire program was obviously moved to the Harz Mountains. The prisoners of this notorious camp were French, Russians, Poles, Lithuanians, Romanians. I’m not certain that any Jews were at that camp.

Somewhat later, I learned that US field hospital facilities were temporarily stationed at the camp to minister to those who were still alive and could be treated there.

Considering that we had been through eight major campaigns in combat, 1942–1945, Nordhausen slave labor camp was the most traumatic experience we encountered.

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