Gerd Miller – The Texas Liberators

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July 9, 2013

I was born [in Cologne, Germany] in ’22. And fortunately, my
father was far-sighted enough to see what was coming. We knew a little bit about the political situation because my dad was kind of a fan of radios when they were still fairly new and pretty high-tech. And at night we would get earphones, and you would listen to Radio Luxembourg or German-language from England, German-language from Italy, from France, Holland, and so forth. You took your life in your hands because if they found out that you were listening to foreign broadcasts, that was it. That was it. So we knew a little bit. He contacted his uncle here in the United States, applied for exit visa, and the uncle filled out all the necessary US papers. Actually it was his uncle’s son. So his cousin filled out all the papers. Eventually, we went through the waiting period until the US quotas came up. We got our visa.

We left Germany in May of 1938: my father, my mother, myself, and a girl, who was my double cousin. And we went to Rotterdam, in Holland. It was all so very difficult, not only to get a permit to leave Germany. In fact, my father lost everything he had there. When he arrived in the United States, he had twenty-four dollars. But he had another cousin who married a man who was on the board of directors of the Holland America Line, who was not Jewish. They lived in Rotterdam. And through that connection, he was able to get passage on a ship. . . . We got off in Houston, Texas. And my father’s cousin had arranged for us to live in Seguin because his father, at one time, had a little country store there in the center of Seguin. And so we went to Seguin. They decided to send me to high school so that I would have an American high school diploma. It was pretty tough learning the language. But there were a lot of Germans in Seguin, and we got along pretty well.

When I tried to join the American army after Pearl Harbor, they told me, You can’t join our army. You’re an enemy alien. Because I was—technically, here I was considered a German. In Germany, the Jews were not considered German anymore. Then I tried to go—tried the navy; tried to get into the National Guard. The National Guard was doing close-order drill in the basement of the San Antonio Auditorium, the city auditorium. And I went down there. And I talked to some old noncom [non-commissioned officer]. And he said, “Well, you’re an enemy alien. You can’t join our forces.” But he said, “One thing you could do.” He said, “You can volunteer to allow them to draft you.” I said, “Whatever it takes,” you know. I signed some paper. And it took, maybe, six months, and I got my draft notice.

Dachau was the first concentration camp that the Nazis put up, I think in 1935. . . . And when we came, when the American army came there, people kept saying, “Well, we don’t know anything about it.” Believe me, I can tell you truly, that was pure b.s. Everybody knew about it. They wanted them to know about it because the threat was, “You open your mouth, you wind up in Dachau.” At that time, it was a small camp. And it became fairly large. It was built, I think, to hold five thousand prisoners. When we liberated it, there were thirty-two thousand people in there.

They said, “We need every German-speaking soldier to go to Dachau.” And I knew right away what Dachau was because I knew it since I was a kid. But I never suspected to find what we did there. I mean it was—I can’t begin to tell you. It was hell on earth. I mean, it was like Dante’s Inferno. We came in there shortly after these two units liberated the camp. We had to drive from Munich into Dachau, which was north-northwest. It took us about twenty minutes. It’s not very far up, maybe ten miles. When we approached the village of Dachau, the smell—the smell was so awful. Now, we had all been in combat. And we had all seen and smelled dead soldiers, dead cows and horses. Nothing like what we found there. We came to the gate. The Americans that had gone in there, they had—I think they bulldozed through the gate or ran a tank through there or something. The camp was completely enclosed in high-tension wire. And somebody had cut that power out, but we found like half a dozen guys hanging in there. They had committed suicide by jumping on to the live wire. And I tell you, this may sound bad, but they were the lucky ones. What we found in that camp.

First of all, like I say, the smell of all those bodies, those rotting bodies. They were stacked all over the place. The people that were moving around, they were like skeletons. I mean, they were like zombies. They—most of them—a lot of them didn’t have shoes, and they wore those blue and gray concentration camp outfits. Undernourished, covered with sores, teeth missing. A lot of them couldn’t even move. They were laying on the ground. They waved to us, said something. A lot of foreigners there. You know, not everybody there was German. They were French. They were Russian, Polish, Yugoslav. I mean— But when we came in there, we didn’t know what— I mean, it was so stunning and so unbelievable. They had a gas chamber there, which we found later. And they had an oven, two ovens, those crematoriums. And they had run out of fuel, so people kept dying. I mean, I think they gave them eight hundred calories a day and worked them fourteen hours a day. These people were living skeletons and sick and weak. And their eyes were sunk. And they [were] covered with lice. And we had—well, later some of the medics finally came in there. Right near the main gate there were these administration buildings where the Nazis lived. And they were beautiful. Nice buildings, neat. They had a flower garden. And we knew right away, if there’s any documents—you know

But we wanted to go through the camp first to see what we could do for those people. The most frustrating thing was, what could we do for them? I mean, the American GI, they see these poor starving people. They reach in and gave them their K rations. They gave them food. An officer came and . . . said, “Do not give them food.” He said, “They can’t take that food. They haven’t had a decent meal in months.” All they got every day—they had these big kettles over a fire, and they got, like, a soup that was like—I would say 90 percent water and cabbage, and some kind of crap in there. And then they got a piece of dry bread. That’s all they got to eat. Those people, they were weighing ninety, a hundred pounds.

. . . And the last thing we saw—in fact, one of the French men told me in French, “Have you seen the chemin de fer?” The railroad. I said no. That was way in the back, where the railroad track came in. And that’s where we found thirty-nine cars full of bodies. It— I mean, it was so unbelievable. We didn’t know what to do with those people. They had dysentery. They had—some of them had typhoid fever. They had sores all over their faces. They were undernourished and worked to death. Some of them were barefoot. Some of them had some of those wooden shoes. Some of them had nothing. A lot of them were just laying there on the ground, unable to move. And then a medical unit finally came in. They made more announcements. They said, “Be sure and don’t give them food.” Because in the C rations, if you opened that up, there was a big hunk of cheese. They couldn’t take it. There was meat, Spam, I think, or something like that. There were powdered eggs. And these people were starving. I mean, they would eat—they would eat the weeds that were growing there just to get something into their stomach.

The medics finally set up some kind of a, I guess you would call it a mess hall, big cooking pots. And they brewed some kind of, some kind of soup for these prisoners. And then they use some of our tin cups to let them drink. And they told them, “Very slowly.” And then we gave them bread. They called it cake. You know, we had that white bread. Well, in Europe the bread that they got was the ordinary bread, and half of it was wood chips, sawdust. So they called our bread cake. And they said, “Eat it very slowly, and dip it in that soup. Let your stomachs get used to it.” And then more and more medics came in. I don’t know from what unit.

So by that time we had seen enough. And I’ll tell you something: I saw American soldiers just collapse and crying, throwing up. Really, nobody knew—what do you do? How do you help these people? So our officer, the senior officer said, “Let’s get in these buildings and get a hold of all the documents and records.” Because we found out, one of the things that happened in Dachau, they did these medical experiments on the prisoners. There was—and I have a list here of the names, which I will give you in a minute. One of the first ones was they did experiments on malaria, on how to treat malaria. So they intentionally infected hundreds and hundreds of prisoners with malaria. And then tried different treatments, most of which didn’t work. I spoke to a prisoner who was in pretty good shape but wore the prison outfit. He was a doctor. He was from Czechoslovakia. The Nazis had him do autopsies of all the people that died. He was forced to do that. I forgot what he told me, how many thousand autopsies he had to do, people that died from the malaria experiments. Then, they did experiments on people on how they—for the Luftwaffe—how they would survive in freezing water. They threw them into a container that had ice blocks floating in there and took their temperature every two minutes, and the people were screaming and hollering and freezing to death. And then they put some of these flying suits on that they were testing. And some of them protected them a little against that, but most of them didn’t. And there were hundreds and hundreds of those people that just didn’t survive, and if they were halfway alive later, they killed them. Then they did another set of experiments on explosive decompression. That was for the Luftwaffe also, because we found all those records later. That’s how we knew. But we also heard from some of the prisoners. They would put them into a compression chamber and gradually increase the pressure like they would have in those planes. And then they would very suddenly drop the compression to simulate explosive decompression. But most of those people died, if not instantly, miserably. You know, their blood was boiling and it was so horrible.

Then we found our way to Linz, and on the other side of Linz was that huge concentration camp, Mauthausen. There were even more prisoners than Dachau, and it looked just like Dachau. Bodies stacked everyplace. The survivors walking around, you know, skin and bones. . . . And one of the worst things in Mauthausen— It’s hilly country. They had a big cliff there. Like a two hundred-foot cliff. And when the Nazis couldn’t bury the bodies fast enough—kill the people fast enough—they’d push them off that cliff. Down below there were just tons of bodies laying there. Those poor guys—thousands—they were dumped in a ditch with a bulldozer and covered up at the foot of that cliff in Mauthausen. The bodies were just stacked, rotten, rats running through there. It was just as bad. And, of course, now we know the Nazis had hundreds of those camps.

Later we went back, and we interviewed a number of the survivors from the camp that were able to tell us names, these doctors, and who did what and even some of the guards. And some of the guys that were in charge of some of the barracks that were— Don’t forget, besides the political prisoners, there were a lot of criminals in there. And the Nazis put those criminals in charge of a barracks. And it is just—that one human being can do this to another. Including like in those thirty-nine cars, children, women—children—they let them die there. They either shot them or machine-gunned them or let them die from exposure and starvation. I will never understand, never understand—a country like Germany; educated people, you know. How could this happen? I don’t know. I don’t know to this day, how can they be that gullible? How can they be that uninformed? But a lot of them saw things that were going on and they looked the other way. Maybe they didn’t participate, but they looked the other way.

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