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

Author:Michael Hirsh [Hirsh, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Modern, 20th Century, Holocaust, Psychology, Psychopathology, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
ISBN: 9780553907315
Google: J0ESOgh7xv4C
Amazon: B0036S0F6C
Publisher: Bantam
Published: 2010-03-09T16:00:00+00:00

Inside the turret of their Sherman tank ten miles from Kaufering, T/5 John Critzas and his four crew members began to smell something they couldn’t readily identify. “We knew the odor of combat and we knew the odor of dead soldiers, but we didn’t know the horrendous odor of a concentration camp.” They kept trying to find the source as they continued down the road, but the smell only got worse and they could find nothing to explain it. “You don’t see anything. You don’t know where it’s coming from. And we saw these things that looked like prisons, but we didn’t know what they were. And, of course, we’re looking for the enemy, and there wasn’t any enemy to be found. As we approached, the odor got even worse, and there were no people around to talk to and ask.”

Critzas’s crew did what any self-respecting tank crew would do when faced with a mystery behind a stone wall about ten feet high. “We just went through it. I was instructed to turn the gun around because the 76 protrudes beyond the front of the tank. So I was told ‘traverse 180 degrees,’ and I did that. There wasn’t an impact when we hit the wall. We just went through it and we stopped on the other side and looked at all of these people, maybe two thousand of them. We saw all these emaciated prisoners with striped suits on that looked like two-hundred-pound men starved down to about eighty pounds, the vast majority of them being Jewish. And we found out pretty quickly what it was. They all came up to the tank, and several of them knew English and welcomed us, and they were asking for food.”

The prisoners quickly explained that their German guards had fled but that some of the inmates were still locked in their cells with 500-pound bombs on timers ready to explode. Critzas says they called for the nearest explosives ordnance disposal squad to deal with the problem. Questioned about his seemingly nonchalant attitude toward the possibility of large bombs exploding nearby, he said, “We had stuff exploding all around us all the time, and one bomb was like another. Under that kind of pressure and at that age, you don’t feel anything. You don’t know if you’re going to live another day or not. And you just don’t think about that stuff, that’s all.”

His tank unit wasn’t given the opportunity to wait around and learn more about the camp or to help with the survivors. Orders came down from General Patton telling them to “get out of here and keep chasin’ Germans—don’t stop. We’ve got ‘em on the run, we don’t want them to stop and regroup and set up their defenses.” So they left, heading toward Munich.

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