A Train Near Magdeburg

by Matthew Rozell

  *

  By the 25th of January, the Germans finally withdrew behind the West Wall once more and the lines moved back to the fighting at the Siegfried Line and beyond. As anticipated, in February 1945 the Germans slowly released the dammed Roer River’s waters. Once they began to recede, the Allies delivered a furious artillery barrage all along the front, and crossed onto the Cologne Plain. Heavy fighting continued, but as the end of March came into view, so did the banks of the Rhine River. In late March, Gross and Walsh and the rest of their outfit finally crossed the Rhine.

  George C. Gross

  I remember we crossed the Rhine River on March 24. I remember that because shortly thereafter, my first son was born back home.

  We crossed the river on a bridge that the engineers had put together, a little rail bridge. We had to get our tank treads matched to the rail, and if we weren’t careful, the tank would go off the side and fall into the river and we probably would have drowned, but we got across all right. The first tanks that went across were dual-drive tanks, like the ones they had on the beach[*]. They could float and had propellers in the back that would move them along in the water. They were very untrustworthy, but they got through all right. A couple platoons went across that way and then the others went across on rafts, and we were able to wait until the engineers got the first bridge built. We got across and established a beachhead on the other side and broke out from there.

  It was a strange [part of the] war; we were going very fast and the order was to ‘burn the bogies,’ which meant to burn the bogie wheels off. Bogie wheels were supporting wheels on the tank, and if you went too fast, the rubber would burn on them. The order was to go ahead and burn the bogies. This was the end, so we went as fast as we could. We would leapfrog with the 2nd Armored Division and they would take the spearhead and we would clean up around them; they would go past the strong points, clean up those areas, and then we would trade with them for a while—we would take the spearhead and then they would clean up the strong points. One of the strong points we cleaned up was the town of Hamelin, where the Pied Piper of Hamelin piped the rats out of town with all the little children; Robert Browning’s poem “The Pied Piper,” and they assumed the story of the children was an echo of the Children’s Crusade where all the children marched out and they never came back because they all died on their way to the Holy Land. We were so cold and had been going so long without sleep that we stopped for two hours on the other side of the Weser River in Hamelin town, slept for two hours. We were so cold and though we never drank before we went into combat, we had two bottles of gin that had been liberated by the infantry, so we thought we would just have a drink or two. So we had a drink or two, got in our tanks, and there I was in the turret of the tank running across a cobblestone road, rocking back and forth, and pretty soon, the building started rocking back and forth! So I yelled at the driver to stop because the buildings were closing in, and he had a drink or two so it didn’t seem strange to him at all, so he stopped. Everyone behind us had to stop because we were near the head of the column, and the buildings started to go back to where they were. No one ever said anything about it because everyone had a couple drinks, so no one cared.[*] It was very foolish thinking because later I found out I went through three firefights and I don’t remember them at all. That was the only time I had drunk before combat. It taught me never to drink before fighting.

  Spring had finally arrived amid the endless days of fighting. The days grew longer and the swiftness of the advance towards Berlin was stunning, the Ninth Army having been assigned the route through Central Germany as the British drove in through the north, and other American armies to the south of the Ninth. After the first few hundred miles, the GIs got used to encountering groups of unarmed German soldiers walking towards the oncoming Americans to surrender, and waved them on towards the huge ‘PW cages,’ the hastily wired prisoner-of-war camps to the rear. German civilians hung out white sheets of surrender from their windows, and in one instance, the tankers encountered a burgermeister who pedaled out slowly toward them on a bicycle with a white flag of surrender. It was apparent that many were incredulous that this could be happening to their Germany, and many stared at the Americans with sullen eyes or hid in their homes. On the other hand, some townspeople even smiled and waved at the tank crews passing by. No one waved back.[57]

  At the city of Brunswick on April 11, General Hobbs demanded the unconditional surrender of the German garrison. It was rejected and a day-long battle ensued, and the German general was captured fleeing the town toward the east. Block-to-block mop-up operations quashed the resistance, and the 30th Division brass set up a command center. Meanwhile, the 2nd Armored Division was racing for the Elbe River. While the fighting was nothing like what the GIs had encountered through France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and up to the Rhine, pockets of resistance were a constant reminder that the war was far from over. Sniper fire killed men in areas where the spearhead had already raced through. On the 12th, a German plane tried to take to the air; a tanker shot it down with his .50-caliber turret-mounted machine gun just as the plane rose off the airstrip. At the town of Cremlingen, 100 more Germans surrendered, but Sgt. Gross in Dog Company’s Tank 12 pursued an enemy command car and knocked it out before it could make its escape.[58]

  On April 13, lead elements of the 743rd Tank Battalion and 30th Infantry Division reached the banks of Elbe River. The military objective was the ancient city of Magdeburg, which showed no signs of surrendering without a fight. Still, spirits were generally high as the tankers of 2nd Platoon, Dog Company mounted up to move out in the early morning sun; the soldiers could not know that their confrontation with pure evil would come well before the sun would set that day. And though they were just hours away from witnessing the horrors of the greatest crime in history, their personal worlds were about to be shaken to the core.

  At midmorning, the column halted. A soldier went from tank to tank to pass the word. The joking stopped, the small talk ceased as a new kind of numbness crept over the column. That immortal father figure, the man who had led their families through the Great Depression, and now four years of the most brutal conflict in the history of mankind, was suddenly gone.

  The president of the United States was dead. It was Friday the 13th, April 1945.

  BOOK THREE

  LIBERATION

  ‘We Keep the Faith’

  –Motto of the 743rd Tank Battalion

  For the first time after going through sheer hell, I felt that there was such a thing as simple love coming from good people—young men who had left their families far behind, who wrapped us in warmth and love and cared for our well-being.

  –Sara Atzmon, Holocaust survivor

  “At Eleven Fifty-five”

  The train stopped under the hill

  huffing and puffing

  As though it reached the end of the road.

  An old locomotive pulling deteriorating train cars

  Not even fit for carrying horses.

  To an approaching visitor

  The experience was of a factory of awful smell

  Two thousand five hundred stinking cattle

  Heading for slaughter

  Shoved to the train cars.

  The butterflies into the surrounding air

  Were blinded by the poisonous stench.

  The train moved for five days back and forth

  Between Bergen–Belsen and nowhere.

  On the sixth day, a new morning came

  To shine over our heads.

  Suddenly the heavy car doors were opened

  Living and dead overflowed

  Into the surrounding green meadow.

  Was it a dream?

  Or a delayed awakening of God?

  When we identified

  The symbols of the American army

  We ran to the top of the hill

  As though bitten by an army of scorpions

  To kiss the treads of the tanks

  And to hu
g the soldiers with overflowing love.

  Somebody cried—

  Don’t believe it, it is a dream

  When we pinched ourselves; we felt the pain

  It was real.

  Mama climbed to the top of the hill.

  She stood in the middle of the field of flowers

  And prayed an almost silent prayer

  From the heart.

  Only a few words escaped to the blowing wind

  Soon… Now…

  From the chimneys of death

  I give new life

  To my children…

  And this day

  My grandchildren were born

  To a good life.

  Amen and Amen.

  –Yaakov Barzilai, Israeli poet and train survivor, for his liberators, written on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the liberation at Farsleben, April 13, 2015.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  What the Soldiers Saw

  April 13, 1945/Central Germany

  On April 13, 1945, World War II was in its sixth year. As Allied troops closed in on the crumbling Reich from all directions, the war continued everywhere. On this day in the Pacific, Tokyo would burn, again, after 327 B-29s dropped their payloads on the arsenal there. The battles for Okinawa and the Philippines were raging with no end in sight. The US Eighth Army Air Force was heading out on its 945th mission over enemy territory and Allied troops continued to slog it out against the retreating Germans in the north of Italy. Advance units of the 30th and 83rd Infantry Divisions reached the Elbe River and were preparing to cross it, although Eisenhower was now dictating that Berlin was a political prize which he would leave to the Russians, seeing no purpose in putting more American lives at risk when faced with the enormous tasks already at hand. Vienna fell to the Red Army and Soviet troops were also moving onto the Elbe River and closing in for the kill on Berlin even as Hitler celebrated the death of Roosevelt, his own death by his own hand only a few weeks off.[*]

  The American Ninth Army, to which the 30th Infantry Division was attached, had now nearly cut Germany in two, spearheading towards the Elbe River. The First and Third Army closed in on Austria and Czechoslovakia. Resistance in the industrial Ruhr Valley was rapidly collapsing, and Allied supply lines were stretched to the limit, compounded by the German forces now surrendering literally in the hundreds of thousands, all of whom had to be fed in the hastily erected compounds. Thousands more Russian, American, and British POWs shuffled along on forced marches where many dropped from exhaustion, starvation, dysentery, and outright murder at the hands of their captors. And all over the Reich, inmates of hundreds of concentration camps were also on the move as the Germans tried haphazardly to shift and destroy the evidence of their crimes. In the northwest, the British Second Army closed in on major ports and the town of Celle, where a nearby camp called Bergen–Belsen was putting out feelers for the peaceful transfer of power to the Allies.

  Into this churning cauldron of suffering we now pour the nearly incomprehensible element that was thrust onto the shoulders of the young American soldiers—the overrunning of the hundreds of concentration camps and subcamps, euthanasia centers and prisons—an overall tapestry of horror that unfolded on an hourly basis throughout the collapsing Reich from the first part of April 1945 forward.

  On April 12, General Eisenhower reached Ohrdruf, one of the more than 80 subcamps of Buchenwald, joined by Generals Bradley and Patton. It was the first Nazi camp liberated by US troops, and here, for the first time, the commanders themselves came face-to-face with the horrors of the Holocaust; General Patton got sick behind a shack. When aides pressed Ike to move on, he told them he was not to be rushed. He then ordered, ‘I want every American unit not actually in the front lines to see this place. We are told that the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for. Not at least, he will know what he is fighting against.’

  Later, he would cable Washington:

  The things I saw beggar description. While I was touring the camp I encountered three men who had been inmates and by one ruse or another had made their escape. I interviewed them through an interpreter. The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty, and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where they were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said that he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’[59]

  *

  On the 13th, just 40 kilometers to the north of where the men of the 743rd Tank Battalion and 30th Infantry Division were now setting out towards their final battle, over one thousand Jewish slave laborers were herded into a large barn by SS guards and locals. The doors were closed and the guards stationed themselves on the perimeter. Gasoline-soaked straw was then lit, and as the conflagration spread, nearly all of the prisoners burned alive and others were shot to death as they tried to burrow under the barn walls to escape the flames. Two days later, the Gardelegen Massacre was discovered as US troops reached the still smoldering barn.

  *

  Now, it was the tankers’ turn. Shortly after the war ended, Pfc. Wayne Robinson, the author of the 743rd Tank Battalion’s official history, composed the soldiers’ dramatic introduction to the Holocaust, even before it had a name.

  There was another sidelight to the death of fascism in Europe. Only a few of the battalion saw it. Those who did will never forget it.

  A few miles northwest of Magdeburg there was a railroad siding in wooded ravine not far from the Elbe River. Major Clarence Benjamin in a jeep was leading a small task force of two light tanks from Dog Company on a routine job of patrolling. The unit came upon some 200 shabby looking civilians by the side of the road. There was something immediately apparent about each one of these people, men and women, which arrested the attention. Each one of them was skeleton-thin with starvation, a sickness in their faces and the way in which they stood–and there was something else. At the sight of Americans they began laughing in joy—if it could be called laughing. It was an outpouring of pure, near-hysterical relief.

  The tankers soon found out why. The reason was found at the railroad siding.

  There they came upon a long string of grimy, ancient boxcars standing silent on the tracks. In the banks by the tracks, as if to get some pitiful comfort from the thin April sun, a multitude of people of all shades of misery spread themselves in a sorry, despairing tableau. As the American uniforms were sighted, a great stir went through this strange camp. Many rushed toward the Major's jeep and the two light tanks.

  Bit by bit, as the Major found some who spoke English, the story came out.

  This had been—and was—a horror train. In these freight cars had been shipped 2,500 people, jam-packed in like sardines, and they were people that had two things in common, one with the other: They were prisoners of the German state, and they were Jews.

  Henry Birnbrey was part of an advance party that was one of the first to reach the train. As a German Jew, Henry had the good fortune to be sponsored for immigration to the United States before the war broke out; he applied to join the U.S. Army and was sent over with the 30th Division as a forward artillery spotter scouting positions in the lead-up to the final battle at Magdeburg; it was the advance parties which had probably radioed back to the command post the information about the existence of the train just ahead of the rest of the 30th Infantry Division.

  Henry Birnbrey

  I was a forward observer from the 531st Anti-Aircraft; we were searching for gun positions. We moved on to the Braunschweig (Brunswick) area. Here, along the highway, we encountered ditches full of dead concentration camp prisoners who had been marched from one camp to another, and were shot before they had a chance to be liberated.

  All of a sudden, I was attracted by this terrible odor and we could not figure out whe
re it was coming from. I told my jeep driver to head ‘over there.’ Suddenly, I see these freight cars with people coming out of them. When I got out of the jeep, I realized what it was all about, and actually spoke with some of the people. Most of them, the first word out of their mouth was in Yiddish, ‘Ikh bin a id,’ which means, ‘I am a Jew.’ That was about the extent of our conversation—they only spoke Yiddish, and my Yiddish was very limited because German Jews hated the Yiddish language; my father would not allow it in our house. I communicated with a few people as best I could.

  The sub-human conditions which these people were subjected to had reduced them to a very sorry state. We did not know how long they had been in those cars; they looked like walking skeletons and could barely speak. Unfortunately, we had no food to share with them, which gave us a very helpless feeling; headquarters was notified… I was very frustrated because I saw these people were starving, and I had nothing to share with them; all I had was my canteen with water. I had no K-rations; I had nothing to give them. I had an awful helpless feeling. I stayed about an hour and then I had to do my job that I was supposed to be doing.