Memories of Buchenwald - Bill Jasper

[Walt's Daughter]

This sent to me by my friend, Bill on the Hill.

 

Here are some of my memories of Buchenwald:

 

Two days after Buchenwald was captured, General Patton saw to it that we would get to see this concentration camp. It was an unforgettable experience.

 

We were a combat engineer outfit, the 312th Engr © Bn, of the 87th Infantry Division. Our squad traveled on our own...12 of us. We had a 2-1/2 six-by.

 

We simply entered the camp and wandered about on our own. There were lots of individual former prisoners wandering around in their prisoner garb. One of the first things we witnessed was the beating of a former German guard. He was kept in a small building near the edge of the camp. Every hour they, the former prisoners, would bring him out and beat the hell out of him with a hard rubber truncheon.

 

Next, I wandered into the detainee barracks. The inmates were lying on what amounted to wooden shelves, packed rather closely together. I took a couple of pictures and labeled them in my album as "The Living Dead." We were told that some died every 24 hours. Most of the dead had already been removed or hidden from view. There still was an odor of death.

 

The next place I visited was the crematorium. This is my best recollection: They dropped those who were to be cremated thru a hole in the floor above about 16 feet on to a concrete floor. (It could have been less than 16 feet, but that number sticks in my mind.) Then they would hang them from "meat hooks" against the wall until it was the individuals turn to be put into one of three ovens. We were told that the last 18 men hung and cremated were British airmen. (No proof of that.)

 

You could see against the wall where these men were hung the marks of their heads, shoulders, buttocks and feet.

 

My next stop was in the hospital. We saw the evidence of some horrifying experiments.

The camp was dirty. The barracks were more or less disgraceful.

On one wall along one edge of the camp, painted in big letters was the following: "Swine hund".

 

My guess is that we were there for about four hours.

 

I was back at Buchenwald in 1996. There is no trace of any of the original buildings. There is a monument...a fairly tall structure with a lot of symbols, outside, of the inmates, with "evidence" of the torture they experienced. You can find up-to-date pictures of Buchenwald on the Internet. I can't recall if there is any accompanying text. I was the only one at the site when I visited in 1996. I took pictures and more or less cut that visit short because I was afraid that my rental car might be stolen. Cars were being stolen left and right all over Europe at that time, and I was in a total of 12 countries during that visit.

 

During that visit I met a cousin who was one year older than I, whom I never knew about until a couple of years earlier. I was in the house that my great grandfather built, where my German grandfather was born. (I also had a British grandfather.) When I told a professor at Stuttgart in 1996, that the German/English grandparents were the worst possible combination, he diplomatically said, "No, that was hybrid vigor!"

 

Bill Jasper, aka Arthur W. Jasper