page 6 of 8
Play MovieAschen and Dachau
Please report errors to: info@tellingstories.org.
We captured those places and then we we went to a place called Aschen and at Aschen I have some photographs of a factory where they were...I'm not sure what they were building. But somehow or another, the picture was taken from a high position...so I must have crawled up on a roof and looking down through the window or something. But there was this factory. And what was significant about the photograph that I took was that the workers were very industrially filing stuff. You could see that once in a while they would be looking up, and they obviously knew we were there but they just kept working away. And I don't know, I think they probably were making munitions of some, sort or guns, or something.
I later learned that these places were called Komandos, spelled with a "K." And a Kommando would have been a subsidiary of Dachau. So when you say Dachau, it probably is a subsidiary of the main camp, unless it was designated as the main camp, then it probably was a subsidiary. We liberated many of the sub-camps and we even captured a aircraft factory... it wasn't a factory, it was a experimental research design center, and they had their own little airport, and we captured a lot of 35 millimeter film.
On this film, it showed Hitler and Göring and some of the other guys that were watching these jet aircrafts of all different configurations come flying across the field. Some of them would blow up right in front of them, and some of them came in, crash-landed and things like that. But from there, it wasn't too much further, probably 30 or 40 miles to Munich.
Munich was the focal point of all of the forces that were in Europe. It came from all directions and it focused on Munich because that was the headquarters of the SS. So Munich was a real big objective. It turns out that the concentration camp at Dachau, was 6 miles, it's either 6 miles or 6 kilometers, I'm not sure, north of Munich. It sort of just got in the way, because it was not a military objective to us. General Eisenhower knew about Dachau but he didn't know about... he didn't personally see what a concentration camp was like until he visited one because he'd heard of the atrocities that were being committed at one of the ones farther north, a little south of, somewhere around Augsberg. And then he required all of his major troops to go to the concentration camps just to show them that these things were happening.
We got involved because...when I say we, it was 522... because we got attached to so many different units...we were attached to 17 units. I'm not sure whose army it was, it was either 7th or 3rd army... while we were in Germany.
But the significant thing about the liberation of Dachau was that our boys, the field artillery guys, did in fact liberate the crematoria. People don't realize that the crematoria at the main camp were outside of the big wall. They had a big wall about, I think an 8 foot wall or so that went all the way around the Dachau perimeter. It was quite a thing. Because they had big offices for the SS officers and their wives and their families. What was significant about it was that the women were fascinated by various tattoos that were on some of the prisoners. They had them skinned and tanned and they made gloves out of them and they made purses and lampshades and things like that. And, it's an awful feeling to take and feel and touch that leather, human skin, knowing that it's a human skin.
Who were the women?
I'm not sure whether they were the wives or officers or who they were. They were part of the staff that lived upstairs and they could look down into the complex.
Of the Nazi staff?
Yes. There was a gate. The main gate into Dachau has a sort of filigreed iron fence around it like that, except it's much taller. In there, it says "Arbeit Macht Frei" which means "Work makes you free." That was on the gate. Work made those inmates free alright, when they died. I saw photographs. I didn't see the actual incident, but I saw photographs that, to me, were really awful, of men. I'm not sure what ethnic group they were, or what their political aspirations were, but they were hanging on a fence, spread-eagled, with their arms tied up and their legs tied up, and they had a big weight hanging off of their genitals. Pulled it clear to the ground. They were still alive. For what purpose? I don't know.
Can you tell us some of your first impressions once you arrived in Dachau?
My very first experience with Dachau was, like I mentioned, that it's significant to define the day in which this happened ... by the weather condition. On the 29th of April, is the day in which Dachau was officially liberated. On that particular day, it was raining and it was cold rain. It was muddy inside the complex, so if you hear stories where the ground is dry or it's got snow on it, there's something wrong with the story because on the night of the 29th, it snowed and it snowed a lot. On the 30th the snow was probably a foot and a half deep, thereabout. My first experience was, in one of the photographs that you could see... I don't have a photograph of the bodies, but there were lumps in the snow and when you scraped away this snow it turned out that these lumps in the snow were human corpses.
They either died of starvation or from exposure or just pure exhaustion, because the Germans put them on a death march to get them out of there before the Americans got there. That was pretty devastating to me, because I didn't realize that this was the condition that some of the people were in. Later on, of course I saw some of the -- well mostly photographs -- of carloads, carloads, boxcar loads, of cadavers that were heading toward the crematoria. But, there was a war to finish, so we just went on, and of course the Germans had given up primarily by that time, and it was only eight days later that the war was over.
What did it smell like?
It didn't smell that bad, the ones that we scraped snow off of, because they had just died over night. Just the fact that they probably never had a chance to change their clothes, and then of course their sanitary conditions were -- there weren't any sanitary facilities, so these folks didn't smell good.
How did the prisoners react to you and the other soldier's presence?
The ones that were ambulatory, and survived, which I have some photographs of, they were more robust and hadn't reached the stage of being emaciated yet--they were very grateful to be set free. The only problem was I don't think they trusted us because they were like an animal that had been mistreated-- coward, noise, always looking around to make sure that somebody wasn't sneaking up on them or something. But I don't think they believed what they were seeing.
What else did you see during this time in the camp?
What I saw was lumps in the snow. That was my primary. I didn't see much more than that.
Did any of the prisoners understand English?
If they didn't understand what we were saying, they understood the gestures. They were very grateful for giving them aid and clothing and blankets and things like that. We couldn't give them food because we were ordered not to feed people because, in the condition they were in, some of the food would kill them, and I guess that that happened. The prisoners were very grateful to us, but then, when you've been mistreated for so many years, that long, I think they were pretty numb too. They weren't quite up to what was really happening.
Do you have any personal stories about you interacting with one of the prisoners?
Other than the ones that we gave blankets to.
Can you tell us a story about that?
Yeah. The guys were barefoot and some of them didn't have any headwear, and all they had was just this striped bathrobe kind of thing, so we gave them bedroll type of blankets, and gloves, which were army OD wool gloves and socks. I don't know whether we gave them any shoes or not because I don't think we had any shoes we carried along with us extra, or any other clothing. Food we didn't give them.
Where did you get your camera from?
I had two cameras. One of them, I smuggled in and brought with me, which was a folding type of Kodak. It used the large format film, which was hard to come by and only had 12 or so frames on a roll. I got a 35mm camera. It was a Kodak Retina 1 that I took off of a dead German soldier. I used that for quite a long time in Germany, because I was there from April till when we came home, which was in Christmas time.
Were there any Germans left in Dachau when you arrived?
Do you mean were they prisoners or soldiers? I don't know because I never went right into the Dachau main camp. I'm told there were. There were some occasions where the German soldiers would take the clothing off of a prisoner who had died, and put that on just to show that he was a prisoner. There was two kinds of people that we looked at. One of them was a DP. A DP was a displaced person, one that was subject to being incarcerated. Then there was the POWs of course--prisoners of war. The German soldiers were hard to identify, that had swapped clothing. But eventually they'd get caught because the DP's had a tattoo. They had their number tattooed on their arm, and the soldiers didn't. You could identify the person by their tattoo.
Did you have direct experiences in checking these people?
Not really. My experience with these people were sorting them out after the war was over. I had interpreters for talking to them and dealing with them and finding out where they came from and who they were and all that.
Was there any reaction from the prisoners to your being Japanese?
No, there was no violent reaction. I'm told by some of the survivors that we have interviewed since, they thought Japan had won the war. I don't know what their reaction really was.
