Charles Green Memoire--- as dictated to his wife, Margie

Charles E. Green Jr.
  Army, medics 120th Evacuation Hospital
PFC. at the end of the war.  Rank of discharge the same.
.  Charles was a truck driver for the 120th.  He delivered supplies to his
unit and to other evac. hospitals.  He was in and out of a number of
concentration camps in Germany and Austria. 
Yes, he remembers Weimar and Buchenwald very vividly.  I will give you
more on that later in the letter.
I do not know about the, Gotha-Erfurt-Jena-Gera, area.  Charles is not sure
where the camps were that I will be telling you about.  There were three
camps in the area of, Lenz, Austria, that he went into toward the end of the
war. In fact the war ended while he was on that trip.
Charles was about 19 when he entered Buchenwald.  They had waited below the
hill for at least 24 hours before moving up to the camp.  No-one was prepared
for what they found.  The guards had abandoned the camp with the prisoners
locked up.  When Charles arrived with his truck he was immediately surrounded
by starving prisoners begging for food.  Charles and his buddy always carried
rations in their trucks and they started handing these out to the men. Then
the nightmare began.  The food was much too strong for the men and they
started dying before his eyes.  He could not get the food back and as each
man fell the next grabbed the food and ate it and so on.  He does not know
how many men were killed there but it has haunted him all his life.  The idea
that they had survived the horrors of the camp only to die there, at the
gate, beside his truck because of what should have been an act of kindness. 
This is a picture he still holds in his mind, "the gate and those dead men." 
He was in many other camps and saw much horror but nothing ever affected him
as did that incident and the guilt is still very real. 

Charles saw the lamp shades of human skin.  The crematoriums were still hot
and going.  He talked to a Polish doctor who was a prisoner.  He was forced
to take the tattoos from the men.  They were not sedated.  The same doctor
said that one of the scientific experiments he was forced to help with was to
tie a pregnant females legs together when she was in labor to see how long it
took for her and the baby to die.  (Charles was not sure in which camp this
took place.)  Prisoners offered them some human soup they had made.  They had
captured a guard.  He was being badly mistreated but no-one felt sorry enough
for him to come to his aid. 

He also remembers that Patton was so incensed with what they found on that
hill that he made the citizens of Weimar march through and look for
themselves at the havoc and cruelty at their door.  Many of them insisted
that they were unaware of the camp.

One of the camps he entered had a concrete pit in the front.  It was about
ten feet deep and about eight or ten feet across, the sides were straight. 
The pit had lime in the bottom just deep enough to reach up on the legs. 
There were old bloody streaks on the walls where the victim tore their hands
trying to escape.  Inside this pit at the time Charles entered the camp was a
Russian soldier.  He had lost a part of his legs and had reused to let them
take him out.  He wanted the Russian army to find him and see what had been
done.  Part of his legs were eaten off.   

Charles said that the women and children's camp was the worst.  There was one
woman that told them that the commandant would send the guards into the camp
to pick several women at random.  They were then marched outside the camp
where the commandant sat in a chair and shot at each woman lined up in front
of him.  The dead were removed.  Any who were wounded were killed by the
guards, any who missed were sent back to the camp.  They were subject to a
second time if they were picked.  She had been picked once and said that
there was no horror so great as seeing them come again and fear that you
would have to go again. 

The guards could use any woman of their choice but afterward they had to be
killed.  He believes this is the same camp that had sharp stabs arranged out
of the ground.  He was told they were used to ram the women down on their
buttocks.  Charles did not see this but there was a man in Lubbock who was in
that camp with another hospital unit at the same time Charles was there and
had seen the results of this treatment. 

When he arrived in one of the camps a wounded woman came up to them.  She
could speak no English and they could speak no German.  She was very agitated
and made it plain that she wanted them to go with her.  He and his buddy
could not get her to go to the doctor so they followed her to a large pit
full of bodies.  She finally made them understand that they had all been
lined up at the pit the night before and shot.  The pit was full.  Her
concern was that her little girl was among the bodies and she wanted them to
go into the pit and find her.  They finally got her to the doctor.  She had
been shot in the head.  The shooting was done to kill as many as possible
before they gave up the camp.  They did not have time to cover the pit.  The
woman had crawled out during the night but could not fine her child in the
dark.

His unit was in what Charles called a,"Baby factory."  It was a state
operated camp for girls who were impregnated by chosen military men as a part
of the,"Master Race", plan.  He said there were many babies born while they
were there.  I guess these were the, "Clones," of their time intended to be
raised to worship their leader, country and never have a thought of their own
nor to know right and wrong.

He was delivering supplies on one trip and as he went through he was detoured
around the town.  When he came back the town had been bombarded.  The war was
over and so he stopped to find out what was going on.  It seems that the
commander of the unit stationed outside the town had lost several men to the
Werewolves, (very young children trained to lure soldiers off by themselves
and kill them).  He was told that the commander had warned the Mayor that if
it happened again he would use his guns on the town.  It was an artillery
unit and therefore the threat was real.  It seems that there was another
incident after the warning and the commander called the Mayor out to his unit
and told him that he had a certain amount of time to remove his citizens
before the town was bombarded. 

Charles has often wondered what happened to children who were part of the
Werewolf movement.  I have not been able to feature how they would have been
able to retrain them to be responsible to a society that had any empathy for
another human.  If there was an active effort, successful in this area, it
might be something useful to other countries for children who have grown up
in the destruction of hate and war. 

He cleaned out gas chambers at another camp.  He said the bodies were packed
as far up the wall on the far end of the room as they could climb over the
other people trying to get away from the gas. 

On that detail he had a German, "prisoner of war", helping.  He spoke English.
 Charles was very angry by this time and asked the man, "What do you think of
your Master race now?"  The answer he received was very frightening.  He said
that when Hitler came to power Germany was in the worst depression that the
country had known.  Hitler put them to work that Germany was the first
country out of the depression.  Then the children were sent to day schools
operated by the government.  The citizens were doing great.  Hunger was gone,
they were doing well.  For the safety of the citizens all guns were
registered.  The children were being taught that the state was more important
than any thing all loyalty was erased except that to, "the home land,"
meaning Hitler.  They were told to spy on their parents.  Then they were set
against the population, all guns were confiscated, all objection was punished.

This man told Charles,  "You are just one generation away from this; get a
leader that convinces the people that he is the cause of their prosperity;
have the media behind him; create the idea that they depend on his wisdom and
his plans for their future; let your children be separated from the teachings
of and loyalty to their parents and their belief in God to be erased or
neglected and you have the Government of Adolph Hitler in the making."  This
seems to be where our country is today.  Our citizens do not seem to care
what is right or wrong, they ignore all the signals, no religion in school,
get rid of the guns, open disobedience of the laws by our leaders, dependence
on the government for too many things that we need.  I fear that we have not
learned too much from the past. 

Sometime toward the end of the war Charles was picking gas up from the depot
and was moving it where ever needed.  On his trips to the air base he
transported prisoners from the camps who wanted to go to Israel.  After the
planes had unloaded their cargo and taken to the coast where Charles was told
that they would have transportation to Israel.  He later learned that these
boats were held off the coast of Israel until many of the people had starved.


You ask in your letter how the above affected my husband's life.  I must tell
you that he has had a very hard time.  First, understand that he was very
young, raised on a Texas farm; had never come in contact with any form of
human cruelty, then there was the fact that the Jews were, "God's chosen
people."  It was very hard for Charles to understand how God could treat his,
"Chosen," people so cruelly.  He still struggles with this concept even
though he knows that this was the travail to reestablish their home land.

He was also in a unit that was supposed to help people and the hospital
personal did but the motor pool spent their time carrying supplies from place
to place seeing more and more cruelty, madness and terror.  Even the people
he thought he was helping to send home were starved on the boats.  In other
words sent into a trap.  There was no time when he felt he had helped one
single individual, or saved a life, only the memory of the gate at Buchenwald
and the dead men at his feet and at his hand.  Perhaps you can understand why
he is haunted to this day, over fifty years of dread. 

Charles had a book made up of the pictures made during their stay in Germany.
 They show some of the prisoners and the dead bodies stacked in the boxcars. 
there are also pictures of the citizens of Weimar being sent through the camp
by the American soldiers.  None of the pictures Charles took are shown in the
book because they were lost on a train of their way back into the States.

I have visited Two of our sons while stationed in Germany.  My husband would
not return.  Any time there is a program on the television, about the war, we
do not watch because he cannot cope with the memories. He will cry for a week
over the memory of people he saw both dead and alive that he could not help. 
I know that in our country there is a movement to erase all history of the
cruelty of the concentration camps.  I also know that in your country the
young people do not want the memory.  "The Holocaust," was shown while our
younger son was stationed in Ulm.  The next day my daughter-in-law was pushed
while down town by a young lady who informed her that we mistreated the
Indians in the same way.  Of course the Indians were not peaceful, citizens
of our country.  We were at war and there was hate and willful harm and
injustice on both sides as in any war.  None of us want to take the
responsibility for our countries mistakes but they should not be forgotten
nor excused.  This time in your history is an example of the results of
ignoring trouble for fear it will interfere in your personal life.  A very
dear mistake to many who deserve to be remembered and should never have their
history forgotten.