Memories of events while I served with the 120th Evacuation  Unit:  by Dr. J. H. Mahoney

My  official assignment with the 120th Evac Hospital in April, 1945, was management of Anesthesia  and surgical rooms. However, in addition, I was assigned Intelligence and Education Officer and transportation officer for our semi-mobile hospital.  At midnight , while we were in Frankfurt, we were ordered by General Patton to begin moving at 6 A.M..  Our destination was Weimer where the Buchenwald Concentration Camp had been found by the Rangers.   We made this move.  The following morning the Chief of Surgery and I went into the Camp.  We saw the guard dogs, the crematories with half - burned bodies.  We observed living skeletons and wagons filled with dead bodies ready for cremation.  We saw the horrible degradation of the human race.
We heard there was a surgical hospital in the camp and moved until we located it.  We found a modern, clean hospital with modern surgery being done.  The surgeon was finishing a case.  He was  an inmate at the camp and  had been a Professor of Surgery in a  medical school in Austria. He carried on a conversation with us in English.  He was most curious what was going on in the field of medicine in the outside world since he had been out of touch for five years.  We learned his story.  He  had been an eminent surgeon. When he had been shipped to the concentration camp the SS  wanted him to do their surgery.  He would agree to this only on the condition that he have his own unit hospital and  be allowed to treat and perform surgery on the camp inmates also and that the inmates  would be afforded the same rooms, beds, food and treatment provided to the SS people. So valuable were his services that these terms were agreed to.  When he saw inmates needing surgery he would operate.  He made sure  these patients got food before and good treatment afterward. In this way he was able to save some of the better brains of Europe. This surgeon's moral and professional courage, in the face of death, originally, remains an inspiration to me to this day. In the midst of the horrible degradation of the camp we found many  examples of the greatest and noblest  men the human race has produced. The Austrian surgeon is one notable example.

Next we proceeded to investigate the barracks where the inmates lived. Bunks were stacked six high, one atop the other. The strongest slept in the top bunks. With the prevalence of diarrhea from disease and starvation, the inmates in the lower bunks were often showered with excrement from the upper bunks.  If the weakest did not die rapidly enough the SS troops hastened death in many ways.  The most economical seemed to be a small shot of formaldehyde in an arm vein.  When we started nutritional IVs,  the first few resisted fearing it was a death injection. After thirty-six hours the inmates receiving IV nutrition showed such remarkable improvement, the medical workers were met at the doors of the barracks each  morning by inmates wanting  this life giving "magic" in their arms. Our forceful communication and our results worked like a miracle.
In one of the barracks we found one person with ten rotting toes, some bones protruding.  We asked what caused  this injury.  He stated his buddy in the next bed had put toothpicks under each toe nail and had lit them on fire.  Why, we asked.  He stated it was necessary or the SS would kill both of them.  Some of the SS apparently enjoyed torture in various forms.
We met an inmate who had an especially interesting story.  He was a Catholic priest, a German citizen, who had joined a French Socialist group in South America.  He returned to Germany in 1939 for medical reasons.  When he stepped off the ship at Hamberg he was taken by German authorities and placed in a concentration camp.  He was taken from one camp to another  and when we found him at Buchenwald he was emaciated and barely alive.  We asked him how he kept his mind through all these years of various tortures.  He told us  that he spent much time in mental prayer.  There were some parts of the Bible he would repeat from memory.  He also made a mental list of the principal Germans who committed gross atrocities against society.  He would repeat their names mentally so he could remember and bear witness against them.  This he did at the Nurinburg trials.

After Buchenwald I had a better understanding of the great extremes humanity could endure.  I seemed to have less tolerance for those extremes.  Gifted and less gifted people all deserve consideration and respect beyond their abilities.  Each one is a child of a Supreme Being! Since Buchenwald I have tried to live with increased respect for my fellow man, though I have not always succeeded.

After I returned home from the war  I saw that many of our American people did not seem to appreciate the wonderful life we have  in  the United States.  Many of our young and our finest paid a terrible price that we might live so well.