Responder: William H. Deierhoi

Date: August 4,2000

Assignment: Truck Driver in the motor pool

Most vivid memory: Walking into the yard of the crematorium and seeing the emaciated bodies stacked like cordwood on a wagon. Another group in one big pile by the crematorium door and the partially consumed bodies in furnaces. Those views have not faded one-tenth from my mind.

Buchenwald

The 120^th Evacuation Hospital S.M. was bivouacked in a racetrack on the South side of the Main River opposite Frankfort in Germany in April 1945. It was Sunday when the order came that we were moving up. It seemed that we always moved on Sunday. Perhaps we were finally headed for the front lines where we would set up our hospital and begin doing what we had been trained to do. A few hours later we learned that our unit had been assigned a totally different kind of task.

Our gear was quickly loaded. We climbed into our 2-½ ton trucks and started north on the autobahn towards Berlin. Along the way we passed Eisenach and could see in the distance the Wartburg Castle where Martin Luther had hidden himself from the Diet of Worms and, where it is said he threw his inkwell at the devil.

At Wiemar, we turned off of the autobahn and drove through rolling, forested countryside. It was along the roadside we saw the first ominous signs of our ultimate destination…. human bodies dressed in black and gray striped clothing. A short distance later we arrived in the small town of Ettersburg. Our convoy rolled into the compound of a rather complex group of buildings that was to be our home for the next few weeks. We soon learned that Schloss Ettersburg, as it was called, had been the former residence of the Duke of Weimar and later became a school where Goethe and Schiller had lived and taught at one time.

Once settled in we were told where we were and our purpose in being there: to participate in the liberation of a concentration camp and set up our hospital to care for the prisoners that needed it before letting them return to their homes which were scattered over much of Europe.

We immediately moved into the camp and began creating some kind of hospital facilities in the SS barracks that were adjacent to the main gate. Many of the prisoners, and there had been as many as 80,000 there at one time, were in terrible shape primarily from malnutrition. They were packed into shacks existing on tiers of shelves with little or no bedclothes. Some were too ill to move without help and some of them died on the way to our makeshift hospital. On our arrival prisoners were dying at the rate of 100 per day. We left a few weeks later when the death rate had been reduced to a few a day, and refugee doctors could handle the rest.

Walking through this camp was one big visual shock after another and one of the most intense was the crematorium compound. A high wooden fence surrounded it. Inside was a wagonload of emaciated bodies stacked like cordwood waiting to be incinerated in the ovens of the crematorium. Near the door of the building housing the ovens was group of bodies just piled in a heap. Inside were eight ovens on two levels containing partially consumed bodies. We learned that the ovens had broken down a few days before the American forces arrived, which accounted for all the bodies outside.

Most of the prisoners in the camp were gypsies and political prisoners, not necessarily Jews, from many countries in Europe and some Jews as well. I don’t remember seeing any women. Some were just youths. I talked to one who was about 12 years old. He told me that his father had brought him to Buchenwald when a number of prisoners were marched from another camp in or near Poland. He was much smaller at the time and his father had carried him the entire way in a sack on his back so they would not be separated. Another young man I talked to had been a merchant seaman before the war and had been to New York. He couldn’t tell me why he was a prisoner.

One day shortly after we arrived at the camp, a young prisoner who couldn’t speak English approached me in the camp holding his hands to his eyes in a rounded fashion. I thought at first that he was referring to my glasses. When he realized I didn’t understand him, he began pulling on my arm and I got the idea he trying to take someplace. He led me to a building, not a prisoner dwelling. Down in the basement of the building he showed me thousands of binoculars that were stored there. Many were in various states of disrepair. I rooted around until I had found three pairs in good condition and cases for them and left. Spoils of war.

Just outside of the camp were several one-story buildings where some of the prisoners worked during the day. In one of them were long workbenches down both outside walls and the middle of the room. It was apparent that this was a repair shop for optical equipment as the benches were covered with lenses; prisms and other parts used binoculars and telescopes. The Germans had smashed every single lens and prism before we arrived.

In the attic of one of the SS barracks I found a most unusual book, certainly not what you would expect to find in that environment. It was printed in German, had a white cover and was entitled “Hitler In The Caricature Of The World.” It contained page after page of political cartoons from newspapers all over the world depicting Hitler’s rise to power beginning in the very earliest days. Almost none were favorable to him. What added even more oddity to this book being in this place was that many of the pages were stamped with the German swastika. I gave this book to my brother some time ago because he is a history professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and somewhat of an expert on German History. He has since told me that the book is of considerable value.

Other rather gruesome artifacts found in buildings outside the camp included lampshades and other things made of human skin some with tattoos on them.

Several days after the camp had been liberated, the military police rounded up the entire adult population of Weimar and marched them through the camp. I was there and saw the profound shock on many of the faces as they got a glimpse of what had really gone inside this notorious place. I am sure they knew there was a prison camp there of some sort, but little of what went on there except that they learned by rumors.

There are many experiences in life that fade into the dim recesses of the mind, but Buchenwald is not one of them. What I saw there is indelibly printed in my memory and as clear today as it was then. No one can tell me that what I saw there was a figment of my imagination.

William H. Deierhoi

September 15,1995

When I left the service in March 1946, I concentrated on completing my college education. Since then I have tried to be of comfort and service to those around me. Including 25 years teaching Sr. High Sunday school classes and 10 years leading an Adult Bible study class, plus many other church related activities. The Buchenwald experience was a maturing one, but I continue to see devastating effect’s of man’s inhumanity to man and it always hurts.

I returned to Germany a number of times on business beginning in 1965 and have made friends. We have had many discussions about the war and what I saw at Buchenwald.

The first reunion in Kansas City was a very emotional one for many of us. They’re not only from renewing relationships but from missing seeing those who weren’t there, or deceased like Bill Hoblick and Jean Hill just to name two that I was Close too.

William H. Deierhoi

August 4, 2000