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Edited on Mon May-31-04 06:25 PM by MAlibdem
Alexander C*: Witness to Bergen-Belsen
Alexander C now lives in , Massachusetts. He witnessed the greatest cruelty of humanity, but learned from his experience and led a fruitful, good life. For all that he has seen, he maintains an optimistic view of humanity with the knowledge that the only way to defeat evil is with good. The horrors of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp left him wiser, but stronger as a person. His evolution represents a greater evolution of the American people’s awareness.
Alexander C was born in 1924 and grew up in Dorchester. He describes himself as a real “improper Bostonian” . He studied hard and attended the Boston Latin School, one of the premier secondary schools in the Boston area, and then started at Boston College. Mr. C then volunteered for military service in order to choose not only the branch of service but also what job he would have in the military. Mr. C had been interested in chemistry in school, and so he chose chemical warfare. Mr. C completed basic training at Camp Sibert in Alabama. Mr. C then “was slightly horrified to learn that the next step was going to be to send me to a toxic gas handler school were I’d be handling some of the stuff you read about today, nitrogen mustard gas” . In order to get out of chemical warfare, Mr. C applied and was accepted into a German linguist program at Boston University. The purpose of the program was to train “German linguists to interrogate German prisoners and that kind of duty, presumably when the allies were going to launch D-Day.” Mr. C attended a German immersion program at Boston University for six months where he learned everything about German politics, economics, history, and culture. After this training in German, C was sent to a school for interrogators at Camp Ritchie in Maryland. Immediately following the end of the training the whole class of interrogators at Camp Ritchie, including Mr. C, were promoted from Private First Class and Corporal and commissioned as lieutenants. C himself was commissioned as a Lieutenant Second Class.
Following his graduation from interrogator school, Mr. C was assigned to an infantry division !!!€!!!. This division landed at Normandy four days after Operation Overlord began. According to Mr. C, even four days after the invasion began “the beachhead was still a mess. ” In the division Courtney was responsible for tactical intelligence, interrogating German prisoners for information about the battlefield such as the positions of German guns. Mr. C stayed with this infantry division for a few weeks until “they lost in a battle at St. Lo…This unit lost almost two full regiments of men. They lost so many they had to reform. ” While the division was reforming, C was reassigned to the PW and X Detachment, variously known as the 6801 MIS-X and the IS9 WEA Detachment, to lecture allied troops on how to evade capture, resist interrogation, and escape imprisonment. C talked to about 150,000 troops during most of the rest of the war. C’s service was vital in keeping American troops alive and denying intelligence to German forces.
Instead of rejoining his reformed division, C was sent to operate with the Twenty First British Army Group. C’s task was to debrief any American prisoners of war that the British might come across as they liberated German prisoner camps while sweeping through northern Germany. C and his jeep driver were the only other Americans with the British. However, there was also a Frenchman, a Pole, and two Russians, each who had been sent for the same purpose that C had. The Russians, C recalled, were a particularly brutal bunch. In general it was known that the Russians and Germans held a special, and deep, hatred for each other even before the war had begun. These Russians, who carried guns which took the same bullets as the British firearms, would go out into the German countryside and bring back chickens, eggs, and other kinds of food. We then returned they would need more ammunition, which the British were happy to equip them with. C recalled that everyone knew how the Russians had acquired these various provisions, yet no one dared to ask. While many of the soldiers might have found the slaughtering of civilians to be gruesome, no one could prepare them for what they would experience next.
In April of 1945, the Germans were on the retreat and the Allied forces were readying for the final push towards Berlin. Courtney and his British counterparts were heading towards Hamburg, near the Elbe River in the north of Germany. Courtney recalls the events of April 15: "We were north of the city of Hanover and in a town called Celle, when the British received a communication from the commanding officer of this concentration camp called Bergen-Belsen. And the reason for the communication was that they were asking for a truce because in the camp they had a typhus epidemic. "This typhus epidemic had been caused by fleas, and the cramped, inhumane living conditions of the camp only served to exaggerate the problem."
When the C and the British arrived they were in total shock. No one had ever seen anything that terrible. C said that he did not want to be there and that he wanted to go home. And these were the feelings of the soldiers before they had actually entered the camp. When they did enter they found around twenty thousand dead bodies on the ground. The rest of the inmates were in no better condition, most were half-naked, malnourished, and others were suffering from typhus. The British quickly set up a field kitchen were they served the inmates soup; they were still around ten to fifteen thousand prisoners, most of whom were Jewish. Even with the British field kitchen functioning, 200-300 prisoners died every day for several days after the British arrived from various ailments . These Jews came from Poland or other German occupied lands. Lucy S. Dawidowicz remarks in her book about the nature of the camp: "Special Camps for “foreigners” – Jews who, with money, influence, or by virtue of elite communal status had acquired Paraguayan or other citizenship and were hoaxed into believing that they were being held for exchange."
After the British had tried to deal with the starvation of the inmates and the condition of the camp, they began the grueling and horrid task of burying the twenty thousand or so dead bodies around the camp.
The commandant of the camp, Joseph Kramer, and the leader of the female guards, Irma Grese, were both taken into custody by the British forces. Kramer later was executed for crimes against humanity, Grase was imprisoned. Meanwhile, most of the SS guards stayed at the camp. C remembered that he “would have taken off like a big tailed bird and got out of there” if he had been in a similar position as the SS guards because “they were immediately pressed into service .” In order to deal with the huge numbers of corpses strewn throughout the camp, C remembers that the British “dug five enormous trenches…and were forced, usually at the double, to pick up bodies…then bring them down and toss them into these enormous pits. And they put 5,000 bodies into each pit. ” Lime was used to disinfect and reduce the smell of the corpses, C recalls that “they’d put in a layer of bodies and then they’d put in a layer of lime…and then they’d throw in another layer of dead bodies. ” C remembers that: “From my observation, although it sounds horrible, the people in the pits looked like the most peaceful people in the camp.” The truly grisly task of burying the bodies was made somewhat easier to accept for the Allied forces because German civilians from the surrounding towns were forced to witness the genocide that had occurred only a few miles from their homes. No one would be able to claim with any shred of credibility that these murders had not occurred.
Because of the typhus outbreak in the camp, Dr. D, a member of the American Typhus Commission, was flown up to the camp. Mr. C accompanied Dr. D throughout the camp. In the camp a woman grabbed the leg of C’s pants and asked for medical attention. C called to Dr. D, who came over and examined the woman, “He pressed his finger into her leg and he explained ‘it’s a normal thing…you release that pressure and the flesh will just snap right out.’ This girl’s leg just came out as if you filled a pen with ink, the bladder of a pen, it just came out as slow as could be. He says ‘No point fooling around, she’ll be dead in an hour.”
This woman’s condition was only one such tragedy of thousands in the camp. C recalls that “half of them were half-naked and the camp conditions were so atrocious that it didn’t make a difference, man or woman, if they had to relieve themselves, they just did so wherever they were in the camp.” The camp was truly hell on earth.
Only a few miles away, in the town of Belsen, German citizens had gone on with their lives throughout the duration of the war. With a location so close to the camp, its seemed hard to believe for many of the British soldiers and for C, that the German people were unaware of what was going on. Following his first day at Bergen-Belsen, C was returning to Celle through the town of Belsen “which was…about 2 and a half miles away from the camp. Two and a half miles away from the camp you could very, very clearly smell the camp, because two and a half miles wasn’t enough distance to stop that odor.” All German citizens were ordered to turn in all weapons to their police stations. In the town of Belsen C’s jeep pulled along side “a young woman pushing a baby carriage on the side walk.” C asked her “Where is the police station?” in German. The woman explained to C that the people of Belsen were very lawful and so they did not have a police station. There was no police station in Belsen, even as the mass murder of thousands of innocents continued only two and a half miles away. A guilty finger that pointed even more readily towards the German civilians’ compliancy in the mass executions of Jews was that in the town of Celle there was a factory that made prison uniforms. It is quite obvious that the German civilians knew of the horror which went on in Bergen-Belsen. C commented that he believed that in any society there would be people who would do the exact same thing that the Nazis did in Germany.
After C and the British had dealt with Bergen-Belsen they moved on to Hamburg. They did not stay long. For as the war began to come to a close, C and his jeep driver, eager to return to their regiment, rushed back to Paris on May 6. They arrived two days later on May 8, the day of final surrender of German forces or VE Day. C had arrived just in time for the giant parade on the Champs Elyess and victorious merriment that took place afterwards.
Although the war had officially ended in Europe, C was to stay on until December of 1945. His job was to go to Holland, which had been occupied by the Germans, and debrief members of the Dutch Résistance movement who had helped American pilots who had been shot down move through Holland and France, finally crossing into neutral Spain. Because C did not speak Dutch, he was set up with a translator, also a member of the Résistance, named Bob G, whose family had an equally interesting story. During the war, the G parents, Bob, and his older sister, were all involved in the Résistance and they had all been caught by the SS. The G sister had been tortured, burned with cigarettes and given an enema with boiling water, but she refused to break. She was then sent to a concentration camp, but when the King of Sweden ransomed several of the camp’s inmates, the sister went to Sweden for the rest of the war. Bob G and his parents were tortured as well, but none of them gave up any information to the SS. And miraculously all four survived the war. Finally in December of 1945, C was allowed to return home after learning that his father had suffered a heart attack and died. After returning home, C was sent to Fort Carney Prison Camp in Rhode Island to be the executive officer because he lacked sufficient points to be discharged from the Army. But C was not there long and he wished to return to college, at long last.
C had wanted to return to Boston College, but the administration refused to honor the credits he had received as part of his wartime education at Boston University. Instead he enrolled at Harvard University, where he majored in German Literature and Language. He received his diploma in 1947. The commencement speaker was one George Marshall, who in that very speech announced his plan for the reconstruction and recovery of the European nations, this plan came to be called the Marshall Plan. C then attended Harvard Business School where he earned his MBA and had a fine career in business.
*Names removed to respect the privacy of a great man who helped me with an important research project.
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