April 11, 2013 — the 68th anniversary of the liberation of Buchenwald

Elie Wiesel, a survivor of Buchenwald, famously said: “Some things never happened, but are true.”  The most famous events that never happened at the Nazi concentration camps, but are true, took place at Buchenwald.

The photo below shows some of the things that never happened at Buchenwald, but are true: the shrunken heads, the lampshades made of human skin, an ashtray made from a human bone.

Display table put up at Buchenwald after the camp was liberated

The Buchenwald concentration camp was liberated on April 11, 1945 by four soldiers in the Sixth Armored Division of the US Third Army, commanded by General George S. Patton. Just before the Americans arrived, the camp had already been taken over by the Communist prisoners who had killed some of the guards and forced the rest to flee into the nearby woods.

Pfc. James Hoyt was driving the M8 armoured vehicle which brought Capt. Frederic Keffer, Tech. Sgt. Herbert Gottschalk and Sgt. Harry Ward to the Buchenwald camp on April 11, 1945.

American soldiers were brought to Buchenwald to see the display table

The photo above shows American soldiers, who were brought in trucks to Buchenwald on April 15, 1945 to see the displays put up by the prisoners, including the table in the photo above.  Last year, I wrote about the liberation of Buchenwald here.  You can read a poem written about the liberation of Buchenwald here.

One of the most famous events, that never happened, but are true, is the role of African-American soldiers in the liberation of Buchenwald, which you can read about here.

There were approximately 21,000 prisoners at Buchenwald on the day it was liberated. This included approximately 4,000 Jewish prisoners who were survivors of the death camps in what is now Poland, and 904 children under the age of 17, many of whom were orphans. Elie Wiesel claims that he was one of the 904 orphans, who were housed in Block 66 at Buchenwald, but many revisionists, such as Carl Mattogno, don’t believe him.

Regarding the liberation of Buchenwald on April 11, 1945, Robert Abzug wrote the following in his book “Inside the Vicious Heart”:

The Americans were met by reasonably healthy looking, armed prisoners ready to help administer distribution of food, clothing, and medical care. These same prisoners, an International Committee with the Communist underground leader Hans Eiden at its head, seemed to have perfect control over their fellow inmates.

The Allies used the word “extermination camp” for all the Nazi camps, assuming that the purpose of these camps was the mass murder of the Jews. Buchenwald was a Class II camp, intended for the imprisonment of condemned criminals and captured anti-Fascist resistance fighters who were considered to be beyond “rehabilitation.”

Three days after the Americans liberated Buchenwald, the 120th Evacuation Hospital arrived in Weimar with a staff of 273 service personnel to take care of the 3,000 sick prisoners; a hospital was set up in the barracks of the SS soldiers who had been stationed at Buchenwald. The staff stayed in a beautiful castle on the Ettersberg, which had formerly been the summer home of German royalty. A path through the woods connected the castle to the concentration camp.

One of the soldiers in the Evacuation Hospital unit was Tech. Sgt. Warren E. Priest from Haverhill, MA. In October 2007, Warren Priest told his story to Mike Pride, the editor of the Concord Monitor.

The following quote from Warren Priest was included in an article published by the Concord Monitor on October 25, 2007:

We left this lovely summer home and walked up a pathway through the woods. It was spring, and the leaves were just emerging. We saw all the loveliness and color of the season.

We smelled Buchenwald long before we saw it. That whole area was overwhelmingly and intrusively affected by the odor of death in the camp. You couldn’t escape it.

Reaching near the top, I suddenly encountered human forms. We had been trained not to fraternize, so I didn’t say anything. I held my carbine. They moved to the side of the pathway and got down on their knees and put their hands together prayerfully and looked up and smiled. It was one of those moments when expression was all nonverbal.

Buchenwald was a work camp, not a death camp, although plenty had been killed there. Close by was a Karl Zeiss factory, where prisoners worked. They specialized in the assembly of optical instruments – binoculars and cameras. We got quite a few of the things we needed from a supply train that the American troops had captured. We stole, if you will, things from the factory. I had two or three pairs of binoculars and a 35-millimeter camera.

Sgt. Warren E. Priest wrote the following, in a letter to his mother, after seeing Buchenwald:

I saw what and why we were fighting. Never never permit yourself to feel any trace of pity whatsoever for the German people, Mum. They’ve jeopardized their right to call themselves standing members of our world of civilization. They are certainly no better than the Japs, and in some respects worse.

The photos below show what Sgt. Priest saw at Buchenwald, that caused him to feel no “trace of pity whatsoever for the German people.”

Bodies found outside the crematorium when Dachau was liberated

Dead bodies outside the Buchenwald crematorium

Pile of ashes found outside the Buchenwald crematorium

On April 15, 1945, German civilians were brought to Buchenwald to see the evidence of the Nazi atrocities.  General George S. Patton, who was there that day, wrote in his autobiography that the number of Weimar citizens brought to the camp was 1,500, although other accounts say it was 2,000. The German civilians had to march five miles up a steep hill, escorted by armed American soldiers. It took two days for the Weimar residents to file through the camp. No precautions were taken to protect them from the typhus epidemic in the camp.

General Patton had previously visited the Ohrdruf sub-camp of Buchenwald on April 12, 1945 along with General Omar Bradley and General Dwight D. Eisenhower.

On April 15, 1945, the day that he visited Buchenwald, General George S. Patton had written the following in a letter to General Dwight D. Eisenhower:

We have found at a place four miles north of WEIMAR a similar camp, only much worse. The normal population was 25,000, and they died at the rate of about a hundred a day. The burning arrangements, according to General Gay and Colonel Codman who visited it yesterday, were far superior to those they had at OHRDRUF. I told the press to go up there and see it, and then write as much about it as they could. I also called General Bradley last night and suggested that you send selected individuals from the upper strata of the press to look at it, so that you can build another page of the necessary evidence as to the brutality of the Germans.

The photo below shows German civilians walking past the pile of bodies in front of the Buchenwald crematorium.

German civilians were marched to Buchenwald at gunpoint to view the bodies piled up at the crematorium

This YouTube video explains how some things never happened at Buchenwald, but are true.

The unsung heroes of the Buchenwald liberation by the 6th Armored Division

I received an e-mail yesterday from Dave Pinkley who gave me his father’s story about the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp.  His father, Herbert Pinkley, was a tank driver/gunner in the 6th Armored Division which is credited by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum with being the liberators of Buchenwald.

I previously blogged about the liberation of Buchenwald here.

Pfc. James Hoyt has been credited with driving the M8 armored tank which brought Capt. Frederic Keffer, Tech. Sgt. Herbert Gottschalk and Sgt. Harry Ward to the Buchenwald camp around 5 p.m. on April 11, 1945. He parked the vehicle outside while Capt. Keffer and Sgt. Gottschalk (both of whom spoke German) went through a hole in the barbed wire fence that had been made by the prisoners.

According to his son, Herbert Pinkley “is not listed in the rolls, probably due to the main incident” described in his e-mail letter.

The “incident,” which was pieced together by Herbert Pinkley’s son, is that, after seeing the Buchenwald camp, Herbert Pinkley was in the town (Weimar) near Buchenwald and he found a photo of a man in a high-ranking German officer’s uniform, standing in front of the camp.  According to Dave Pinkley, his father “beat the officer to within inches of his life, and the officer filed charges with U.S. officials.”

I have no trouble believing that an American soldier beat a German officer after discovering that he had been associated in some way with the Buchenwald camp.  However, I have difficulty in believing that a German officer would report this incident to “U.S. officials” and that Herbert Pinkley’s name would be removed from the official story of the liberation of Buchenwald because of this.

To continue the story, Herbert Pinkley “managed to get  him (the high-ranking German officer) imprisoned for something and visited him in jail daily, finally smuggling in a piece of line (rope) and so this officer hung himself, maybe with some help.”

I have heard at least one other story of a German SS soldier who was captured, after escaping from Buchenwald, and forced, by the American liberators, to hang himself.  However, this kind of revenge was not sanctioned by the U.S. military and according to Dave Pinkley, “my dad got into a lot of trouble over that and got reduced in rank.”

According to Dave Pinkley “Another incident of which is not so gory, maybe, is that the tankers, upon seeing the camp, emptied their catches of liberated German weapons and gave them to the inmates. A few of the Polish inmates left, well armed, and started on a crime and murder spree across Germany and had to be hunted down by Allied troops.”

Another side of this story is given by Flink Whitlock in his book The Beasts of Buchenwald.  This quote is from the book:

A former prisoner [of Buchenwald] said, “The survivors of Buchenwald are tremendously proud of two facts, the liberation of the camp by its underground organization, and the humane manner in which the captured guards were treated and of whom not even a single one was murdered or executed.”

Another American soldier, named Harry J. Herder, Jr. claims that he was on the first American tank that arrived at Buchenwald on April 11, 1945. In his story of the liberation of Buchenwald, Herder described how the American soldiers looked the other way when the Communist inmates hunted down an escaped SS guard, brought him back to the camp and forced him to tie a noose to hang himself.  (Could this have been the incident which involved Herbert Pinkley?)

Political prisoners at Buchenwald, April 15, 1945 Photo taken by Margaret Bourke-White

US Army Signal Corps photo of Buchenwald survivors, April 14, 1945

Read more stories about the liberation of Buchenwald on my web site here.

According to The Buchenwald Report, in the first days after the liberation of the Buchenwald camp, the political prisoners who had been freed by the Americans, hunted down 76 of the camp guards who had escaped into the surrounding woods; they were brought back to the camp and killed.

According to Robert Abzug in his book Inside the Vicious Heart, the inmates “killed almost eighty ex-guards and camp functionaries in the days following the liberation, sometimes with the aid and encouragement of Americans.”

In his book Abzug quotes one of the liberators, Fred Mercer:

… a German soldier attempted to surrender to the Americans, but was intercepted by a prisoner with a four-foot wood log: “He just stood there and beat him to death. He had to – of course, we didn’t bother him.”

American newspaper reporter Marguerite Higgins wrote in her book News is a Singular Thing, that 20 to 30 American soldiers took turns beating 6 young German guards to death at Buchenwald.

Elie Wiesel was saved from the gas chamber at Buchenwald by soldiers in the 1st Infantry Division who liberated the camp

I am indebted to a reader of my blog who wrote a comment and provided a link to an article, written by Desiree Chen, in which she states that Abner S. Ganet was one of the soldiers with the 1st Infantry Division, which liberated Buchenwald on April 11, 1945.

Dead bodies found by American soldiers at Buchenwald

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum gives the credit for liberating Buchenwald to the 6th Armored Division, but what do they know.

This quote is from the article written by Desiree Chen:

But the man [Abner S. Ganet] known for his outspokenness had always been silent about one thing: his tour as an American soldier in World War II, and the day in 1945 when his 1st Infantry Division liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp. Mr. Ganet’s military service would earn him a Purple Heart and two Bronze Stars for bravery.

It wasn’t until 50 years later, in 1995, when Mr. Ganet realized he could no longer remain silent. That year, he met Nobel Peace Prize recipient, acclaimed author and death-camp survivor Elie Wiesel, who had come to Elmhurst College to speak during the College’s annual Holocaust Education Project.

“Wiesel asked if I had been in the war,” Mr. Ganet recalled in a 2004 interview for the College’s magazine, Prospect. “I said, Yes, Buchenwald.’ He said, ‘You liberated me.’”

Wiesel had been slated for the gas chamber on the day Ganet’s unit arrived and the camp’s guards fled.

The USHMM  claims that the 1st Infantry Division liberated Falkenau an der Eger, a sub-camp of Flossenbürg.  In 1995, Ganet was 70 years old.  Did his memory fail him or is the USHMM wrong about which division liberated Buchenwald?

Elie Wiesel was first sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau in May 1944, but the Nazis were not gassing people on the night that he arrived. (They were burning prisoners alive in two separate ditches — the babies in one and the adults in another.) Elie was marched out of Birkenau in January 1945 and put on a train to Buchenwald.

In an interview with Time magazine on March 18, 1945, Elie Wiesel said this:

“In Buchenwald they sent 10,000 to their deaths every day. I was always in the last hundred near the gate. They stopped. Why?”

What? You don’t believe that there was a gas chamber at Buchenwald?

Sign on the Buchenwald gate “To Each his Own” in English

On the web site of the Eisenhower Memorial Commission, there is a reference to a gas chamber at Buchenwald where prisoners in the Ohrdruf “holding facility” were sent to be gassed:

“On April 4, 1945, elements of the United States Army’s 89th Infantry Division and the 4th Armored Division captured the Ohrdruf concentration camp outside the town of Gotha in south central Germany. Although the Americans didn’t know it at the time, Ohrdruf was one of several sub-camps serving the Buchenwald extermination camp, which was close to the city of Weimar several miles north of Gotha. Ohrdruf was a holding facility for over 11,000 prisoners on their way to the gas chambers and crematoria at Buchenwald. “

In fact, Buchenwald was the place where the Nazis first tested Zyklon-B on humans according to this website:

In January or February, 1940, 250 Gypsy children from Brno in the Buchenwald concentration camp were used as guinea pigs for testing the Zyklon B gas.

At the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal in 1946, the French prosecutor submitted an official report which stated:

Everything had been provided for down to the smallest detail. In 1944, at Buchenwald, they had even lengthened a railway line so that the deportees might be led directly to the gas chamber. Certain [of the gas chambers] had a floor that tipped and immediately directed the bodies into the room with the crematory oven.

Sir Hartley Shawcross, the chief British prosecutor at the Nuremberg trial, stated in his closing speech that murder had been conducted “like some mass production industry in the gas chambers and the ovens” in Buchenwald and other Nazi concentration camps.

Jean-Paul Renard, a French priest who was an inmate at Buchenwald, wrote a book about his camp experiences in which he stated:

I saw thousands and thousands of persons going into the showers. Instead of liquid, asphyxiating gases poured out over them.

In a book published in 1947, Georges Henocque, another French priest and the former chaplain of the Saint-Cyr Military Academy, wrote a detailed description of the inside of the gas chamber in Buchenwald, which he claimed that he had visited.

Would a priest lie?  Two priests wrote that there was a gas chamber at Buchenwald, so it must be true.  Thank God the 1st Infantry Division arrived in time to save Elie Wiesel from an ignominious death in the gas chamber.

You can read an analysis, by Robert E. Reis, of Elie Wiesel’s book Night on another website here.

Elie Wiesel says that he was a prisoner in the “Small Camp” at Buchenwald.  This was the quarantine section for prisoners who had newly arrived.  They had to stay in this section until it was known that they had no diseases that might spread throughout the camp.  The Jews who were brought to Buchenwald, after the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp was abandoned, were kept in this camp for months. Elie says that he was eventually taken to the orphan barracks in the Buchenwald camp after his father died.

The “Small Camp” was separated from the main part of the camp by a barbed wire fence and a gate that was made of wood and barbed wire.  A photo of the gate is shown below.

Barbed wire fence and gate that divided the “Small Camp” from the main part of the Buchenwald camp, which is shown in the background

The “Liberation” of Buchenwald 67 years ago today

American soldiers arriving at the entrance to Buchenwald camp

I put the word “liberation” in quotes in the title of my blog post today because the Buchenwald concentration camp was not actually liberated.  Four American soldiers in the Sixth Armored Division of the US Third Army arrived at the main Buchenwald camp around 5 p.m. on April 11, 1945 AFTER the Communist prisoners, who ran the camp, had already taken over, killing some of the guards and forcing the rest of the guards to flee into the surrounding forest.  The photo above shows American soldiers arriving at Buchenwald to tour the camp a few days after the camp was taken over by the inmates.

Regarding the liberation of Buchenwald on April 11, 1945, Robert Abzug wrote the following in his book Inside the Vicious Heart:

The Americans were met by reasonably healthy looking, armed prisoners ready to help administer distribution of food, clothing, and medical care. These same prisoners, an International Committee with the Communist underground leader Hans Eiden at its head, seemed to have perfect control over their fellow inmates.

Pfc. James Hoyt was driving the M8 armored vehicle which brought Capt. Frederic Keffer, Tech. Sgt. Herbert Gottschalk and Sgt. Harry Ward to the Buchenwald camp that day.

Communist prisoners at Buchenwald had disarmed the guards and stacked the weapons outside the camp before American liberators arrived

The following quote is from a CNN news story on the occasion of the death of James Hoyt on August 14, 2008 at the age of 83:

According to military records, Keffer was the officer in command of the six-wheeled armored vehicle that day. The soldiers were part of the Army’s 6th Armored Division near the camp when about 15 SS troopers were captured. It was mid-afternoon.

“At the same time, a group of Russians just escaped from the concentration camp, burst out of the woods attempting to attack the SS men. The Russians were restrained and interrogated,” Maj. Gen. R.W. Grow, the American commander of the 6th Armored Division, wrote in a 1975 letter about the Buchenwald liberation.

Keffer was ordered to take his three comrades and two of the Russian prisoners “as guides to investigate, report and rejoin as rapidly as possible.”

“I took this side journey of about 3 km away from our main force because we kept encountering SS guards and prison inmates, and the latter told us of the large camp to the south,” Keffer wrote in a letter around the 30th anniversary of the liberation.

“We had been told by our intelligence that we might overrun a large prison camp, but we — or at least I — had no idea of either the gigantic size of the camp or of the full extent of the incredible brutality.”

Keffer and Gottschalk, who spoke German, entered the camp through a hole in an electric barbed wire fence. Hoyt and Ward initially stayed at the vehicle.

“We were tumultuously greeted by what I was told were 21,000 men, and what an incredible greeting that was,” Keffer wrote. “I was picked up by arms and legs, thrown into the air, caught, thrown again, caught, thrown, etc., until I had to stop it. I was getting dizzy.

“How the men found such a surge of strength in their emaciated condition was one of those bodily wonders in which the spirit sometimes overcomes all weaknesses of the flesh. My, but it was a great day!”

Keffer said the prisoners, through an underground system, had already taken control of the camp. The four soldiers notified division command to get medical help and food to the prisoners as soon as possible.

The 6th Armored Division newspaper “Armored Attacker” ran a headline on May 5, 1945: “Four 9th AIB Doughs Find Buchenwald.” The article described the discovery as “the worst concentration camp yet to be uncovered by west wall troops.”

Hoyt, a Bronze Star recipient and veteran of the Battle of the Bulge, was the last of the four original liberators to die.

Note that the headline in the 6th Armored Division newspaper said: Four 9th AIB Doughs (doughboys) FIND Buchenwald.  Credit for finding Buchenwald goes to the 6th Armored Division.  Credit for liberating Buchenwald goes to the Communist prisoners in the camp.

The typical American soldier in World War II was a 19-year-old youth, fresh from the farms and small towns of a country that was less than 200 years old. Most of them had never been outside their home state and the closest they had ever come to the kind of sights they were seeing in Germany was a picture in an encyclopedia. Some of the towns and villages they were marching through had been in existence for 700 years before America had even been seen by a white man. The war-time destruction of this ancient culture, which they were participating in, must have been mind-boggling. Most of these soldiers had no clear idea of why they were fighting the Germans, as General Dwight D. Eisenhower admitted.

After crossing the Rhine river, Germany’s ancient line of defense, on the night of March 22, 1945, the US Third Army, commanded by General George S. Patton, was advancing through the middle of Germany toward a pre-determined line where they would stop and wait for the Russian troops advancing from the east. In their path were four charming old towns laid out like a string of pearls in a straight line through the Horsel Valley on Highway F7: Eisenach, Gotha, Erfurt, and Weimar.

This was the heartland of German culture, the old stamping grounds of such German greats as Goethe, Schiller, Liszt, Herder, Nietzsche, Cranach, Luther, and Bach. Today these four cities draw millions of tourists who want to follow in the footsteps of the famous on “the Classics Road.” The area has long been known for its well preserved medieval villages and its gemütliche German people.

By April 1st, which was Easter Sunday, the American soldiers were approaching the first town, Eisenach, on the northwestern edge of the Thuringian Forest. Eisenach has been at the center of German culture since the Middle Ages; it is where Johann Sebastian Bach was born and the place where Martin Luther holed up in a castle to translate the Bible. A few miles down the road is the town of Erfurt, the place from which St. Boniface set out on his mission to convert the Germans to Christianity.

The Buchenwald concentration camp was located 5 miles from the town of Weimar.  It was at Weimar that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany’s most famous writer, had lived from 1775 until his death in 1832. The area, where the concentration camp now stood, had been his favorite forest retreat, where he had sat under an oak tree. When a spot in the forest on the Ettersberg was cleared for the Buchenwald camp, Goethe’s oak was left standing, and when the tree was killed in an Allied bombing raid on the camp on August 24, 1944, the Nazis cut it down but carefully preserved the stump.

The stump of Goethe's oak tree inside the Buchenwald camp

The 6th Armored Division of General Patton’s US Third Army had approached Weimar from the northwest, when they discovered Buchenwald, which was on a wooded hill called the Ettersberg, 8 kilometers north of the historic town of Weimar. The prisoners had already hoisted a white flag of surrender by the time the Americans arrived. The soldiers in the Sixth Armored Division would not see the ruins of Weimar, the citadel of German culture, until the following day.

Weimar was the last residence of Friedrich von Schiller, a German writer whose patriotism and nationalism had encouraged the unification of Germany in 1871. The famous composers, Franz Liszt and Johann Sebastian Bach, had both lived for a time in Weimar, and the famous philosopher, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, had spent his last days there. In April 1945, Germany had long been recognized as the most cultured country in the Western world, as well as the most technically advanced.  But all anyone cares about today is the Buchenwald concentration camp; you never hear about the destruction of the city of Weimar by American bombs.  There were no factories in Weimar and there was no reason to bomb the city, except to destroy German landmarks.

Obama grovels before the Jews at AIPAC conference, but it wasn’t enough

This morning, I listened to President’s Obama’s speech at the annual AIPAC conference.  He started off by mentioning that Dan Shapiro, our ambassador to Israel, is learning Hebrew, and lauding Shimon Peres, who was born in a shetetl in Poland.  Then he rattled off a list of things that “destroy freedom” including gas chambers.  Obama said “we share human values with Israel.”  He got a round of applause after he said that “our support for Israel is bi-partisan and that is the way it should stay.”

Then he spent about half of his speech defending his record of support for Israel.  He specifically said “I have kept my commitment to Israel.”  and “Israel’s security is sacrosanct.”  And finally, his best line:  “There should be no doubt that I have Israel’s back.”

Towards the end of his speech, Obama mentioned his “great uncle who liberated Buchenwald.”  That is not quite correct:  On my scrapbookpages website, I wrote here about Obama’s great uncle, Charles T. Payne, who was a member of Company K, 355th Infantry Regiment, 89th Infantry Division.  He was taken to see Ohrdruf, a sub-camp of Buchenwald, on June 6, 1945, two days after the first American soldiers arrived at the abandoned camp, so technically he cannot claim the honor of being a “liberator” of Ohrdruf, and certainly not a liberator of Buchenwald.  As anyone, who knows anything about the Holocaust knows, Buchenwald was “liberated” by the prisoners themselves at 3 p.m. on April 11, 1945, a couple of hours before any American soldiers arrived.   But I digress.

Shortly after Obama finished his speech, Naftali Bennet was interviewed on Fox News.  Bennet was not happy with Obama’s speech.  He wants Obama to take “decisive action” against Iran.  He wants “immediate paralyzing sanctions against Iran, not in June — now!”  Bennet pointed out that Israel bombed the nuclear facility in Syria several years ago and it has not been re-built.  Bennet wants a “plausible threat to Iran.”  He wants “sanctions on Iran’s Central Bank now!”

Obama said, in his speech: “I firmly believe in the opportunity for diplomacy.”  What the Jews want is military action against Iran, not diplomacy, as Naftali Bennet pointed out. This speech could cost Obama his re-election.  All of the Republican candidates for the nomination are “sabre rattling” except for Ron Paul, who has no chance of being the Republican candidate.

The American liberator who literally blew the lock off the Buchenwald gate

Today, I read the heart-warming story of the meeting of Irving Roth, a Buchenwald survivor, and Frederick (Rick) Goss Carrier, an American liberator who literally blew the lock off the gate into the Buchenwald camp in April 1945.  The two of them participated in the annual March of the Living at Auschwitz this year.

You can read about the liberation of Buchenwald on my website here.

Old photo of Buchenwald gate taken shortly after the camp was liberated by American soldiers

The quote below is from the Jewish Tribune, a newspaper in Canada:

Carrier was an assault reconnaissance combat engineer attached to General Patton’s Third Army during World War II. He was following the advancing American infantry in the German city of Weimar on April 10, 1945, tasked with finding and securing engineering equipment, vehicles such as trucks and cement mixers, and road- and bridge-building supplies left behind by the Nazis. He had to find the materials, map them and get the information to his superiors.

Churches were always a good place to go for information, Carrier had learned, so when he spotted the spire of a cathedral, he “drove over the rubble to find that church,” he told the Tribune. People at the church told him about a stone quarry and lumber mill at the site of a prison camp nearby and offered to take him there.

One of them told Carrier that Russian prisoners had overpowered camp guards following the evacuation, just a few weeks earlier, of thousands of Jewish prisoners who were taken on a forced death march to Auschwitz.

It seems that the “people at the church” in Weimar were misinformed about the Buchenwald camp which was 5 miles from the city.  Why would “thousands of Jewish prisoners” have been taken on a forced death march to Auschwitz in April 1945?  The Auschwitz camp had been abandoned by the Germans on January 18, 1945 and 60,000 prisoners had been taken on “a forced forced death march” to Buchenwald and other camps in Germany.