Private Joseph Galione2 was a Timberwolf and member of the 415th Infantry Regiment. In the early days of April 1945, he was assigned to conduct reconnaissance for his unit as they followed in the wake of the 3rd Armored Division spearhead. Acting on instinct, and following his sense of smell and some nearby railroad tracks, he walked several miles ahead of his unit into the vicinity of Nordhausen, a small town in Saxony.
As he made his way along a spur of the railway the evening of 10 April, he stumbled upon a large rail car piled with unidentifiable corpses. After a brief altercation with a retreating German soldier, he scouted the area and discovered, to his horror, a large concentration camp. Within this sprawling, fenced enclosure were dozens of shabby barracks huddled against the hills, the gaping mouth of an enormous tunnel bored into the side of a mountain, and dozens of gaunt, timid detainees peering at their unexpected visitor.
Konzentrationslager Mittelbau, known as the Mittelbau-Dora or simply the Dora Camp, had been established on the former site of a large gypsum mine in the Kohnstein, a mountain about five miles north of Nordhausen. Its creation was the direct result of the Allies’ discovery and subsequent bombing of the German rocket testing base on the small Baltic island of Peenemunde off the north-German coast. The bombing, which occurred in 1943, not only severely damaged the Germans’ ability to manufacture and test their nascent rocket technology, but showed the extent to which the security of the entire, intensely secretive program had been compromised. The decision was made to manufacture the rockets in a secure underground location, and the already partially excavated Kohnstein was deemed the ideal spot.
In the aftermath of Hitler’s rise to power in the 1930s, Heinrich Himmler’s Schutzstaffel assumed the role of state police for all of Germany. Under their administration, several large prison camps were established to house common law criminals and domestic political enemies of the National Socialist regime. After the late-1930s attacks on Czechoslovakia, Poland, Holland, and France, the camps swelled with foreign prisoners who resisted German occupation and with victims of the cruel ethnic and social cleansing practices of the Nazis.
As the Allies engaged Germany in a savage two-front war and Germany’s workforce began to be depleted by conscription into the armed services, these camp interns played an increasingly prominent role as the labor force for Germany’s munitions and transportation industries. Concentration camp labor was used to an extent even at the Peenemunde base prior to its destruction, but with the relocation of the rocket manufacturing facility, slave labor was brought to bear in an unprecedented fashion to complete the excavation of the tunnels and carry out the assembly of the V1 and then-experimental V2 rockets.
The Dora camp (properly considered a labor camp as opposed to an extermination camp such as Auschwitz) was originally a Kommando or satellite worksite of Konzentrationslager Buchenwald, several miles to the south. Buchenwald prisoners arrived in large transports and were put to work completing the excavation. The overworked and starved inmates slept in unsanitary conditions in the tunnels during this period. As the work progressed and the size of the inmate population increased, a camp was constructed featuring all of the hallmark horrors of the Nazi concentration camps including a crematorium for the disposal of corpses. In the fall of 1944, with the completion of the tunnel factory and growing importance of the rocket program, Dora was made an autonomous camp dubbed Mittelbau, and oversaw several smaller satellite camps in the region. During its operation, the prisoners assembled thousands of V1 and V2 rockets. Between November of 1943 and April of 1945, the camp detained over 60,000 prisoners, more than 20,000 of which died due to exhaustion, starvation, disease, and violent treatment by the SS camp guards.
Private Galione, horror-stricken and fearing capture, retraced his route until he reached a small group of American troops that he had passed on his way to the camp. They took him to their commander and he related what he had seen. Galione, the commander and a driver drove a jeep back to the camp, broke the heavy padlock on the gate, and entered the camp. The prisoners showed them to the Revier, or hospital barracks and they peaked inside. The putrid stench and the ghostly figures of the over 100 barely-living prisoners shocked the battle-hardened G.I.s. Frightened, and in need of help, they raced back to Galione’s unit, and instigated the mobilization of a rescue party of Timberwolf riflemen and medics.
In order to prevent being held up by a German ambush, they radioed ahead to the CP of Task Force Lovelady of the 3rd Armored to have tanks lead the way and eliminate any resistance. The tanks and supporting infantry rolled out at 4:30 AM the morning of 11 April, following the directions given by Private Galione. He recalled: “When I gave the Third Armored directions to Camp Dora, I failed to consider the direction they would be coming from. After all, I didn't take the road; I traveled through the woods. I was tired and forgot to tell them about the curve in the road.” Galione felt that this misdirection “was meant to be” and counted it a small miracle because of what they found there.
Sergeant Lee McBride was riding on one of the tanks in the first combat patrol to enter nearby Nordhausen. They approached from the southwest and arrived in town near the train station. After encountering some slight resistance in the form of machine gun fire, the infantry along with the tanks of Task Force Lovelady succeeded in subduing and capturing the 35 remaining enemy troops in town.
Late that morning, as they proceeded through the bomb- and fire-devastated city in search of the hillside camp and tunnels described by Galione, they were startled to discover a second prison camp, there amidst the rubble of Nordhausen. Galione himself would later describe conditions at this camp as “even worse than the one I found.”
The Boelcke Kaserne or Boelcke barracks (map here) had been constructed by the Luftwaffe and served as quarters for the pilots and technical staff that serviced a nearby airfield. It had been evacuated in the spring of 1944 and was converted into a satellite camp in the growing Mittelbau-Dora camp complex. Most of the prisoners at the barracks had been sent there because they were too ill, weak, or injured to continue working at the rocket assembly works five miles to the north at Dora. This accounts in part, for the wretched condition of the prisoners--these were the most feeble and helpless of the bunch. Furthermore, the camp had been the subject of several direct hits during the brutal RAF fire-bombing of Nordhausen the previous week, which claimed nearly 1,500 victims in the Boelcke Kaserne.
Lee described their arrival at the barracks, otherwise known as the Nordhausen camp: “These people were literally worked and starved to death. Some 5,000 bodies were discovered, many stacked like so much cord wood awaiting final disposal. Most were apparently French. As we came into the compound which housed the slave laborers, it was surrounded by a chain-link fence which I would guess to have been ten or twelve feet high. The French slave-laborers, when they saw who we were, literally climbed over that fence en masse and broke it down; just laid it flat, they were so happy to see us.”
Life Magazine photograph of prisoner remains at the Boelcke Kaserne shortly after the arrival of the combined 3rd Armored and 104thh Infantry.
The barracks consisted of five, two-story dormitory buildings and two, larger structures. The second story of each dorm was lined with three-level bunks, crammed with corpses and emaciated survivors.
Other Timberwolf units, including a medical battalion, soon arrived to help care for the survivors. In fact, VII Corps CO General J. Lawton Collins saw to it that as many soldiers under his command as possible were taken to the camp to witness firsthand the Nazi’s “Final Solution.” German civilians were recruited to bury the bodies of former camp inmates in mass graves.
While this sequence of events is sometimes called a “liberation,” it is important to remember that Germans soldiers had abandoned the camp by the time the Americans arrived and that the Allied bombing of Nordhausen had inflicted horrific casualties and killed many of the prisoners.
Like many U.S. soldiers who encountered such camps, the Timberwolves made their discovery of the camp the centerpiece of their postwar meaning making. From their perspective, it lent purpose and justification to a campaign that often seemed senseless. In the words of the 3rd Armored Division historian, the men “would never again doubt the reason for their fighting.”
The French government under Charles de Gaulle later awarded Lee a Battle Cross with Bronze Star (Croix de Guerre avec Etoile de Bronze) for his role as a member of that first patrol to arrive.
horrific. grateful men like your grandfather stamped out the monstrous Nazi regime.
ReplyDeleteYour entire story is a cover up of the fact that the Allies bombed 75% of the city, including the barracks because they thought it was a factory. So, they entered the city, dragged all the corpses out and blamed the very people you had just killed for the killing. LIFE Magazine sold you the same propaganda you continue to disseminate here.
ReplyDeleteThis is a gross oversimplification. The Allied bombing was horrific. I acknowledge this multiple times in the OP. No cover up here. But it is well-documented that the barracks were a death trap long before the Americans arrived. My sources include Andre Sellier's history of the camp. He was a trained historian and a Dora Camp survivor. His account is heartbreaking and thorugh.
ReplyDeleteThe Allies hands were not clean, but denying German atrocities during the war does not become us.