Posted on 04/12/2002 11:56:59 AM PDT by knighthawk
WEIMAR, Germany (AP) — U.S. veterans reunited Thursday with survivors they cared for at a Nazi concentration camp, marking the 57th anniversary of the liberation of Buchenwald on the tree-ringed hilltop where some 56,000 prisoners died during the Third Reich.
When American soldiers arrived on April 11, 1945, some of them could hardly believe the prisoners they found were human beings ``because of our appearance — we were only skin and bones,'' Edward Kierski, 87, a former camp inmate from Poland, said at a ceremony honoring four members of the U.S. Third Army's 120th Evacuation Hospital, the first unit that brought medical supplies to the liberated camp.
Buchenwald, where victims were starved, tortured and worked to death, was the first major concentration camp entered by American forces at the end of World War II.
``It has an aura of unreality about it,'' Warren Priest, one of the former medical soldiers, said of his first return to the camp since 1945.
``Everything that made Buchenwald the hideous place it was has been removed,'' he said. ``All of the drabness, all of the dirt, all of the bodies, all of the unmentionable sights — and most of all, all of the odor, which was inescapable.''
The veterans and U.S. military officials laid wreaths at a plaque next to the camp gate that lists 47 nationalities of people interned at Buchenwald. They also toured the memorial site on a windswept hill, which includes the preserved crematorium and execution chambers.
The medical troops arrived at Buchenwald two days after it was freed. A mess had been set up to feed the surviving 21,000 inmates on a diet of soft food and liquid, and Kierski recalled that a meal was prepared for the starving survivors after the camp's liberation.
``There was no physician who could advise what to eat,'' he said. ``So we had a very nice meal after which a lot of us had stomach trouble.''
At a brief ceremony in the former camp hospital Thursday, Brig. Gen. Richard L. Ursone, commander of the U.S. Army Europe's Regional Medical Command, saluted the veterans for ``the undaunting courage you displayed when faced with the unimaginable human suffering.''
Within three days of their arrival, according to U.S. Army records, the death rate among Buchenwald survivors had been cut from more than 100 each day to less than 30. Common diseases included dysentery, malnutrition and tuberculosis.
U.S. Gen. George S. Patton was so disgusted by what the Nazis did at Buchenwald that he ordered the citizens of nearby Weimar to come and see the victims.
``In all that viewing by all those people, not one of them said `How awful,''' recalled Priest, 80, of Campton, N.H., who was an orthopedic surgical technician at the time. ``That was the problem — that indifference.''
Buchenwald's first prisoners were communists, followed later by Russian prisoners of war, Poles, Gypsies, and Jews. As U.S. troops closed in at the end of the war, most of the 5,000 SS guards fled the camp.
When the prisoners heard U.S. artillery, they grabbed discarded guns, took the remaining guards captive and hoisted a white flag.
``From the morning, the SS insisted we leave the camp. They tried to compel us to go on a `death march' but we were not that stupid,'' Kierski said.
When the American soldiers arrived shortly afterward, ``they approached and touched us — they were really shocked.''
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