Original subtitles

[projector reel clicking]

[upbeat classic music]

[ominous music]

- [Voiceover] We couldn't believe

man's inhumanity to man.

It just...

It just shocked us.

Literally shocked us to the point.

We couldn't believe what we saw.

- [Voiceover] At two in the morning

on Christmas Eve of 1995, my sister and I

opened this trunk and took out an envelope.

Inside was a small stack of photographs

that our grandfather had taken

while he was at war.

The only light we had came from a small lamp

left over from my uncle's childhood.

Earlier that day our grandmother had threatened

to destroy the pictures.

Slowly and quietly we laid them out

on the top of the trunk and I used the last roll

of film in my camera to make copies.

I could barely look at them.

They were so gruesome and sad.

Sixteen years have passed since then,

but I now have a reason to print those negatives.

As a teenager I saw the horror in the pictures,

but I never thought about the man who took them,

the young soldier behind the view finder

snapping the shutter.

My grandfather may be dead,

but his pictures tell a story of his time at war.

It's a story of mass murder.

Of a Holocaust and a liberation.

It's a story of silence.

And once I tried to understand the photos

I realized that it was the story of hundreds,

even thousands of others like me.

The chaos of World War II was much more

than I could ever hope to understand,

but I have these 16 pictures and for me

they're the key to unlocking a family secret

that's only ever been told in whispers.

[somber music]

- [Voiceover] Tucked into the mountains

of Vermont is the tiny town of East Dorset.

The marble quarry here is the oldest in America

and it's the home of Bill Wilson,

founder of Alcoholic's Anonymous.

It's the kind of town where everyone knows each other

and where Memorial Day is celebrated

with flags and motorcycles and church services.

On Pleasant Street is the house my grandfather built

on a plot carved out of the woodlands

where my great grandfather once tapped for maple syrup.

This is where my mom grew up

and we've come to try to untangle

the story of the photos.

- [Voiceover] Do you remember Don talking

about the war very much?

- Not much, no.

I do know he would say he was General Patton's driver

and I knew he had been in concentration camps,

but he didn't talk about it.

- [Voiceover] We talked for a while

about family history, but eventually I have to ask

about the photos that I shouldn't even know exist.

- [Voiceover] How did you feel when I told you

that Martha and I had made copies of them?

- Well, by the time I knew that I was glad

because I knew my mother wanted to get rid of them

and I don't feel they should be gotten rid of.

- [Voiceover] I guess everything starts there.

[instrumental Christmas music]

- [Voiceover] In the winter of '95

I was studying photography in Boston.

I'm not sure why, but when I left town for Christmas

I only had one roll of film with me.

I took a few pictures on my way out of town

and the rest of the roll is very different.

Those copies I made of my grandfather's pictures.

This is the room where I've slept since I was a kid.

It had been my uncle's bedroom

and later my grandpa's office.

My sister Martha, was with me

the night I made the copies of the photos

and as I stand in this room

I wonder if she remembers things the way I do.

- [Voiceover] Not really, I mean I remember

what my mom talked about it

a few months ago, I remember her talking about you

finding all these pictures of grandpa

and you know, that he saw in the Holocaust

that they took pictures of.

I don't remember it as a kid.

I remember our dad talking about it.

I remember, you know, grandma

but she never talked about it.

I don't think she liked to think about it

so she didn't want them around probably.

- [Voiceover] I've often thought about

how I first heard of the Ohrdruf photos.

Don was always very silent about the war,

but there were clues to what he had seen.

I was the oldest grandkid,

but I was only 14 when he died.

He only mentioned his pictures once

while we were stacking wood in the barn.

So this is what I know after all these years.

No one really remembers why we felt compelled

to copy the photos,

to save them from some vague threat

from my grandmother, but we did.

Now all I'm left with are my own memories,

which are confusing and incomplete.

[instrumental hymn music]

My grandmother has played the organ

in her church every Sunday since Eisenhower was President.

She lives a life of discipline

and unbending principle.

In her home there is no sugar, no salt,

no caffeine, no alcohol.

Recently my grandmother has been giving away

Don's books and papers,

and I worry that she's gave away his pictures too.

I wanna ask her about them,

but she keeps putting me off,

so I follow her around with my camera

hoping she'll tell me where they are.

So my first question is

when did you meet your husband Don?

Eventually she agrees to sit down

for an interview.

Her memory has faded and she doesn't say much.

I'm not sure if she's scared of the cameras

or if she really can't remember,

but it looks like I'm gonna have to wait a little longer

before I can ask her where the pictures have gone.

- I think they were very typical boys, kinda rowdy.

Preacher's kids, you know?

So they had to be bad because they

were the preacher's kids.

- [Voiceover] Is that the rule, you have to be bad?

- Yeah, you have to like rebel against

being the preacher's kids.

My Uncle Warren was the oldest,

and then there was Uncle Bob,

and then my dad was the youngest,

and they were all about two-and-a-half years apart.

- [Voiceover] Like many families,

we keep our history in snapshots

and half remembered stories so we start looking

through old photos, piecing together the life

of Donald Johnson.

- I think my dad came back

and he had a very successful job.

He became a banker and,

You know, he made a good living.

He was able to build a nice house and everything

and I think my Uncle Warren had a more difficult time

maybe getting jobs.

The other thing was he was the oldest

and my dad was the youngest,

so it's possible he had some of the sibling rivalry,

unconscious probably, of the older and the younger

and actually the younger probably being more successful.

- [Voiceover] The Don I remember was an old man,

a grandpa, but the pictures tell another story.

How do you explain a full life?

Here was a man who fought in the war

and came home to start over.

He built his own house and had a good job.

He was a father and a husband.

Raising two kids in a conservative, but loving home.

He served in the National Guard from 1957

until retiring as a Captain in the '80s.

Does any of that really get to the heart

of who he was?

So which one is which?

- This is Warren, and this is Bob, and this is Don.

1939.

- [Voiceover] Which one is you?

- Me.

- [Voiceover] The smaller one.

- [Voiceover] Wow.

Nice mustaches.

[laughing]

That seems like a lot to get through.

- Holocaust.

- [Man] Now that,

if you wouldn't mind holding onto that

for just a second.

That is what...

So could you...

- [laughing] My report cards

when I was little. - [Man] Your report cards?

Well, here, why don't we open up

the one that says Holocaust?

- Order right here.

David Thum.

I never saw these.

He never showed 'em to me.

Oh, gosh.

Oh, I don't wanna...

- [Voiceover] What I wanna know is what this is.

These are the originals.

It says pictures taken at Ohrdruf.

First death camp overrun, April 1945.

Then picture one is of the lyme pit.

Picture two...

- He never showed me these.

- [Voiceover] He never showed

you those? - [Voiceover] No, no.

- [Voiceover] Then he never talked about it,

but this is a list of the pictures.

So these are survivors.

I don't...

They have numbers on them.

So one is a lyme pit,

and two is clothing,

and this is three.

So he'd labeled them all.

Three.

Oh, that's gross.

This is, it's a...

It was used to incinerate the bodies.

Oh.

I'm just reading the rest of this list,

doesn't look very pleasant,

but these, so these are the,

so these are the pictures that grandpa took.

[ominous music]

And he never showed them to you?

- No.

- I'm sorry to have to dig up

all this old stuff.

- I don't like it.

- [Voiceover] That night after my grandmother

has gone to bed, we start looking through Don's books

for pages that he might have marked

and clues he might have left behind.

We decide to take out his pictures

and look them over one more time.

- I can't imagine bein' 20 years old

and walkin' into this.

[peaceful instrumental music]

- [Voiceover] Of the few things that I can

remember about Don

it's his work on the Ambulance Corp

that stands out the most.

He was always running off to answer

an emergency call and to this day

my grandmother leaves the police scanner on

in the living room even though the EMS

has gone digital and the scanner is now silent.

- He went on the Ambulance Corp after he retired.

I won't say he was always easy to get along with,

so I have a feeling as management

and times changed in the bank they kind of

wanted to push him out.

So he was looking for something to do

and I guess he had always loved the medic

aspect of his work in the war.

So he became an EMT.

He had surgery

to have a lung removed in the middle of '90, late in '90.

Just before Marty and I got married.

In fact, we had to change our wedding date.

He made it to our wedding.

I'm sure that was more difficult for him

than we knew at the time.

But he eventually just, ya know,

he just sort of got worse and worse.

The radiation and the chemotherapy

just kind of didn't cure it.

When they knew there was really nothing else to do

they gave him medicine he could take

to prevent the pain or to ease the pain.

There was a hospital bed right here,

in the middle of the living room.

Just mom and I were here when he died, no one else.

People in and out all the time,

but as it turned out just mom and I

were here when he died.

[bagpipes playing "Amazing Grace"]

- [Voiceover] I'll never forget Don's funeral.

There was a bagpiper on the hill,

and I stood by his grave in the hot August sun,

mumbling the words to Amazing Grace under my breath.

[somber instrumental music]

Back in Boston it takes me a few days

before I open up the envelope.

Even though I went to Vermont

with a plan to get the pictures,

part of me hadn't really expected to come home with them.

I read through the letters,

which are mostly from the United States

Holocaust Memorial Council

who would later build the museum in DC.

The letters date back to 1979,

but the most important is the one

written by my grandfather.

- [Voiceover] We were present at Ohrdruf,

the first of the death camps uncovered.

I have some snapshots of scenes there.

Members of my platoon shared what little film we had

and I have my set of prints.

Our negatives disappeared in Linz, Austria

and we were told that counter intelligence

had confiscated them.

I'm enclosing copies of these.

- [Voiceover] The date on the back of the copies

is November 1984.

Amazingly, 27 years later, the phone number still works.

- Hello?

- Yes, this is Mathew.

Pictures of the liberation of a concentration camp

during World War II.

So, do you even remember making the copies?

Oh.

They're pretty gruesome, I have to say.

- [Voiceover] I had hoped that he could tell me more.

That maybe my grandfather had told him his story

when he asked for the copies, but no luck.

[slow classical music]

- [Voiceover] So 20 years after his death

I finally have his photos.

I was so worried my grandmother had destroyed them,

but now they're safe with me,

but reading through the letters

I feel confused and a bit frustrated

because I have no idea what they tell me

about his life.

- [Voiceover] The memory of Ohrdruf,

particularly is engraved upon my memory.

I keep the pictures close at hand

and have made a point of looking at them frequently.

- [Voiceover] Where was Ohrdruf

and how did he end up there?

What exactly is the story told by these pictures?

The truth is that I'm not a researcher or historian.

Just a grandson trying to understand.

I'm a photographer and I point a camera

at the world to learn about it,

so my research into Ohrdruf takes a long time.

Even though the internet is full of information

about dates and locations

I still can't connect the horror of these photos

to the cold facts.

Many of the articles I find

refer to one interview from 2008

with a veteran named Charles Payne.

He's the great uncle of President Obama

and the article came out a week after

Obama caused a scandal on the campaign trail.

- I had a uncle who was one of the,

Who was part of the first American troops

to go into Auschwitz

and liberate the concentration camps.

- So why is everyone up in arms?

Well, first, Auschwitz was liberated

by the Soviet Army and second,

Senator Obama's American mother didn't have a brother.

- [Voiceover] First, Obama didn't have an uncle

who served in the US Army.

Second, Russian forces liberated

the Auschwitz concentration camp in

Poland in January of 1945.

- [Voiceover] For a week Obama's opponents

hyped his mistake until the AP article

about Mr. Payne came out.

In it he said that it wasn't Auschwitz that he liberated,

but the sub-camp of Buchenwald called Ohrdruf.

To be honest, as excited as I might have been

to make this connection between my grandfather

and the president, I wasn't really all that thrilled

about spending a year of my life

immersed in the gruesomeness of the Holocaust.

But as I started doing my research

and learning more about the camp

and the men who liberated it, I realized

that I really needed to know what happened

in April of 1945.

The problem was where to begin.

I decided to call Mr. Payne.

He's kind and talks with me a little,

but refuses to let me record the conversation.

He gets off the phone as quickly as he can.

As I hang up I realize that in my rush to talk to him

I hadn't thought about all the horrible memories

I was forcing him to relive.

In fact, I had no real idea

what those soldiers saw when they liberated the camps.

My guilt about how badly I handled things with Mr. Payne

almost made me forget something he told me

in our conversation.

That he had served in the 89th Infantry Division.

That led me to Mark Kitchell.

Mark helped his dad run the 89th website

and they had been dragged into

the controversy around Obama.

- [Voiceover] Some of the emails had been pretty nasty,

so his first responses to me were really defensive,

but eventually when he understood

what I was trying to do

he agreed to help me find some veterans to talk to.

- [Voiceover] I didn't know it at the time,

but in the months to come

Mark would have a huge influence on my life.

So here I was, waiting for Mark

to help me find some veterans.

Trying to connect my pictures to April 1945.

I didn't know what else to do.

All I really knew was that my grandfather

had been at Ohrdruf and that the 89th Division

had liberated that camp,

but how do I find one soldier

in a war of millions?

[ominous music]

[projector reels clicking]

The Holocaust looms large

in our cultural memory.

Places like Buchenwald and Auschwitz

are permanently ingrained in the American Psyche.

Images of the suffering inflicted in those camps

have forever shaped how we remember

World War II.

Writers like Elie Wiesel and film makers

like Steven Spielberg have turned the memories

of the camps into a cultural language.

Something we all recognize immediately.

Yet, as I look at my grandfather's photos

I realize that I know nothing at all

about what he saw.

In fact, other than the general Holocaust images

of movies and documentaries

I can't say for certain what a soldier

like Don would have seen.

So I start looking for people who can help me.

- [Voiceover] It's already understood,

even when the Nazi's were,

before they came to power,

that the Nazi's wanted to set up

some kind of concentration camps.

- [Voiceover] Long before American soldiers

started fighting in Europe,

the Nazi's had been killing people

in concentration camps.

Geoffrey Megargee and Joseph White

are senior researchers at the Holocaust Museum.

They helped me fill in some details,

and we talk about their new book.

- The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos.

- I began in January of 2000.

And, at the time, we were told

that we were looking at probably about

between five and 7000 sites that we had to cover.

We then started our research,

and the numbers have been expanding ever since.

We're up to somewhere between,

well, probably close to 30,000 at this point.

The first volume covers the so-called "early camps"

that the Nazi's set up on an ad hoc basis in 1933,

and then that system evolved into

the series of main concentration camps.

The big names that most people know,

Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, and so on.

About 24 of those and about 900 sub-camps.

- Well, I would say that in some way

I sort of see the Holocaust experience

as shaping my entire work life

and issues and questions that I, you know, pursued.

Well, I think there are a number of processes

involved at which a central one

is a dehumanization and there are, again,

I think degrees of dehumanization,

but the ultimate one is when you see

the target as not,

as less than human,

not subject to the moral obligations

that one owes to other human beings.

In the cases of genocide, it seems to me

it's gone to the point where

there's a moral obligation to kill these people.

They are evil.

They are insects.

They're termites.

They need to be exterminated.

- July 1944, I was deported to Auschwitz.

Stayed in Auschwitz 'til October 23, 1944,

at which point I was shipped out

on a transport to a small satellite camp of

Buchenwald called Niederorschel,

not far from Ohrdruf.

They did not tattoo you on the way in.

They only tattooed you on the way out

if you managed to get out.

So I was tattooed when I left Auschwitz, not before.

- [Voiceover] I can't read it from this angle.

What does it say?

- B13174.

- [Voiceover] Thank you.

- We make the distinction between,

for example, a concentration camp

where a lot of people died.

Especially a places like Belsen

and Mauthausen where conditions became very bad

and Buchenwald, very bad toward the end of the war.

Versus those few sites, and the Museum

actually lists five of these at this point,

whose main purpose was to kill.

Where most of the people who arrived

were gassed immediately.

Those are Chemno, Bezec, Sobibor,

Treblinka, and Auschwitz-Birkenau.

[male foreign singing]

- [Voiceover] Other than Auschwitz,

I'd never heard any of the extermination camps,

and I had no idea what went on inside them

until my wife sent me an announcement

about a talk at a local synagogue.

- Today I had a discussion with my wife, and I was wondering

if I should bring my children here tonight with us.

On the one hand, I figured they're young,

I don't know if this is really the place for them to be.

And then I thought to myself, "When are they gonna

"have an opportunity to meet a man as Mr. Bialowitz.

- [Voiceover] Sobibor was an extermination camp

set up by the Germans to liquidate the ghettos.

Philip Bialowitz was among a small group of

slave laborer's kept at the camp, to work for the Nazis,

and his story is as heartbreaking as it is amazing.

In 1943, the 600 Jews at Sobibor rebelled,

killed the Nazi guards and ran for the woods.

By the end of the war, nearly 60 of them were still alive.

[German shouting]

- [Voiceover] The people of Eastern Europe faced terrible

hardships during the mid war years.

Under Stalin, the people of the Ukraine were starved

by the millions under Soviet collectivization policies.

In Germany, the Nazis began setting up concentration camps

as soon as they took power in 1933.

According to some historians, over 14 million people

died in the bloodlands of Europe,

controlled by Hitler and Stalin.

In the fall of 2011, as I'm doing my research,

the U.S. honors the 10th anniversary of the

terrorist attacks of September 11th.

Nearly 3,000 Americans died on that tragic day.

For the people of the bloodlands, there was a 9/11 every

single day, between 1933 and 1945.

For me, this is just too much to take in.

I want to understand the story of one soldier,

but instead I'm confronted with the mass murder

of millions of people.

How can I understand anything about Ohrdruf unless

I get into the one story I can grasp,

the story of my grandfather.

I need to map his path across Europe, and know his version

of the war to really, truly understand what he saw.

I'm not even sure where to begin,

and it all seems so overwhelming.

And then I meet Anna Rosmus.

- When I published my first book about resistance

and persecution, in Passau, my hometown in Bulvaria.

In '83, it garnered a lot of attention.

Locally, of course it was considered a scandal

more than anything else, for breaking a taboo,

for publishing things that I should not have published.

I was already a student at the University

when I wrote a nationwide essay contest,

and one of the topics, one of the five topics to choose from

was the pre-war years in my hometown.

So I started, literally, at zero, absolutely zero.

It was not only World War II per se that we hadn't

learned about, it was in particularly our hometown.

In hindsight, of course, I do understand why that was.

My hometown was also Hitler's hometown.

My hometown was also Adolf Eichmann's hometown.

This was a town where him and Goring was active.

This was a city where the big shots were at home,

long before Hitler took power.

I started to catch up, and before long I realized

that locals, with very few exceptions, were unwilling to

address the topic, were unwilling to answer my questions.

And I had to go outside of my hometown,

to look for evidence.

There was a movie about my early work,

and the movie premiered in America.

- [Voiceover] In 1991, director Michael Verhoeven made a

film about Anna's work, that showed how angry people were

with her, for talking about the Holocaust.

The English title of the film is The Nasty Girl.

- The German title is Das schreckliche Maädchen.

Straight forward translation would be The Terrifying Girl,

which was too terrifying and too

political for American taste.

It wouldn't sell.

The Miramax brothers told me in person,

that they had to look for something sexual,

so they came up with The Nasty Girl.

- [Voiceover] Anna's research eventually focused on the

soldiers who had liberated her town,

and she became a historian and activist,

working closely with veterans.

- On the tour in America, I had an opportunity

to meet former Passau Jews.

Now it happened that some of the former Passau Jews

were not only victimized during the Holocaust

and long before, they also returned to Passau,

as American soldiers.

- [Voiceover] Mark Kitchell has found some veterans

for me to talk to, and I'm ready to start putting together

Don's story of his time at war.

- [Voiceover] Yesterday, December seventh 1941,

a date which will live in infamy.

United States of America was

suddenly and deliberately attacked.

- [Voiceover] Don's older brother, Warren,

was already in the service when the war broke out.

- [Voiceover] He was in the Pacific.

I don't know anything about a division, I believe it was

the army, but I know he was at Pearl Harbor.

As he just always said he was at Pearl Harbor.

- [Voiceover] Pearl Harbor had shocked the nation,

and it must have hit really close to home,

to have their older brother in the midst of the attack.

So first Bob, and then Don, did what the rest of

the boys of their generation did.

- [Voiceover] Soldiers, sailors, and airmen are the

Allied Expeditionary Force.

You are about to embark upon the great crusade,

towards which we have striven these many months.

The eyes of the world are upon you.

The hopes and prayers of liberty loving people

everywhere march with you.

- [Voiceover] On June sixth of 1944, the largest invasion

in history took place on the beaches of Normandy.

As the allied soldiers pushed into the French countryside,

they took appalling casualties.

To fill the ranks, the army called up soldiers

who had been given non-combat assignments.

Many of them were in college.

It was joked that the rolling W was the smartest

division in the army.

- [Gene] We decided we were going to

join the paratrooper force.

Well, when we'd gotten down to the office to sign up,

he said, "Well, now you know that if you don't want

"to jump, you're gonna jump one way or the other."

He wasn't signed up for the paratrooper, so I told him,

I said, "Well, I'm very unhappy in this outfit,

"I want to get in an outfit where it's matching."

So I went in and I signed the document,

and 10 days later, I was transferred to

the 89th Infantry Division.

That was in July of 1944.

- [Voiceover] Over the next few weeks, I pieced together

the story of the 89th, as told by the veterans.

- [Donald] So I had volunteered, I did that,

then the next thing I know, I was taking a physical.

- [Ralph] Well I was in, of course, in the 89th division.

And infantry divisions in World War II were

divided into three regiments.

The 89th had 353, 354 and 355 regiments,

and I was attached to the 355th.

- [Ralph] We continued to be in the army,

when we were in college.

They said, "You're going back into the army,

"and you're all going into the infantry."

We were all told, "You're all privates,

"no matter what your rank might have been

"before you came to college."

We were put through the extensive training.

We were told that, "We want to be sure that you get

"the best training you can possibly get."

We were delayed a bit going to Europe, until they made the

89th division a full man division,

rather than a light division.

We shipped out of Boston, and it was in February.

The riggings were full of ice, it was cold as cold

can get.

Seas in the winter time get pretty vicious,

and we had a lot of sick boys on board.

We did not go to England, we landed in the heart of France.

- [Voiceover] We unloaded at midnight,

and we were sitting on top of trucks

that were carrying guns.

We almost froze to death going 25 miles to a camp.

We got to the camp, and there were--

It was, I'd say, nine inches of snow on the ground.

And there was a bunch of cots,

but there was no tents.

- [Voiceover] Well, I guess you know that the different

camps were called by cigarette brands.

Lucky Strike, Old Gold and Philip Morris,

they were all designated as camp names.

- [Voiceover] It seems that every veteran I talked to

has bad memories of Camp Lucky Strike.

- [Voiceover] They had put cots in the tents,

and the snow was all the way up to the top,

up to the cots.

So when you lay, went to lay,

you're slept on the snow really.

- [Voiceover] When I first went into my tent on the

first night, I took all the stuff out of my duffel bag,

all my my clothing, my overcoat and all of that.

- [Voiceover] Well, and the thing was that

quite a few of the guys lay on their cot

and put the blankets over them,

and wound up with frost bite from below.

- [Voiceover] As it turns out, I made a mistake.

For the last year, I'd been researching the 89th division,

and what they did during the war.

But recently, my mom found an old newspaper in the attic,

and it has my grandfather's obituary in it.

- He wasn't in the 89th division, he was in the 65th.

He was a platoon leader in B company,

of the 365 medical battalion.

I've been looking the wrong place for over a year.

I spend a few days frustrated,

until I find a guy named Bob Patton, who sells books online

about the 65th division.

When I email him about my grandfather, he sends me copies

of all the letters to the 65th newsletter

that my grandfather wrote.

And letters from other vets that mention him.

- [Voiceover] I was very interested to know that

someone else was hungry at Camp Lucky Strike.

For years I forgailed my family and friends with stories of

small frozen potatoes, cooked in water

with a large dash of gasoline.

Some KP grabbed the wrong five gallon can.

- With what?

I don't know, this has becoming him.

Our 365th medical battalion, snapshot sent by

Lieutenant Don Johnson.

Don G. Johnson.

And this would be him here.

He's just a little bit shorter than the other.

The 65th division was activated in July of 1943.

It was the last division to be activated in World War II.

In the middle of the ocean, as a result of the

Battle of the Bulge, our orders were changed,

and we were told that we were needed more on the mainland,

than we were needed in England, so therefore,

we were to dock in L'Heure.

- [Voiceover] The entire world awaited the fateful outcome,

as the armies of Nazi Germany lashed out in the

counter offensive in the Arv Den.

This was the Battle of the Bulge, the battle that came so

dangerously close to crushing allied

hopes for early victory.

- [Voiceover] The orders were changed to go

straight to France, because the anticipation

that we were going to be going into the Battle of the Bulge.

Fortunately for all of us, the Battle of the Bulge ended.

Well, everything was new to me, because I came from

a small town, I was drafted at 18, I entered.

Was inducted, I guess you call it, in those days at about

near the end of 1943.

And I just felt like I was a kid,

I didn't know where I was going

or what I was getting into.

- [Voiceover] With Bob's help, I meet Bud Waite,

a veteran of the 65th who lives a few miles

from me in a Boston suburb.

- [Bud] This one here, this is the bronze star.

Camp Lucky Strike was near Metz, kinda near Metz, France,

and it was horrible.

It was cold, it was muddy,

we only had one helmet full of fuel per day,

to keep us warm.

So that was probably, could be perhaps the worst two weeks

we ever spent, was those two weeks at Camp Lucky Strike.

- [Voiceover] It turns out that my research into the 89th

wasn't wasted time at all.

Both the 89 and 65th division spent the winter

at Camp Lucky Strike.

The 65th, along with my grandfather,

arrived on January 22nd, and the 89th got

there two days later.

They would fight side by side across

Europe for most of the spring.

- It took several days to get us from Camp Lucky Strike

over to the Easter port, around the Metz area,

and that was when we were really committed to hard combat

with the enemy just across the street, in several cases.

- When we first went into combat, it was in the middle of

the night, dark of the night.

And as we advanced, we were advancing by the light

of the burning buildings.

We were moving pretty fast for a while, and then we'd run

into stiff resistance, and then it would kinda

clear out a little bit, and then we'd run into some more.

Unfortunately, we saw lots of German soldiers

dead on the ground as we were advancing,

and stuff like that.

- I almost tell you, if I had a choice as far as

the service was concerned, I would have been a

conscientious objector, because I did not want

to shoot any Germans.

I did not have any desire to kill anybody.

- I guess we had no,

we had little feelings or something.

People ask me, "Did you kill people?

"Did you kill soldiers?"

And honestly, I can not say if I did or not.

I fired at them, and at distances and so forth.

- [Voiceover] The 65th entered combat on

March seven, near Sarlaturn.

Five days later, the 89th joined them on the line in

the nearby town of Trier.

- [Voiceover] Well, unless you'd been there,

you couldn't understand it, really.

It's...

You really...

Well, you can't let it bear on your mind too much,

that you might get killed,

but you do give that some thought.

- [Voiceover] It was unnerving to the fact that you just

didn't know what you were getting into,

or what you're up against.

So, you just went and did what you could do.

- [Voiceover] As I talk with the veterans about their time

at war, the one story I keep coming back to

is that of Ralph Rush.

So when he invites me to his house on a small island

near Seattle, I jump at the chance to meet him in person.

We spend several days digging clams

and talking about politics.

He treats me like a grandson, and I'm glad I made the trip.

As we sit on his deck, I'm struck by how

beautiful the scenery is.

Such a contrast to the story Ralph has to tell.

- I was with an I&R platoon,

which is Intelligence and Recognizance,

Headquarters Company.

We began to move fairly rapidly towards the front.

We got into some pretty heavy fighting.

And our job was to find out the best we could,

where the heavy material was.

Well, you're scared to death.

You're frightened of the situation,

you're frightened that you're not gonna be able to

do your required job.

You worry about your buddies.

We had a good camaraderie.

My jeep driver was Neil Cramer, and he would say to me,

when I got out, he'd say, "Okay Ralph,

"you son of a bitch, remember I've got a wife and three

"kids at home, and don't you get us into any trouble."

[majestic instrumental music]

- [Voiceover] With one terrific blow, they have begun

the last great battle in the West.

Now, they will unload, deploy and drive forward

for their objectives.

The crossroads, the bridges, the strong points,

which might hinder the land armies,

thrusting along behind them.

- [Voiceover] The Rhine crossing was a real tough one.

There were several companies that were instructed

to go across first.

The company E and company B lost tremendous amount

of men, crossing the Rhine.

The Germans had positioned themselves under the coverts

of a number of the roads.

Then they had excellent guns, 20 millimeter guns and 88s,

that shoot almost flat.

I think we almost lost all of E company, crossing.

Very few of 'em made it across, because they were just

blown out of the water.

It was a terrible day for the 89th.

I think they lost--

I don't know how many men they lost,

but we lost a--

A lot of great guys.

- [Voiceover] Anna sent me this photo.

It shows medics in company B tending to the wounded

of the river crossing.

I'm not sure if Don's in this picture, but it shows the

kind of gruesome work that a medic would have

done in combat, and it's the closest I have to a picture

of Don at war.

- Yes, we all remember the Rhine River real well.

And that is where we were engaged from that particular

point on, chasing the Germans.

- What many of the soldiers envisioned themselves doing,

after a few weeks in combat only,

was to take Germany's capital.

It would have been a trophy in their eyes.

Of course, many of those very young soldiers never looked

at the statistics at that time.

They had no clue how heavily Berlin was defended.

They did not really want to picture the 65th infantry

division's casualties, should they be sentenced,

more or less, to capture the capital.

Eisenhower did not send them to Berlin, but ordered them to

shift course and come straight toward Bavaria from there on.

Now as they took this particular turn, instead of marching

into Berlin going South, at that corner,

the first very large concentration camp on

German soil was discovered.

[fast-paced piano music]

- [Voiceover] Before the war, the German town of Ohrdruf

was best known for music.

Beethoven had lived there, and Johann Sebastian Bach

had composed some of his best known pieces in the city.

But music wasn't on the minds of the men of a small

recognizance platoon, as they moved into the town.

- The fourth army division was spearheading that effort,

crossing Germany and ending up there,

along with the 89th Infantry Division.

- It was early in the morning

when we looked up, and on the top of this hill,

there was a guard tower, the first thing I spotted,

'cause I was out front.

Then compound, obviously, of some distance.

And we got up a little closer, and there were a few shots

thrown at us, and we threw a few shots

back with the 50 caliber.

There weren't any more shots then.

So we continued on, climbed the side of the hill and up to

this compound, and we opened it, being very careful because

we had, had a few shots thrown at us.

And here, laying on the ground in a circle in front of us,

10 or 12 soldiers, either allied, British--

- [Voiceover] And there's one American in the bunch,

and he was from Gardner, Mass--

Says, "American flyer from Garnder, Massachusetts,"

and I believe that I--

I believe his last name was Wagner.

Somebody was trying to make a statement, I think.

Each had been shot behind the ear and were dead.

There's no--

None of them were alive.

That made us mad as hell.

And then we saw the poor, bedraggled,

guys that had been the inmates of the camp.

We realized we discovered something that

was different than usual.

- [Voiceover] There had been rumors of camps,

but what Ralph and his platoon discovered,

was something that no allied soldier had ever expected.

Ohrdruf was the first camp liberated by the allies.

- I did not go to Ohrdruf, I did not have the

opportunity to go to Ohrdruf.

I had to stay in battalion quarters,

so all the rest of them could go to Ohrdruf.

But they came back and told me all about it,

and all the things that they saw there.

- I don't imagine that the people who actually liberated

them realized that there was anything like that,

until they actually got there.

That's my own thoughts on it.

They knew that it might be bad, but maybe not anywhere

near as bad as it was.

- [Voiceover] As I remember it when I went in,

there were a few people staggering around, and how they were

able to stand up, I don't know, because it looked like

the skin was just stretched over their bones.

- [Voiceover] Now those bodies that you saw lying there,

I was looking at, I walked right over those bodies.

And that building wasn't over 50 feet.

The building stored--

Where they had bodies stack about five high, six high.

It wasn't over 50 feet from where those bodies

were lyin' on the ground.

- The bodies were being taken from the live shed,

or the dead shed.

There was a large pit with steel railroad tracks.

- [Voiceover] On the North side of the camp,

going down the hill a little bit, they had rail--

They had looked like small railroad railings,

up about two and a half, three feet off the ground,

close together, and there was all kinds of

burned body parts around there.

There'd be an arm laying over at the side,

that's hardly burn, that are just charcoal, you know.

And a head with the hair still on it,

and all that kind of stuff.

- We couldn't believe man's inhumanity to man, it just...

Just shocked us, literally shocked us to the point

we couldn't believe what we saw.

- [Voiceover] The commanding officer of--

I don't know who was our regiment or company,

but anyway, I don't recall his name,

went into town and got a hold of the mayor,

and brought him out to the Ohrdruf camp.

And when he saw it, he was just--

I could tell that he wasn't puttin' anything on,

he was just completely shocked.

And from what I understand Matthew,

when he went back to his home, which was down a ways from

the camp, he committed suicide.

- I had one chap come up to me, asking me to provide him

with my gun, and of course I couldn't do that,

and I told him no.

The German SS who were running the camp had taken a lot of

the clothing of the inmates, and changed clothes with them.

He would know who they were,

and I would not.

And he said, again, "Will you give me a gun?"

You have to take a chance, you have to make a decision that

balance what you think is right, and what's wrong.

And I came to the conclusion that he was telling the truth.

- [Voiceover] As the Americans searched the compound,

they found a number of dead SS guards dressed in the

same clothes as the prisoners.

- Actually there were two orders of sub camps,

but the big order sub camp, which would be the one that

was liberated by the Americans in April 1945,

was set up in November '44.

It was called S3, that was its code name,

and what it was intended for, was a huge labor camp

for outfitting the basement of the Millburn Castle,

purpose of which was to create a massive communications

center for the Nazi regime, in the event of the relocation

out of Berlin.

It was particularly for the--

Kind of a high command communications center.

- [Voiceover] What the soldiers found at Ohrdruf,

was a camp that was nearly empty.

As the allied troops moved into Germany,

the Nazis had evacuated many of the camps,

and forced the prisoners onto death marches,

to the center of the camp at Buchenwald.

At Neter Rochelle, that was the fate of Steven Fenves.

- On first of April, 1945, we were marched out,

and 10 days later, we arrived in Buchenwald.

I knew that things were different, the chimney was

not smoking, the inner gate was open,

a quarantine area.

And so they marched us in, and pointed us to the barracks,

and I collapsed.

Late the following day,

I think it was early afternoon, I'm not sure of the

exact time, people shook me awake to tell me that

the Americans had arrived, and we ran up the steep slope.

We were yelling, screaming, waving to the armored carriers,

and jeeps, and tanks.

- This was something of tremendous importance for,

I think, especially, the American army.

We may not have known what we were fighting for,

but once we saw the camps,

we knew what we were fighting against.

- [Voiceover] On the wall outside the

Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC,

is a block of text.

Of the millions of words written about the Holocaust,

they've chosen those of Dwight Eisenhower.

- [Dwight] The things I saw beg a description.

The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation,

cruelty, and bestiality were so overpowering.

I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in

a position to give first hand evidence of these things,

if ever in the future there develops a tendency to

charge these allegations to propaganda.

- Because it was the first major concentration camp

in Germany, Eisenhower was there.

He seized, very wisely, that opportunity.

Sent all the men available to take a look at the atrocities,

to witness what has happened, and to get a mental image

what they are fighting against.

- [Voiceover] The murder mill at Ohrdruf

brings out the full horror and bestiality of the Nazi scum.

And General Eisenhower, a man hardened by the blood

and shock of war, seems appalled at

these unbelievable sights.

Accompanied by General Bradley on his revolting mission,

and also by General Patton, hard boiled yet visibly moved,

the supreme commander sees demonstrations

of the torture racks.

- General Patton, when he arrived there,

the odors and such were so horrible, that he went behind

the barracks and upchucked.

And he was embarrassed that he couldn't handle it.

- [Voiceover] In the week after Ohrdruf was liberated,

the American soldiers uncovered several more camps.

On April 11th, they liberated the infamous

Dora- Mittelbau at Nordhausen.

And later that same day, they uncovered the

huge camp at Buchenwald.

- Many of the men in the 65th Infantry Division who

were available, not immediately on frontline duty,

did go to one of these concentration camps.

Most did go to Dora-Mittlebau.

Some may have ended up in Ohrdruf.

[ominous music]

[camera clicking]

[muffled voices over radio]

- God, yes.

Some of these pictures that your

grandfather had are remarkable.

They show some evidence that I didn't show.

Can't believe it, still can't believe it.

- The ones that are most upsetting are

the ones where they're--

Not the corpses, but the ones that are still alive.

The walking corpses.

- Some of these pictures I have never seen before.

Your grandfather was very good at taking these pictures.

- [Voiceover] Judy Cohen is the director of the

Holocost Museum's photo archives.

And Jacek Nowakowski is the Senior Curator,

who created the permanent exhibit.

I've arranged to talk with them about Don's photos,

before I donate them to their collection.

- This is definitely Ohrdruf--

- [Jacek] Ohrdruf, right.

- [Judy] Because we have the tracks,

and this is what you saw when you were

in the exhibition today.

- [Jacek] When you enter this.

- You were looking at it from the other angle,

but it's the same tracks with the bodies stacked

as cord wood and then burned.

- [Jacek] It's a small stack of bodies.

- Um.

- [Jacek] That also could be Ohrdruf.

- Yeah.

- [Jacek] Yeah, it's...

- Hard to tell.

- [Jacek] It says, "survivors," that's really difficult

to say where it is.

- Look at this little girl,

I just noticed her for the first time.

- [Jacek] Yeah.

- I wonder how she got there, and what she's doing.

- [Jacek] Here's the survivor camp doctors, in 16.

- This is the same person but

without the doctors.

- [Jacek] "A survivor still fit for some work."

Huh.

- Okay, here we're moving into the ones

we talked about before.

- [Jacek] It says, "New inmates at a camp,

"still in some kind of shape."

- And these are the ones that we think look

more like Mount Hausen.

As you can see, the quarry in the background.

- The men, usually, can not distinguish to this day,

which one of those concentration camps

that they actually were at.

Many, of course, did not have a lot of time,

so it was a matter of minutes, maybe an hour,

that they took out of their busy frontline duty,

to take a look at the atrocities.

These pictures, none the less, haunt these men.

Many of them talk about Buchenwald or Ohrdruf,

whether it actually is that camp,

or a neighboring concentration camp.

- [Voiceover] I wish I could claim some

greater share of actually liberating these camps.

I was rather small potatoes at the time.

I did see two more camps before I came home.

One prior to clean up, and Dachau after.

The memory of Ohrdruf, particularly,

is engraved upon my memory.

I keep the pictures close at hand, and have made a point

of looking at them frequently.

- We were liberating, there was two, three, four

or five of 'em a day, running into 'em,

and different people running into different camps

and everything, as far as that goes.

As we approached the building at Mauthausen,

there was this great wall that surrounded it with the gates.

We were aware of something that was different,

and that was the odor, that was, oh miles,

several miles from the camp itself.

And that odor was the odor of death, it was an unusual odor

that once you smell it, you won't forget it.

- It's stuck in my mind, I can see them now,

as I look back there.

- Oh, when I came back from the war,

I was tired, tired of war,

tired of the things that we had seen.

Washed it pretty well, the war and my

experiences out of my...

Well, couldn't get it out of my mind,

but out of my thinking.

- This is so horrible, that you get your mind on this

and sometimes you wake up at four o' clock in the morning,

or two o'clock in the morning, with this thing

on your mind, you can't get it off.

- I didn't talk, not even to my family,

until the early 70s,

when I did have some serious psychological problems.

- [Voiceover] After all this,

what do I know about my grandfather?

All of this work and research has let me walk in his shoes

for just one day, the day he visited the

concentration camp at Ohrdruf.

I can see now the fear, the horror,

and the guilt that the soldiers must have felt.

How do you tell your wife or your daughter

about these terrible things?

I can see why he kept them from the family.

And after a while, how that silence became easy,

easier than digging up the past.

- I was convinced the first photo that you see,

when you go to the fourth floor, you start at Ohrdruf,

because that's the first one that was found.

I was just convinced that one of the people in it was

my father, because it--

I could name a whole bunch of different characteristics,

that made it think like my father.

- You know, we start the story with those photographs.

This is how the United States learned about the atrocities.

So our story goes this way, this is how you learn about

the atrocities, and then we try to explain how did

it happen, what happened,

and what were the aftermath of this.

- [Voiceover] So you begin your story with Ohrdruf,

the first camp liberated.

- Yes.

- [Voiceover] Touring the Holocaust Memorial Museum,

I'm reminded of the power of images.

We take pictures to remember times of meaning,

whether they're birthdays, or weddings,

or maybe an indescribable horror.

Don took his pictures as a way of remembering what he saw.

And even if he never told their story to the family,

he wanted them shared with the world.

Their memory might have died with him,

but instead, I found them.

It took me a long time to meet the people who could

help me understand, and to collect the stories of

Ralph Rush and Bud Waite,

of Steven Fenvas, and Anna Rosmus,

of my family and all of us who've come later,

looking for answers.

I could have put Don's photos in a box,

and forgotten about them, like I did for 16 years.

But I now know that it's been my responsibility

to bring them to this museum,

so others can know what he saw.

It's been my duty to keep his story alive,

since the first day I heard of these 16 photographs.

[solemn instrumental music]

[projector reel clicking]