Stuff in the Basement: The War Memoir of John L. DeGroot (iv)

Saturday, February 06, 2021

The War Memoir of John L. DeGroot (iv)

By the time we arrived at the buzz bomb factory and the cremating furnaces, they (the furnaces) were all cooled down. The Dutch Jew I mentioned earlier, who was very emaciated but still able to talk and get around a bit, took us on a tour of all the facilities on this compound. He first took us into the mountain where the factory was located. Once we got into the factory properly, the place looked like a real factory with assembly lines, piles and stacks of parts and supplies, and workers' stations.

Because this was a very secret project, the German people lived right there as well. Only the German people themselves could work on assembly, therefore the children and the families were present. The prisoners were there to do the menial tasks; keep everything clean, feed the workers, do their cooking and laundry and hundreds of other tasks.

The prisoners here were rejects from arbiters prison, people who could no longer handle a full days work in the fields. When they could no longer carry their load here, they were moved to another building on the compound. This building kind of looked like a hospital and it smelled like one too.

The bodies would come in a south door, go into a room on the right. In this room we found eight or ten butcher shop types of tables, and the bodies were searched for any and all items that could be of any value--watches, rings, necklaces, etc. Then all of the teeth were knocked out to salvage any and all fillings that could be found. After final stripping, these nude bodies were stacked up in this room to await cremation, and lime covered the bodies. There was no odor of any kind here except a mild deodorant, Lysol-type antiseptic smell.

At this point we were taken by our "guide" to a third building that looked like a large barn or machine shed. This building was equipped with a large room and a smaller one. In the large room, people were herded in by the tens, the fifties, the hundreds, and the thousands. They were made to take off all their clothes, put them on neat piles, and then told to go into the smaller room where they were to get showers or to be deloused. Instead, when the outside doors were closed and locked, the gas jets were turned on and the people were gassed to death (men, women, and children). Then the doors were opened and the "prisoners" had another job--to load the bodies on carts, roll them over to the "hospital" building, and their bodies too would go through the butcher-block room and the lime room and await their turn for cremation.

These two sources of bodies kept the furnaces going twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Our "guide" did not know how many bodies had been cremated here, but he thought many tens of thousands*. He related that the ones coming in for gassing came in by the train loads, truck loads, or in huge columns, walking from a rail head or other kinds of depots.

I related earlier that on the South edge of the city of Nordhausen, Germany, we found the most visible atrocity. This is not stated to minimize the others or to suggest that the others weren't graphic. I am really relating that Nordhausen, Germany was the atrocity, all of it together, but that it was actually found and seen in three parts. Here we found an estimated 3,500-5,000 bodies, many just lying where they had been killed and many of them piled up in huge piles as one would pile cords of wood awaiting the circle saw to reduce logs to kindling.

By the time we came across this killing field, about 24 to 30 hours had elapsed since the executions and it was high time to tend to these bodies. Very soon another army unit came in and they were delegated the task of burning the remains of these people because the threat of disease and even plague became more real with each passing hour.

This burial group was headed by an American army colonel. He was of German descent and could handle the German language 1st class and was determined that the German people of Nordhausen would not forget this atrocity.