The War Memoir of John L. DeGroot (v)

Nordhausen in the Nazi glory days

The 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. 

Being engineers, we had the necessary equipment to dig a mass grave, to load and haul bodies to the place of interment and to actually bury the bodies, but this appointed Colonel would not hear of this. He issued an immediate command to have every single able-bodied person, anyone who could walk, of any age, to come to the atrocity site NOW, the people of Nordhausen were herded into the execution area. There he gave the people shovels and sent them to an open field about ¼ to ½ a mile away and made them dig a huge hole to serve as a grave. 

Then these same people began hauling bodies, they carried 3500-5000 bodies the distance from the camp to the burial site, They were fed, but there was no let up in burial time; the people worked straight through until every single body was taken care of. They carried them on stretchers, on boards, and in blankets; they began carrying four persons to a stretcher, but the Colonel soon cut that down to two persons to a stretcher. Of course the carrier's shoulders would soon become sore and they would put cloths between shoulder and stretcher, but if the Colonel saw it, he would jerk this cloth away, give a good swift kick to the rear, and send them hurrying on their way. 

After all bodies had been buried, about another 24-30 hours, the burial was completed and all bodies had been covered. The covering was also done by the burial detail. It was told to us, that every able-bodied man, woman, and young person was rounded up in this process and that the burgomeister (mayor) of the city, as well as the city council were all delegated to work on this effort. 

This was a gruesome detail, but it served good purposes. Had the people of Nordhausen not been used, as they were, there very likely would have been smaller groups doing this because what we had seen earlier made us so angry we could easily have killed. So punishing the Germans in the way the Colonel did took some of the explosiveness out of us and the situation. 

As gruesome and as large as this atrocity in Nordhausen, Germany was, and as angry as it made us, we later realized that this really was a small part of the whole of the atrocities the Germans imposed on the people of Europe--the Jews first, but later it involved most of Germany's neighbors, and finally any and all who didn't follow them in their thinking and in their devious ways. I do not know if there were other Nordhausen type atrocities centers. I would not be surprised if there were others--others beside the large notorious ones that is.