The War Story of John L. DeGroot (iii)

[It is beyond human imagination what Mr. DeGroot and the Allied troops found at Nordausen and other camps. Here were thousands of dead.]

There seemed to be some sort of hierarchy in the prison population. The prisoners usually came to this prison when they were no longer able to fulfill work requirements as field workers. When they got to the point of not being able to fulfill these requirements, they would die and would be placed in the building nearby, housing the cremating furnaces. There were three furnaces located here, and they were kept going full time. 

One of the last tasks many of these prisoners would perform before they themselves were sick or already dead, was to serve on the stretcher committee, which involved placing bodies on metal stretchers and pushing into the crematorium for cremation. 

It was at this location that the officer and I became acquainted with a young Dutch Jew. He claimed that if we had been two days later in coming, he would have been a victim of the furnace too. He was alive and could still carry on a good conversation in Dutch in spite of his emaciation (more on that later). 

The officer, some of our troops, and I then went to "see" the rest of the city. On the south end of this very city, we came across the worst of the atrocities we were to see in Nordhausen, Germany. 

It was here that we found approximately 3,500-5,000 bodies of men, women, and children. This group was evidently considered to be "real" enemies of the Reich. They had been killed, murdered, and executed by every conceivable means. Some were shot, others bayoneted, hung, beaten, clubbed, nails driven into legs, arms, necks, heads, and bodies, wires tied to the nails, and executed with electricity. I remember seeing one woman's emaciated body that had given birth just before death, or just after, the baby still laying in its birth position, also dead by clubbing.

We were told that this group of people had been murdered by SS troops as their last act of malice before the SS troops left the city of Nordhausen. We later captured some of these "troops." They were generally youngsters of 14, 15, and 16 years old, Hitler's jugends, who had been trained from babyhood to do the hate work of the Reich: "Train up a child in the way he should go."

Later on in our conversation amongst one another, talk would eventually, but always come to the atrocities we had seen. All of us U.S. soldiers were incensed by what we had seen. Without exception, and to a man, we all voiced our inner feelings. We could have gone down the street of this city, many others in Germany, with guns drawn, blasting to right and left and not even blinking at mowing down man, woman and child in retaliation for the horrible things we had seen. 

What we had seen here was many times more hideous and gruesome than anything we had seen in actual battle. The battle scenes were expected, but this was inhumane and to this day remains in my mind as a day in infamy for the Third Reich and really for all of humanity. 

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(More tomorrow.)