War Memoir of John L. DeGroot (ii)

How many miles we were able to cover on one day was entirely determined by what we ran into. The furthest advance made in one day by my group was approximately 60 miles. (This occurred in France after the St Lo break-through.) When we arrived at our destination, we would have to find a place for our entire unit to camp. 

When we finally got into German homeland territory, we no longer bivouacked out in the open, we commandeered houses. The back of the German army had been broken. There was no longer any organized resistance. We did, on some days when we were spearheading, run into regular German army troops (the "Wehrmacht" as it was called). We really had no quarrel with the regular German army. These men were in the army because the SS officers drove them. Without the SS, they offered no resistance. We would run into hundreds and even groups of 1000 of these troops holding their arms and hands high, their guns above their heads, but we were groups of 75 to 100 men, and had no way to take these men into captivity. For them, the war was over, so we told them to keep on marching and that someone back there would eventually take care of them and feed them because we had no supplies to feed that large a group. 

This is the formation we used from the Rhine Valley all the way to Leipzig on the Elbe River where we waited for several days for the Russians to advance far enough to meet us at the pre-arranged place (pre-arranged by Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt, at an earlier meeting.) It is in this fashion that we advanced through the German countryside, through cities like Bonn, Kassell, Lipstadt, Marburg, and others, until we reached the city of Nordhausen. This was a city of some 100,000 people. It had never been considered a major atrocity center such as Dachau, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Belzen, Dresden, and many others. 

[Highlighted line marks approximate course taken by DeGroot's unit of the First Army. Starting far left, Liege, Belgium, where major fighting at the Battle of the Bulge took place; then Aachen, where they'd been before the Bulge; then Bonn, then Marlburg, and finally up to Nordhausen, far right hand top corner, a distance of approximately 300 miles.]

The city of Nordhausen was, however, a major atrocity, by our calculations. Our group was spearheading this day, and we had advanced some 10 to 15 miles beyond the former spearheading group. We came into this city from the west and as we approached the city, on the outskirts we came across a huge prisoner of war camp.

[Today, the KZ Mittelbau Dora Memorial commemorates those many thousands who died at the camp Mr. DeGroot and his GI buddies discovered.]

These people were "arbiters," or workers for the Reich. We found some 22,000 prisoners here from many nations, probably all of the countries of Europe were represented here.  The people were very hungry. They had been on very reduced rations for a long time and had gotten nothing to eat in the past three days because of the breaking up of the Reich. 

We had no supplies with us to feed 22,000 hungry people, so we opened the gates of the prison, set them free, and told them to go out and find their own food. They did, by ransacking the city of anything and everything they could find. 

There was a group of about 30-35 boys who did not leave. They were Dutch boys as their chest flags indicated. I struck up a conversation with them in Dutch, fed them and befriended them. (See addendum for copies of three letters from these Dutch boys.) Since way back in Belgium, when we began running into German-speaking people, one of my tasks was to accompany our group commander when we approached German people and act as his interpreter. I could handle the Dutch language quite well, and I was the only one in our group. 

After we had taken care of this situation at the prisoner of war camp and left the troops in charge, the officer, other troops, and I went on to consolidate the rest of the city of Nordhausen. 

We then came to the north end of the city, because we had been informed that this was the location of a "buzz bomb" factory. We found the factory, but we also found much, much more. 

This factory was also a prison and the prisoners here worked in the factory on most menial tasks. In most instances, entire families were imprisoned here. 

[Buzz Bomb factory railroad yards, after some Allied bombardment.]