Letter from Tom

[Transcribed from the original English.]

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Somewhere in Germany, 20 April 1945

Darling Claire: 

I want to write you tonight about one of the most moving experiences I have ever had, as well as of the most horrible thing I have ever seen. Something that has cemented my anti-Fascist convictions more solidly than anything I have ever seen or head of or read of before. 

I managed to get a ride on a tip for some distance from here to visit a recently liberated German concentration camp. It was the Buchenwald Concentration Camp near Weimar, in central Germany. I’ll try to jot down while it’s fresh in my mind some to the things I saw there. With the idea not of pleasing you, for what I saw there was really too horrible to be seen by any decent human being. But with the thought that as my wife you would want to share with me my most horrible as well as my pleasant experiences. And because I think the rest of the family and our friends should know from personal observations what bestial things the Nazis have done, and what a dreadful menace they have been to the people all over the world. I think the details of this place canbe mentioned without violating censorship regulations. The press has seen the place, and I shouldn’t be surprised if the place receives some publicity in the next few weeks. General Patton has said he wants as many of his troops as possible to see this place 

The Buchenwald Camp is located in a dense beech forest on a high hill a few miles from the large town of Weimar, birthplace of the Weimar Republic. IT seemed to be about one half by one quarter mile in dimensions. Surrounded by a high barbed-wire fence which was charged with electricity so that anyone who tried to cross it would be immediately electrocuted. Outside the wire were grim wooden log forts with protruding machine guns pointed toward all sides of the camp. Inside the fence were scores of long low wooden, windowless barracks. 

Before we got to the gate we passed many of the freed prisoners wandering around in a dazed sort of way trying to grasp the meaning of their new freedom. 9 days ago the Nazis were planning to exterminate the entire camp when our Third Army troops broke in and saved the more than 20,000 prisoners. An MP stopped us and showed us an ancient living skeleton lying in the grass along the edge of the road. He was a prisoner too weak and sick to walk up the hill to the Camp. We made room for him and helped him into our vehicle. I talked to him in German as we drove up to the Camp. He was a Hungarian, only 49 years old, although he looked at least 75. He had been a professor of economics in Budapest. Now he’s a broken wreck of skin and bones, living his last weeks. He pointed to a great gap in his mouth. The Nazis had pulled out his teeth for the gold in them. Then he broke down and weeped uncontrollably. 

At the Camp entrance (iron grilled gates under a great rustic logged tower surmounted with machine guns) I turned this man over to a committee of freed prisoners running the place, under the command of an American officer. Then I asked for an English 

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Speaking guide. 

In a few minutes a young and very pleasant Dutchman camp up to serve as our guide around Buchenwald. He had been an assistant professor of biology at the University of Amsterdam before the war; he was picked up by the Nazis because he belonged to an illegal Dutch patriotic society. He had spent the last 4 ½ years of his life at Buchenwald and knew the place thoroughly. He had been relatively well treated and had been able to preserve his health. He had been engaged to a Dutch girl at the outbreak of the war. A year or two after he had been imprisoned he got a rare letter from her telling him that she was breaking their engagement. Just before the Americans liberated the Camp an order had been issued for his immediate execution, since he knew too much about the place. He only escaped by stealing the clothes off a dead French prisoner, shaving off all his hair, and pretending that he was a French prisoner. 

We entered the Camp amid a throng of freed prisoners going in and out, American soldiers and officers, war correspondents, etc. We came into a great courtyard full of wasted human beings from every corner of Europe. Thousands upon thousands of gaunt faces dragging around rags of clothing on spindly legs. Faces yellow and sunken. People limping from the advanced peripheral neuritis of prolonged malnutrition. Most wore small red triangular badges. (I’m sending you as a souvenir the badge of our guide.) Red badges meant prisoners of war or political prisoners, and 90% of all the inmates wore them. Each bore a black letter. R for Russian, F for French, N for Dutch, T for Czech, J for Jew, P for Pole. A few wore violet triangles; they were said to be religious fanatics or conscientious objectors. A few wore pink patches. They were ordinary German criminals, mostly homosexuals and murderers. Over the barracks there fluttered in the bright April sunlight flags erected by the freed men. The Stars and Stripes. Many buildings flew the Hammer and Sickle. And there were several Czechoslovakian and French flags. 

Our guide first showed us two different types of apparatus of torture set up in the big courtyard. A rack to which the prisoners were tied face down and frequently beaten to death. And a cross from which recalcitrant prisoners were hung by their hands with their feet only a few inches above the ground. Then we went to a building which served as a combination execution chamber and incinerator. There were big holes in the plaster of the walls from which the prisoners had recently torn hated hooks from which the men were hanged to death. There were 8 great ovens. Several still held partially burned skeletons, incinerated ten days ago while still alive! 

We then learned that the normal capacity of the Camp was 50,000 prisoners. There are now a little more than 20,000 still living there, and in spite of adequate food now and medical care are dying at the rate of 50 a day from the effects of long starvation, disease and torture. 

We went outside and there right out on the ground with 

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People milling around, lay a heap of about 20 bodies. Those who had just died and no one had had time to identify them or bury them. The most ghastly corpses I have ever seen. Greyish-yellow baggy skin, bones protruding through, legs swollen with the edema of starvation. Near them but somewhat separated lay two blue bodies, young fat men with bestial features, blue and cyanotic. They were two fo the SS guards of the Camp who had been caught the day before in Weimar dressed in civilian clothes. They were recognized by their former prisoners and arrested. During the night they had hung themselves. A twisted Russian walked up to them and spat on them. I felt like vomiting. 

We walked on and learned of the life of the prisoners. What did they eat? Here is what I was told by our guide, and then later by a Belgian doctor. During all these years there the ration for one man had been: a sixth a loaf of bread (200 grams) a day, plus a liter (quart) of turnip or potato soup a day, plus a half a liter of ersatz coffee a day. Once a week each man received 50 grams (an ounce and a half) of sausage, 10 grams of margarine, and a spoonful of marmalade. There was no other food except a few Red Cross packages which were allowed to come in. And the Belgian doctor later told me that those packages literally meant the difference between life and death for thousands of prisoners who have lived to be freed. What was a day at Buchenwald like? Roll call winter and summer at 4 a.m. Work from 6 until 12 , and from 12:30 to 5 in winter and 6 in summer. Then rollcall from the end of work often to as late as 10 p.m. The prisoners worked on farms around the Camp, in a quarry where hundreds died from sheer physical exhaustion, in a rifle manufacturing factory, and in a plant making parts for the V-1 flying bomb. 

We walked on to visit several typical living quarters. On the way I took lots of pictures of the prisoners (and of the gruesome things I have described above). And gave away all the cigarettes and soap and chocolate I had on me to the ravenous prisoners. When they saw you give a man something they came running and struggling from all directions like wild animals, a look of the most ecstatic delight in their eyes as you handed them one cigarette. Some lay on the ground too weak to rise and pleaded in high-itched, whining, tearful voices: “Shokolade, Kamerad, Shokolate! Zucker, Kamerad!” I learned from our Dutch guide as we went along that there were many German “Bolsheviks” imprisoned here, as well as people of Nazi-overrun nations. There had been a few British, and some American fliers. At least half of these had been shot here for the “crime” of bombing German cities. I asked who was treated worst and our guide told us the Jews got far the worst treatment; then the Russian prisoners of war. 

We passed through several of the barracks. Windowless and dark, and filled with the most overwhelming, nauseating odor of death and human ordure. Each wall had three tiers of shelves. These shelves extended some 8 feet back from the corridor to the wall, and were separated by partitions every six feet. In each of these six foot sections lived six men. No bedding, no straw, no blankets. Feces everywhere, because almost all the prisoners had and still have dysentery. 

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Then our tour took us to the “experimental” hospital. Here crack Nazi doctors experimented on living human beings against their will. Mostly they have the patients typhus in efforts to develop a vaccine of their own against the disease. Hundreds were said to have died of this artificially produced typhus. The operations performed are said to have been chiefly new types of surgical procedures on the stomach. The laboratories of this hospital were beautifully equipped. The finest instruments, refrigerators, flasks, culture media, all spotlessly clean. And contrasting incongruously with the squalor of the rest of the camp. There was a little pathological museum, full of pathological specimens from autopsied victims of the experiments. There were a number of death masks of former prisoners. I examined them. The inscription on one read: “Polish Jew, aged 38”. Another said “Aryan from Breslau, married a Jewess, aged 52”. Another was of a Negro, whom a prisoner who had known him said was a former African Negro scholar who had traveled over the whole world. Then there were collections of human skin bearing artistic tattoos. Our guide said this hobby was stimulated by the arrogant wife of the brutal camp commander. She used to attend the inspections of the prisoners for lice. They were naked. Whenever she saw a nice tattoo, she took the prisoner’s number. He was shortly killed, his skin removed to serve as an exhibit in the future war criminal trials. As further proof of this story, our guide pulled out of his pocket a 3 by 3 inch tanned section of a human breast bearing a brilliant and intricate tattoo. He had stolen it from the museum. 

There’s ten times this much to tell, but it’s very late and I must finish. We went on to see the kennels where the SS guards kept 45 large and ferocious dogs specially trained to hunt down escaped prisoners and tear them to pieces. This they did on numerous occasions. Then to a huge indoor riding school built for the Commander. Here 7000 prisoneres of war were shot during a very few days when the camp was getting too crowded a few years back. Then back to the rock quarry, to see huge miner’s railway carts which the prisoners had to haul up a long steep incline by hand. 

Finally we visited the hospital outside the camp which had been used for the SS guards. During the last few days the prisoners had taken it over and organized their own hospital there. In it are several hundred of the most seriously ill prisoners. There I met a very fine Belgian doctor, educated at the Univ. of Montreal. He was called to active duty in the Belgian Army in 1939, captured by the Germans in 1940, escaped and fled to France where he carried out sabotage work against the Nazis. Recaptured in 1943, imprisoned for a year in Paris and then moved to Buchenwald. Here he had been a field laborer for 6 months, and then worked in the V-1 plant. HE proudly said he had sabotaged many a V-bomb destined to fly against London. He told me that a great proportion of the prisoners had Tbc, many beriberi and other serious vitamin-deficiency diseases, peripheral neuritis, some typhus, many chronic skin infections. He took me on rounds, and I saw things I have never seen before. Bodies thinner and more wasted than the last stages of carcinomatosis, yet still alive. All incontinent of feces. One man had just died in bed. One 16 year old boy weighed 40 lbs, had advanced Tbc, and was deeply pigmented

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From concomitant Addison’s disease, or so I guessed. Most were completely deteriorated mentally as well as physically, and you could clearly see that they absolutely don’t care two cents whether they live or die. 

But I should add that there are lots of the prisoners, thin and sick as they are, who are still full of hope. They cheered us and waved at us everywhere we went. A crowd of Frenchmen gathered around a Major from Louisiana who speaks fluent New Orleans French. I had a good chat with three young Russians from Gorki, who are itching to get back into the Red Army. We parted with shouts of “Dosvedanya!”. 

I asked our Dutch friend as I took his picture and shook hands in parting how he felt about the Germans after four and half years in Buchenwald. Did he think they should all be exterminated? He said the SS and leading Nazis should certainly be killed. But what good to take revenge at this date on the whole German people. He did not want us to stoop to their level. I asked him whether he thought the German people as a whole knew and approved of what the Nazis had done. He said he certainly thought they did. HE had worked on labor gangs in Weimar several months, and said that all the inhabitants of that city knew perfectly well what was happening in the dark forest up at Buchenwald, and approved of it, and mistreated the prisoners working down in their town. Were there any good Germans? Yes, there were a few left among the prisoners at Buchenwald. 

That’s what I saw today. The unadulterated, entirely unexaggerated truth. There was much more than that, but I can’t begin to describe it in words. One has to see and smell to realize its full horror. And Claire, I wouldn’t want you to know more than this letter sets down. 

As to my feelings: I’m filled tonight with a deep loathing for German Nazis, for their people who allowed them to do this thing, and for persons anywhere who mimic these Nazis. I’m filled with amazement that people living in a country so physically beautiful as this part of Germany is, can do such vile, filthy things to their fellow men. And I’m filled with alarm that men can be so degraded in a dozen years by the pernicious creed of Fascism. I’m tremendously glad to be part of the force that’s destroying Nazism, not by parliamentary methods and strong words, but by fire and flying metal. And determined to fight hard to keep such a curse from ever spreading over this earth again.