Recalling a 'Shock of the First Order'
Before he actually went there, Pfc. Harold Porter read about Germany in the socialist Jan Valtin's Out of the Night. The book's account of the vicious Gestapo, the Nazi's secret police, seemed to him "preposterous." Then, in May of 1945, he went to Germany as a medic with the U.S. Army and changed his mind.
His troop, the U.S. Army's 116th evacuation hospital, was one of the first medical units to enter the notorious concentration camp at Dachau after its liberation. Between 1940 and 1945, more than 28,000 people died there, and by April 1945, 32,000 sick and starving prisoners--jammed into a space intended for one-third that number--were near death. In the excerpt below, Porter writes to his parents about what he saw.
Dear Mother and Father, ... By this time I have recovered from my first emotional shock and am able to write without seeming like a hysterical gibbering idiot. Yet, I know you will hesitate to believe me no matter how objective and factual I try to be. I even find myself trying to deny what I am looking at with my own eyes. Certainly, what I have seen in the past few days will affect my personality for the rest of my life. We knew a day or two before we moved that we were going to operate in Dachau, and that it was the location of one of the most notorious concentration camps, but while we expected things to be [grisly], I'm sure none of us knew what was coming. It is easy to read about atrocities, but they must be seen before they can be believed.
The trip ...was pleasant enough.... The Bavarian Alps country, with the cottages, rivers, country estates ...was almost like a tourist resort. But as we came to the center of the city, we met a train with a wrecked engine--about fifty cars long. Every car was loaded with bodies. There must have been thousands of them--all obviously starved to death. This was a shock of the first order, and the odor can best be imagined. But neither the sight nor the odor were anything when compared with what we were still to see.
Marc Coyle ...took me to the crematory. Dead SS troopers were scattered around the grounds, but when we reached the furnace house we came upon a huge stack of corpses piled up like kindling, all nude so that their clothes wouldn't be wasted by the burning. There were furnaces for burning six bodies at once, and on each side of them was a room twenty feet square crammed to the ceiling with more bodies--one big stinking rotten mess.
Source:
US News & World Report
September 14th, 2006, 08:53 AM
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