Are nazitards mankinds greatest bad loosers or are they just morons?

Are you the type of person that reads an 'official story' and then assumes they have knowledge equivalent to a first hand account?

Are you talking about American nazitards or German nazitards?

It may surprise you but most of the ultranationalists in today's world are neither American nor German...

I'd take this US servicemans word over your mindless shite any day. What's wrong was the POS they hung your great grandfather?


One story: The German army had been losing men on the Russian front because they were freezing to death. Some had been still alive when brought to the field hospitals, but had died in spite of the best efforts of the German doctors. Those field hospitals had requested some research on how to revive human beings who were very nearly frozen to death, but were still alive. The research had been done at Buchenwald. Groups of Jewish men had been taken outside on winter nights, stripped, and sprayed with a mist of water until they were nearly dead. They were then trundled into the hospital, and every effort was made to revive them. Every effort failed. The ungrateful Jewish prisoners just went ahead and died, in spite of the best efforts of German medicine at the time. Finally, some bright medical type thought there might be a kind of animal heat that would revive them. They took one more group out, freezing them until they were nearly dead, brought them back into the hospital, and put them into bed with naked women. Their animal desires would revive them, or so the theory went. It goes without saying the experiment failed--again. The still ungrateful prisoners simply continued to die.

Another story: There had been a factory a couple of kilometers down the railroad line from Buchenwald that was manufacturing something that was in demand by the German government. It was not clear to me what the plant had been making, but, in any event, it was the place where most of the political prisoners worked. Some Jewish prisoners worked there too, but they were only trusted with the menial jobs. One particular night our bombers flew over the camp to the factory, which they pulverized. They leveled it completely. Everyone working there was killed, but that didn't seem to matter to the two professors; not one bomb had missed the factory, not one bomb had fallen inside Buchenwald. The two professors thought that was remarkable--to be able to bomb with such precision. To listen to them was to get the feeling they believed it was a blessing to die in a bombing raid rather than in other circumstances at Buchenwald. The dead were better off, and the factory was out of business also. The Germans had made no effort to rebuild it. It had all happened not too long before we arrived.

Another story (to me the most gruesome): German doctors at the camp were doing research on some human diseases. Groups of Jewish prisoners would be selected (which must have been some kind of an admission they were human beings) and inoculated with the diseases. They would then be observed, and all of their reactions charted until death occurred. A post-mortem of the body would be done, and those organs affected by the disease would be preserved and stored. The doctors would then move onto another disease, repeating the process. A building in the camp, near the hospital, held all of those preserved specimens. The two prisoners told us of the building and its location, how we could find it in the morning if we were so inclined. In that building were rooms devoted to each of the organs: a kidney room, a liver room, a heart room, etc. The two named some of the diseases studied, but I have forgotten (willfully?) the names.

Another story? No. About what they did with the women prisoners? No. I quit. No more. That was probably the most brutal night I have ever lived through. Enough. A major reason I need a catharsis.

The next morning we did a check on the building, and there they were. Rooms full of bottles of organs, all neatly and voluminously labeled. We turned and walked away. I had had enough. Any prisoner could tell me anything he wished from now on, and I would believe. That building was enough.

After seeing the organ building and my walk in the woods, I still had a few hours before my next tour of guard duty. I spent the time straightening my gear out and loading up the pockets of my field jacket. I expected the young boy again, and I wanted to be able to give him everything I could.

After a quickly gobbled lunch at the mess tent, we took off for our towers and relieved the third platoon men. I had barely reached the top floor when the young fellow came running up the steps. I hadn't seen him out in the field on the other side of the fence, but there he had been watching, waiting for me. The first thing he got was another chocolate bar, and he took his time with that while we worked some more on our language. We made another cup of cocoa, this time over a Sterno can rather than a fire on the table. I tried to give him some boxes of K-Rations, but, hell, he was eating better than that at the mess tent. Maybe those K-Rations would be used for barter--that was all right with me. I had more cigarettes to give him when we parted too.

I saw a gang of about thirty or forty of the prisoners still wearing their striped garb. They were heading back toward the camp, which mystified me, because they should not have been outside of the camp in the first place. As they passed the tower I noticed that one of them, one in the middle of the group, had his hands tied behind his back, and a rope tied around his neck. He was being led back into the prison. The commotion was centered around that individual. The little fellow in the tower with me became all excited and tried to explain things to me. After a bit, I got the idea that the person on the end of the rope had been one of the German guards at the prison camp, and these people found him in a small village near the camp. They were bringing him back.

It was then, too, that I noticed a lot of action up in the camp. Something important was happening there. People were scurrying about, and most of the prisoners were headed toward the gate. I was too far down the hill to discern the nature of what was going on, but I was betting it was the people from Weimar touring the camp after being marched out from the city. It turned out to be a good guess.

An interpreter met them at the gate, marched them around, and, according to the word I heard later, carefully explained in great detail what had been going on in the camp. In fact all the interpreter would have needed would have been a few words and a pointed finger. The evidence was all there; the massive pile of bodies still stacked, just as they were when we first found them; the doors in the crematorium now all open, and more of the trays pulled out with their contents visible. The German people were seeing what had been going on in that place all of those years. Now we could bury the bodies.

After the tour had been administered, the group headed back out of the gate and back down the road to Weimar. There was a large patrol of our troops marching them, some on either side of the road. As they were moving back to Weimar, not even out of sight of the camp, a number of Germans in the group found something to laugh about. The commander of the American troops heard them and became livid with anger. He turned them around and marched them, then and there, back through the camp again. This time they went through much more slowly. By the time they returned to the camp the bodies in the stacks were already being loaded on to trucks to be carried away to the mass grave. This time, on the march home to Weimar, there was no laughter. The next day we heard that after returning to their town, the mayor of Weimar and his wife both committed suicide.

The ovens were soon cleaned out, and the bodies were almost all gone, being buried over the top of the hill where the engineers had dug a monstrous trench. The Buchenwald prisoners had found one of their German guards in a nearby village dressed in civilian clothes, and they had him now in a cell in one of the buildings and were interrogating him. No one knew how this gang of prisoners had been able to sneak out the hole in the fence to get to the village. We walked through the gate to the door that opened to the cell area. It was crowded and the onlookers parted to let the three of us through, and we went to the door of the cell. The German was standing at attention in the middle of the room and was being peppered with questions that we did not understand. The answers were all monosyllabic. Tears were coming down his cheeks. One of the Buchenwald prisoners seemed to be in charge, but a group of them were participating in the interrogation. The one who appeared to be in charge also appeared to be one calm individual. The three of us watched, but we couldn't understand what was being said, so we turned and left. The crowd parted again to let us through. A most welcome sight to my eyes was the absence of the stack of bodies as I came through the door from the cell area.

Back inside the cell the former Buchenwald prisoners, and their current prisoner presented a riveting scene: The hands of the German were untied, and, in them was placed a stout piece of rope. He was being given instructions, and, as we watched, it wasn't long before I and the people who had come with me realized he was being told how to tie a noose in the rope. The German guard was corrected three or four times, and had to undo some of his work to re-do it correctly. When he was finished, he had a very proper hangman's noose, thirteen turns of the rope and all. A table was brought to the center of the room and placed under a very strong looking electrical fixture. The guard was assisted on to the table and instructed to fix the rope to the light fixture. Finishing that he was told to put all of his weight on the rope and lift his feet. The fixture held. The guard was told to place the noose over his head, around his neck, and to draw the noose fairly snug. Then he was told to place his hands behind his back and his wrists were tied together. The table was moved until he barely stood on its edge. He couldn't see that--his eyes were unhooded and open, but the noose kept him from looking down. He was talked to some more and then he jumped. He was caught before all of his weight was on the rope, and they set him back on the table. The next time he stepped gently off the end, and the table was quickly slid away from him and out of his reach, and he dangled there. He slowly strangled. His face went through a variety of colors before he hung still.

My stomach did not want to hold food any longer. I turned and walked away, the rest of our guys following me. The Buchenwald prisoners stayed on to view their handiwork.

I walked through the crowd, out the door, through the gate, on up to the barracks, and I didn't say a word. The others with me didn't speak either. It was murder; there can be no doubt of that. The Buchenwald prisoners never touched the rope after it was placed in the German's hands. They did not tie the noose, nor did they fix it to the ceiling. They did not place the rope around the man's neck. They did not pull the table out from under him. In one sense, they had not committed murder; rather, the German had committed suicide. A sophist could rationalize that one I suspect.

That was not what was bothering me, however. I had the ability and the means to stop the whole thing, and I did not. Neither did my companions. Here we were--five or six of us--fully armed with semi-automatic rifles, and we did not make the Buchenwald prisoners stop. We let them continue. In one way, we sanctioned the event. Ever since that day I have been convincing myself that I understood why the Buchenwald prisoners did what they did. I had witnessed their agonies. I had wondered how human beings could treat other human beings as the prisoners at Buchenwald had been treated. I felt I knew why the prisoners of Buchenwald did what they did - so I did not stop them.

I have become some kind of a sophist for myself now. I could have stopped the whole action, and I did not. I have had that under my hat for the past forty-six years. Now I have written it. I have acknowledged it. Maybe it will go away. There are so many things from that week I wish would go away, things I wish could be scrubbed from my memory. When we returned to the barracks we did not tell anyone what we had witnessed.

I was not about to sleep, however. I flopped on my bunk without a thought of my tiny bunk mates, the bugs--I merely lay there. My eyes were closed, but my mind wasn't. I tried to think of other things, but it was impossible. I reviewed in my mind the multiple things the Buchenwald prisoners had gone through, the length of time they had been living through hell, and I didn't have to rationalize their actions. Hell, I knew why they were doing what they did. That train of thought took me further and further from my own guilt, and, in a little while, I was absolved. At least, as absolved as I was ever going to be. Absolved enough to be a little more comfortable with myself. That was enough for then.

The bunch of us walked around to our towers and some of us walked very quietly. Others were full of talk about tomorrow. The electricity had been restored in all of the towers, but I didn't bother with it as I entered mine--I knew my way around. Upstairs, I relieved the guy before me and put my rifle over in the corner, threw the rifle belt under the table, crawled on the table, lit a cigar, and my thoughts continued.

I thought of my German heritage, my Grandfather Hugo who had come from to the United States from Germany while he was still a teenager, my mother's grandparents who had come over from Germany long before that, my mother who had grown up early in this century in a small town in Minnesota, where there were two catholic churches: one for the Germans, the other for the Irish. They were only about a block apart from each other, each having its own grade school. My mother had attended the German school, and the only language spoken through the fourth grade had been German. When I was very young she had taught me how to count in German, and how to sing the German alphabet. She also taught me a very few words in German, everyday kinds of words which I still remembered. Three quarters of me was from German background, solid German stock. Pictures of the formidable Hugo had always been around me as I was growing up.

I wondered...Suppose my ancestors had not come to the United States; suppose they had stayed in Germany, and, through some fluke, the two people who had become my mother and father had met, and I had been born a German citizen. What would I be like? Would I be like the people who had instituted and guarded a place like Buchenwald? Could I have been that? Would I have been in the German army? The answer to the last question is obvious--certainly I would have been in the German army. But what kind of work would I have done? I hoped that I would not have been like most of the Germans I had seen. I could have accepted a likeness to some members of the German army whom we had fought, but there were many I would have been uncomfortable with. Much of what I had seen ran counter to everything my mother had brought me up believing. This whole situation would have appalled her. I have never ever told her, or my father either, most of these stories about Buchenwald. I did not feel it necessary. They knew early on that I had been there, and they took LIFE magazine. They had been made aware, like most people in the United States, of what had gone on.

During these past forty-six years, these memories have been creeping out of my mind, leaving me with sleepless nights afterwards. Never the whole story at once. Until now. I relive that night sitting on that machine gun bench, smoking a cigar, staring at the darkness. That night I sat in the dark and went through two or three cigars, and several cigarettes. I stared out at the darkness, and there were two reasons for not seeing anything: my eyes couldn't see anything, and my mind wouldn't see anything. My thoughts kept me too busy. They do now also.

I saw the lights up in the camp, but, at that time of night, nothing distracting was going on. My relief arrived, but I didn't notice him until he was on the way up the stairs, turning the lights on as he came. By the time he reached the top floor I had my belt back on, my rifle in my hands, and was standing by the stair opening. Nothing had happened during my shift, and that was what I reported to him when he reached the top. I walked down, and caught up to Bill on the road. The two of us walked slowly until Tim caught up to us. As we all three walked together our only conversation was of our departure later in the morning.

I was nineteen, Bill and Tim were eighteen--chronologically anyway. We had aged years in a few short hours.


(Harry Herder Jr. served in the Korean War also, where he lost a leg to an enemy land mine.)

This.

Their also losers and morons

Hitler and the wars aside, National Socialism was the biggest threat to the elite....Never before or since has the world seen a uniting as that under National Socialism.


And that is why it is demonised.

Bullshit. They were demonised as was Stalin and his minions because they treated human life as worthless


Here more for you - this man was there...were you?

He's more of a f**king hero than any nazitard could ever dream of being. You nazitards are f**king filth. Thousands of medics and troops saw these caps? Are you causing these Allied vets liars you thick as shite nazitard?


Harry J. Herder, Jr.
Mr. Herder was a veteran of the U.S. Army Rangers, deployed as a 17-year-old recruit to eastern Germany, where he was involved in the liberation of Buchenwald. He wrote eloquently about his experiences in We Remember WWII: A Collection of U.S. Army Ranger Stories (Meadowlark Publishing, 2003).


Bill, Tim, and I started off through the trees, down the hill to the front gate which was only a couple of hundred yards away. The gate was a rectangular hole through the solid face of the building over which was office space and a hallway. High up above the opening for the gate was a heavy wooden beam with words carved into it in German script, Arbeit Macht Frei. In a clumsy way I attempted to translate the inscription to Bill and Tim as, "Work will make you free". The three of us headed through the gate, through the twenty or thirty feet to the other side of the building. We were slightly apprehensive of what we might see. Our antennae were up. We had been teased by bits of information, and we wanted to know more. The lane we were walking on bent to the right as we cleared the building. We had barely made the turn, and there it was. In front of us a good bit, but plainly visible.

The bodies of human beings were stacked like cord wood. All of them dead. All of them stripped. The inspection I made of the pile was not very close, but the corpses seemed to be all male. The bottom layer of the bodies had a north/south orientation, the next layer went east/west, and they continued alternating. The stack was about five feet high, maybe a little more; I could see over the top. They extended down the hill, only a slight hill, for fifty to seventy-five feet. Human bodies neatly stacked, naked, ready for disposal. The arms and legs were neatly arranged, but an occasional limb dangled oddly. The bodies we could see were all face up. There was an aisle, then another stack, and another aisle, and more stacks. The Lord only knows how many there were.

Just looking at these bodies made one believe they had been starved to death. They appeared to be skin covering bones and nothing more. The eyes on some were closed, on others open. Bill, Tim, and I grew very quiet. I think my only comment was, "Jesus Christ."

I have since seen the movie made about Buchenwald. The stack of bodies is vividly displayed in the movie, just as I saw it the first day, but it is not the same. In no way is it the same. The black and white film did not depict the dirty gray-green color of those bodies, and, what it could not possibly capture was the odor, the smell, the stink. Watching the movie was, in a way, a reliving of the first walk through those stacks of bodies.

The three of us looked, and we walked down the edge of those stacks. I know I didn't count them--it wouldn't have mattered. We looked and said not a word. A group of guys from the company noticed us and said, "Wait till you see in there."

They pointed to a long building which was about two stories high, and butted up tightly to the chimney. It had two barn-like doors on either end of the building we were looking at, and the doors were standing open. We turned and walked back to the building where we found others from our company, along with some of the prisoners milling around in the space between the bodies and the building. We moved gently through those people, through the doors and felt the warmth immediately. Not far from the doors, and parallel to the front of the building, there was a brick wall, solid to the top of the building. In the wall were small openings fitted with iron doors. Those doors were a little more than two feet wide and about two and a half feet high; the tops of the doors had curved shapes much like the entrances to churches. Those iron doors were in sets, three high. There must have been more than ten of those sets, extending down that brick wall. Most of the doors were closed, but down near the middle a few stood open. Heavy metal trays had been pulled out of those openings, and on those trays were partially burned bodies. On one tray was a skull partially burned through, with a hole in the top; other trays held partially disintegrated arms and legs. It appeared that those trays could hold three bodies at a time. And the odor, my God, the odor.

I had enough. I couldn't take it any more. I left the building with Bill and Tim close behind me. As we passed through the door someone from the company said, "the crematorium." Until then I had no idea what a crematorium was.

It dawned on me much later--the number of bodies which could be burned at one time, three bodies to a tray, at least thirty trays--and the Germans still couldn't keep up. The bodies on the stacks outside were growing at a faster rate than they could be burned. It was difficult to imagine what must have been going on.

Later that evening, sitting on the front steps of the barracks with a group of people from the company, Sergeant Blowers among us, the three of us started to pick up the parts of the story we had missed because we were on guard at the towers. All of the German guards had packed up and moved out about three hours before our arrival. There were bits and pieces of personal gear still left around the barracks, but not much. We saw neither hide nor hair of those German guards. When the Germans left, the crematorium was still going full blast, burning up a storm, the chimney belching out that black smoke. Our First Sergeant, Sergeant Blowers, our Company Commander, and the Leader of the TD group found the source of the fuel, and played around with one thing and another until they figured out how to turn the damned thing off.

That was the start. That was just the "openers". There was more, but it was impossible to assimilate it all at once. General Patton had assigned us to this place for four days, ostensibly to keep the now-free prisoners off the roads needed to supply his troops who were racing through Germany at the end of the war. The full explanation was given the prisoners, and there was no problem, they understood. Patton had assigned a whole field hospital to the place along with a big kitchen unit. He eventually sent in an engineering outfit with bulldozers to dig a mass grave for those bodies. We were doing everything we possibly could for the prisoners. Later on, when things became quieter, military government people arrived to help the prisoners get home--if there were homes for them to get to.

A little later in the evening the three of us walked back into the camp, passed by the crematorium and the stacks of bodies, and wandered into the camp proper. There were temporary lights strung around for the medics to do their work. The prisoners came up and surrounded us, moving with us as they jabbered, but they spoke a language we did not understand--they were probably speaking several languages we did not understand. There was the slightest of communication. They gave way and moved along with us. We must have appeared as giants in their midst: we well-fed, healthy, strong, young men; they gaunt, shrunken, their ugly striped uniforms hanging on them.

They were jabbering, and we wanted to listen, to understand, but there seemed to be no way we could. After some moments we figured out they wanted our cigarettes. In no time we were out of them--they just disappeared. We had nothing else with us they really wanted, but they stuck with us and guided us to another set of buildings, which had the look of large barns with wide doors in the middle of the front. Entering the first of these we found we were entering their home. There were stacks of bunks five or six high, crowded together with very little room between a bunk and the one above it. (It was my thought that one would have a rough time merely rolling over.) The bunks were much too short even for short people. The lower bunks served as rungs of a ladder to the upper ones. How many hundreds of people slept in this one building was beyond me. Then there were all of those dead bodies outside that must have come from here. Where did the Germans get them all?

Just inside the door were people on the lower bunks so close to death they didn't have the strength to rise. They were, literally, skeletons covered with skin--nothing more than that--there appeared to be no substance to them. The next day when the press arrived, one of the photographers for LIFE magazine had one of the really bad ones propped up against the door frame in the daylight. He took the photograph, but out of sight in the darkness of the building, behind the man, were the people propping him up. I have seen that photograph several times in the years since, and every time I see it my stomach rolls a little, my mind goes into some kind of a dance, and it takes me a little time to return to normal. There are still altogether too many things that flood my mind once a trigger is pulled.

Later we were told the medical unit was moving around searching for the most desperate cases, in order to get them to the doctor as quickly as possible. They told us the story of one prisoner who was so close to death that even thinned chicken broth was too rich for his stomach. The doctors were doing everything they could, trying mightily; but in too many cases they had no chance at all and would lose in spite of their best efforts.

We were about to do what Sergeant Blowers had told us to do--take a walk in the woods. We headed for the woods talking softly to each other, the talk full of wonderment--the hows, the whys. We had no answers. As limited as our combat experience had been, we had seen dead men, we had seen wounded men from both sides with the immediacy of battle, with no time for conjecture. We had done what we could for the wounded and then had got on with the job that had to be done. None of us, no one in our company, even amongst those who had been the originals, was prepared for what we were now surrounded by. It was not "human". It did not seem real. But it was all too real, it was the only life that some of the prisoners had known for years. Maybe it was all too human. Maybe this is what we are.

Bullshit. They were demonised as was Stalin and his minions because they treated human life as worthless


Here more for you - this man was there...were you?

He's more of a f**king hero than any nazitard could ever dream of being. You nazitards are f**king filth. Thousands of medics and troops saw these caps? Are you causing these Allied vets liars you thick as shite nazitard?


Harry J. Herder, Jr.
Mr. Herder was a veteran of the U.S. Army Rangers, deployed as a 17-year-old recruit to eastern Germany, where he was involved in the liberation of Buchenwald. He wrote eloquently about his experiences in We Remember WWII: A Collection of U.S. Army Ranger Stories (Meadowlark Publishing, 2003).


Bill, Tim, and I started off through the trees, down the hill to the front gate which was only a couple of hundred yards away. The gate was a rectangular hole through the solid face of the building over which was office space and a hallway. High up above the opening for the gate was a heavy wooden beam with words carved into it in German script, Arbeit Macht Frei. In a clumsy way I attempted to translate the inscription to Bill and Tim as, "Work will make you free". The three of us headed through the gate, through the twenty or thirty feet to the other side of the building. We were slightly apprehensive of what we might see. Our antennae were up. We had been teased by bits of information, and we wanted to know more. The lane we were walking on bent to the right as we cleared the building. We had barely made the turn, and there it was. In front of us a good bit, but plainly visible.

The bodies of human beings were stacked like cord wood. All of them dead. All of them stripped. The inspection I made of the pile was not very close, but the corpses seemed to be all male. The bottom layer of the bodies had a north/south orientation, the next layer went east/west, and they continued alternating. The stack was about five feet high, maybe a little more; I could see over the top. They extended down the hill, only a slight hill, for fifty to seventy-five feet. Human bodies neatly stacked, naked, ready for disposal. The arms and legs were neatly arranged, but an occasional limb dangled oddly. The bodies we could see were all face up. There was an aisle, then another stack, and another aisle, and more stacks. The Lord only knows how many there were.

Just looking at these bodies made one believe they had been starved to death. They appeared to be skin covering bones and nothing more. The eyes on some were closed, on others open. Bill, Tim, and I grew very quiet. I think my only comment was, "Jesus Christ."

I have since seen the movie made about Buchenwald. The stack of bodies is vividly displayed in the movie, just as I saw it the first day, but it is not the same. In no way is it the same. The black and white film did not depict the dirty gray-green color of those bodies, and, what it could not possibly capture was the odor, the smell, the stink. Watching the movie was, in a way, a reliving of the first walk through those stacks of bodies.

The three of us looked, and we walked down the edge of those stacks. I know I didn't count them--it wouldn't have mattered. We looked and said not a word. A group of guys from the company noticed us and said, "Wait till you see in there."

They pointed to a long building which was about two stories high, and butted up tightly to the chimney. It had two barn-like doors on either end of the building we were looking at, and the doors were standing open. We turned and walked back to the building where we found others from our company, along with some of the prisoners milling around in the space between the bodies and the building. We moved gently through those people, through the doors and felt the warmth immediately. Not far from the doors, and parallel to the front of the building, there was a brick wall, solid to the top of the building. In the wall were small openings fitted with iron doors. Those doors were a little more than two feet wide and about two and a half feet high; the tops of the doors had curved shapes much like the entrances to churches. Those iron doors were in sets, three high. There must have been more than ten of those sets, extending down that brick wall. Most of the doors were closed, but down near the middle a few stood open. Heavy metal trays had been pulled out of those openings, and on those trays were partially burned bodies. On one tray was a skull partially burned through, with a hole in the top; other trays held partially disintegrated arms and legs. It appeared that those trays could hold three bodies at a time. And the odor, my God, the odor.

I had enough. I couldn't take it any more. I left the building with Bill and Tim close behind me. As we passed through the door someone from the company said, "the crematorium." Until then I had no idea what a crematorium was.

It dawned on me much later--the number of bodies which could be burned at one time, three bodies to a tray, at least thirty trays--and the Germans still couldn't keep up. The bodies on the stacks outside were growing at a faster rate than they could be burned. It was difficult to imagine what must have been going on.

Later that evening, sitting on the front steps of the barracks with a group of people from the company, Sergeant Blowers among us, the three of us started to pick up the parts of the story we had missed because we were on guard at the towers. All of the German guards had packed up and moved out about three hours before our arrival. There were bits and pieces of personal gear still left around the barracks, but not much. We saw neither hide nor hair of those German guards. When the Germans left, the crematorium was still going full blast, burning up a storm, the chimney belching out that black smoke. Our First Sergeant, Sergeant Blowers, our Company Commander, and the Leader of the TD group found the source of the fuel, and played around with one thing and another until they figured out how to turn the damned thing off.

That was the start. That was just the "openers". There was more, but it was impossible to assimilate it all at once. General Patton had assigned us to this place for four days, ostensibly to keep the now-free prisoners off the roads needed to supply his troops who were racing through Germany at the end of the war. The full explanation was given the prisoners, and there was no problem, they understood. Patton had assigned a whole field hospital to the place along with a big kitchen unit. He eventually sent in an engineering outfit with bulldozers to dig a mass grave for those bodies. We were doing everything we possibly could for the prisoners. Later on, when things became quieter, military government people arrived to help the prisoners get home--if there were homes for them to get to.

A little later in the evening the three of us walked back into the camp, passed by the crematorium and the stacks of bodies, and wandered into the camp proper. There were temporary lights strung around for the medics to do their work. The prisoners came up and surrounded us, moving with us as they jabbered, but they spoke a language we did not understand--they were probably speaking several languages we did not understand. There was the slightest of communication. They gave way and moved along with us. We must have appeared as giants in their midst: we well-fed, healthy, strong, young men; they gaunt, shrunken, their ugly striped uniforms hanging on them.

They were jabbering, and we wanted to listen, to understand, but there seemed to be no way we could. After some moments we figured out they wanted our cigarettes. In no time we were out of them--they just disappeared. We had nothing else with us they really wanted, but they stuck with us and guided us to another set of buildings, which had the look of large barns with wide doors in the middle of the front. Entering the first of these we found we were entering their home. There were stacks of bunks five or six high, crowded together with very little room between a bunk and the one above it. (It was my thought that one would have a rough time merely rolling over.) The bunks were much too short even for short people. The lower bunks served as rungs of a ladder to the upper ones. How many hundreds of people slept in this one building was beyond me. Then there were all of those dead bodies outside that must have come from here. Where did the Germans get them all?

Just inside the door were people on the lower bunks so close to death they didn't have the strength to rise. They were, literally, skeletons covered with skin--nothing more than that--there appeared to be no substance to them. The next day when the press arrived, one of the photographers for LIFE magazine had one of the really bad ones propped up against the door frame in the daylight. He took the photograph, but out of sight in the darkness of the building, behind the man, were the people propping him up. I have seen that photograph several times in the years since, and every time I see it my stomach rolls a little, my mind goes into some kind of a dance, and it takes me a little time to return to normal. There are still altogether too many things that flood my mind once a trigger is pulled.

Later we were told the medical unit was moving around searching for the most desperate cases, in order to get them to the doctor as quickly as possible. They told us the story of one prisoner who was so close to death that even thinned chicken broth was too rich for his stomach. The doctors were doing everything they could, trying mightily; but in too many cases they had no chance at all and would lose in spite of their best efforts.

We were about to do what Sergeant Blowers had told us to do--take a walk in the woods. We headed for the woods talking softly to each other, the talk full of wonderment--the hows, the whys. We had no answers. As limited as our combat experience had been, we had seen dead men, we had seen wounded men from both sides with the immediacy of battle, with no time for conjecture. We had done what we could for the wounded and then had got on with the job that had to be done. None of us, no one in our company, even amongst those who had been the originals, was prepared for what we were now surrounded by. It was not "human". It did not seem real. But it was all too real, it was the only life that some of the prisoners had known for years. Maybe it was all too human. Maybe this is what we are.

Bullshit. They were demonised as was Stalin and his minions because they treated human life as worthless


Here more for you - this man was there...were you?

He's more of a f**king hero than any nazitard could ever dream of being. You nazitards are f**king filth. Thousands of medics and troops saw these caps? Are you causing these Allied vets liars you thick as shite nazitard?


Harry J. Herder, Jr.
Mr. Herder was a veteran of the U.S. Army Rangers, deployed as a 17-year-old recruit to eastern Germany, where he was involved in the liberation of Buchenwald. He wrote eloquently about his experiences in We Remember WWII: A Collection of U.S. Army Ranger Stories (Meadowlark Publishing, 2003).


Bill, Tim, and I started off through the trees, down the hill to the front gate which was only a couple of hundred yards away. The gate was a rectangular hole through the solid face of the building over which was office space and a hallway. High up above the opening for the gate was a heavy wooden beam with words carved into it in German script, Arbeit Macht Frei. In a clumsy way I attempted to translate the inscription to Bill and Tim as, "Work will make you free". The three of us headed through the gate, through the twenty or thirty feet to the other side of the building. We were slightly apprehensive of what we might see. Our antennae were up. We had been teased by bits of information, and we wanted to know more. The lane we were walking on bent to the right as we cleared the building. We had barely made the turn, and there it was. In front of us a good bit, but plainly visible.

The bodies of human beings were stacked like cord wood. All of them dead. All of them stripped. The inspection I made of the pile was not very close, but the corpses seemed to be all male. The bottom layer of the bodies had a north/south orientation, the next layer went east/west, and they continued alternating. The stack was about five feet high, maybe a little more; I could see over the top. They extended down the hill, only a slight hill, for fifty to seventy-five feet. Human bodies neatly stacked, naked, ready for disposal. The arms and legs were neatly arranged, but an occasional limb dangled oddly. The bodies we could see were all face up. There was an aisle, then another stack, and another aisle, and more stacks. The Lord only knows how many there were.

Just looking at these bodies made one believe they had been starved to death. They appeared to be skin covering bones and nothing more. The eyes on some were closed, on others open. Bill, Tim, and I grew very quiet. I think my only comment was, "Jesus Christ."

I have since seen the movie made about Buchenwald. The stack of bodies is vividly displayed in the movie, just as I saw it the first day, but it is not the same. In no way is it the same. The black and white film did not depict the dirty gray-green color of those bodies, and, what it could not possibly capture was the odor, the smell, the stink. Watching the movie was, in a way, a reliving of the first walk through those stacks of bodies.

The three of us looked, and we walked down the edge of those stacks. I know I didn't count them--it wouldn't have mattered. We looked and said not a word. A group of guys from the company noticed us and said, "Wait till you see in there."

They pointed to a long building which was about two stories high, and butted up tightly to the chimney. It had two barn-like doors on either end of the building we were looking at, and the doors were standing open. We turned and walked back to the building where we found others from our company, along with some of the prisoners milling around in the space between the bodies and the building. We moved gently through those people, through the doors and felt the warmth immediately. Not far from the doors, and parallel to the front of the building, there was a brick wall, solid to the top of the building. In the wall were small openings fitted with iron doors. Those doors were a little more than two feet wide and about two and a half feet high; the tops of the doors had curved shapes much like the entrances to churches. Those iron doors were in sets, three high. There must have been more than ten of those sets, extending down that brick wall. Most of the doors were closed, but down near the middle a few stood open. Heavy metal trays had been pulled out of those openings, and on those trays were partially burned bodies. On one tray was a skull partially burned through, with a hole in the top; other trays held partially disintegrated arms and legs. It appeared that those trays could hold three bodies at a time. And the odor, my God, the odor.

I had enough. I couldn't take it any more. I left the building with Bill and Tim close behind me. As we passed through the door someone from the company said, "the crematorium." Until then I had no idea what a crematorium was.

It dawned on me much later--the number of bodies which could be burned at one time, three bodies to a tray, at least thirty trays--and the Germans still couldn't keep up. The bodies on the stacks outside were growing at a faster rate than they could be burned. It was difficult to imagine what must have been going on.

Later that evening, sitting on the front steps of the barracks with a group of people from the company, Sergeant Blowers among us, the three of us started to pick up the parts of the story we had missed because we were on guard at the towers. All of the German guards had packed up and moved out about three hours before our arrival. There were bits and pieces of personal gear still left around the barracks, but not much. We saw neither hide nor hair of those German guards. When the Germans left, the crematorium was still going full blast, burning up a storm, the chimney belching out that black smoke. Our First Sergeant, Sergeant Blowers, our Company Commander, and the Leader of the TD group found the source of the fuel, and played around with one thing and another until they figured out how to turn the damned thing off.

That was the start. That was just the "openers". There was more, but it was impossible to assimilate it all at once. General Patton had assigned us to this place for four days, ostensibly to keep the now-free prisoners off the roads needed to supply his troops who were racing through Germany at the end of the war. The full explanation was given the prisoners, and there was no problem, they understood. Patton had assigned a whole field hospital to the place along with a big kitchen unit. He eventually sent in an engineering outfit with bulldozers to dig a mass grave for those bodies. We were doing everything we possibly could for the prisoners. Later on, when things became quieter, military government people arrived to help the prisoners get home--if there were homes for them to get to.

A little later in the evening the three of us walked back into the camp, passed by the crematorium and the stacks of bodies, and wandered into the camp proper. There were temporary lights strung around for the medics to do their work. The prisoners came up and surrounded us, moving with us as they jabbered, but they spoke a language we did not understand--they were probably speaking several languages we did not understand. There was the slightest of communication. They gave way and moved along with us. We must have appeared as giants in their midst: we well-fed, healthy, strong, young men; they gaunt, shrunken, their ugly striped uniforms hanging on them.

They were jabbering, and we wanted to listen, to understand, but there seemed to be no way we could. After some moments we figured out they wanted our cigarettes. In no time we were out of them--they just disappeared. We had nothing else with us they really wanted, but they stuck with us and guided us to another set of buildings, which had the look of large barns with wide doors in the middle of the front. Entering the first of these we found we were entering their home. There were stacks of bunks five or six high, crowded together with very little room between a bunk and the one above it. (It was my thought that one would have a rough time merely rolling over.) The bunks were much too short even for short people. The lower bunks served as rungs of a ladder to the upper ones. How many hundreds of people slept in this one building was beyond me. Then there were all of those dead bodies outside that must have come from here. Where did the Germans get them all?

Just inside the door were people on the lower bunks so close to death they didn't have the strength to rise. They were, literally, skeletons covered with skin--nothing more than that--there appeared to be no substance to them. The next day when the press arrived, one of the photographers for LIFE magazine had one of the really bad ones propped up against the door frame in the daylight. He took the photograph, but out of sight in the darkness of the building, behind the man, were the people propping him up. I have seen that photograph several times in the years since, and every time I see it my stomach rolls a little, my mind goes into some kind of a dance, and it takes me a little time to return to normal. There are still altogether too many things that flood my mind once a trigger is pulled.

Later we were told the medical unit was moving around searching for the most desperate cases, in order to get them to the doctor as quickly as possible. They told us the story of one prisoner who was so close to death that even thinned chicken broth was too rich for his stomach. The doctors were doing everything they could, trying mightily; but in too many cases they had no chance at all and would lose in spite of their best efforts.

We were about to do what Sergeant Blowers had told us to do--take a walk in the woods. We headed for the woods talking softly to each other, the talk full of wonderment--the hows, the whys. We had no answers. As limited as our combat experience had been, we had seen dead men, we had seen wounded men from both sides with the immediacy of battle, with no time for conjecture. We had done what we could for the wounded and then had got on with the job that had to be done. None of us, no one in our company, even amongst those who had been the originals, was prepared for what we were now surrounded by. It was not "human". It did not seem real. But it was all too real, it was the only life that some of the prisoners had known for years. Maybe it was all too human. Maybe this is what we are.

Bullshit. They were demonised as was Stalin and his minions because they treated human life as worthless


Here more for you - this man was there...were you?

He's more of a f**king hero than any nazitard could ever dream of being. You nazitards are f**king filth. Thousands of medics and troops saw these caps? Are you causing these Allied vets liars you thick as shite nazitard?


Harry J. Herder, Jr.
Mr. Herder was a veteran of the U.S. Army Rangers, deployed as a 17-year-old recruit to eastern Germany, where he was involved in the liberation of Buchenwald. He wrote eloquently about his experiences in We Remember WWII: A Collection of U.S. Army Ranger Stories (Meadowlark Publishing, 2003).


Bill, Tim, and I started off through the trees, down the hill to the front gate which was only a couple of hundred yards away. The gate was a rectangular hole through the solid face of the building over which was office space and a hallway. High up above the opening for the gate was a heavy wooden beam with words carved into it in German script, Arbeit Macht Frei. In a clumsy way I attempted to translate the inscription to Bill and Tim as, "Work will make you free". The three of us headed through the gate, through the twenty or thirty feet to the other side of the building. We were slightly apprehensive of what we might see. Our antennae were up. We had been teased by bits of information, and we wanted to know more. The lane we were walking on bent to the right as we cleared the building. We had barely made the turn, and there it was. In front of us a good bit, but plainly visible.

The bodies of human beings were stacked like cord wood. All of them dead. All of them stripped. The inspection I made of the pile was not very close, but the corpses seemed to be all male. The bottom layer of the bodies had a north/south orientation, the next layer went east/west, and they continued alternating. The stack was about five feet high, maybe a little more; I could see over the top. They extended down the hill, only a slight hill, for fifty to seventy-five feet. Human bodies neatly stacked, naked, ready for disposal. The arms and legs were neatly arranged, but an occasional limb dangled oddly. The bodies we could see were all face up. There was an aisle, then another stack, and another aisle, and more stacks. The Lord only knows how many there were.

Just looking at these bodies made one believe they had been starved to death. They appeared to be skin covering bones and nothing more. The eyes on some were closed, on others open. Bill, Tim, and I grew very quiet. I think my only comment was, "Jesus Christ."

I have since seen the movie made about Buchenwald. The stack of bodies is vividly displayed in the movie, just as I saw it the first day, but it is not the same. In no way is it the same. The black and white film did not depict the dirty gray-green color of those bodies, and, what it could not possibly capture was the odor, the smell, the stink. Watching the movie was, in a way, a reliving of the first walk through those stacks of bodies.

The three of us looked, and we walked down the edge of those stacks. I know I didn't count them--it wouldn't have mattered. We looked and said not a word. A group of guys from the company noticed us and said, "Wait till you see in there."

They pointed to a long building which was about two stories high, and butted up tightly to the chimney. It had two barn-like doors on either end of the building we were looking at, and the doors were standing open. We turned and walked back to the building where we found others from our company, along with some of the prisoners milling around in the space between the bodies and the building. We moved gently through those people, through the doors and felt the warmth immediately. Not far from the doors, and parallel to the front of the building, there was a brick wall, solid to the top of the building. In the wall were small openings fitted with iron doors. Those doors were a little more than two feet wide and about two and a half feet high; the tops of the doors had curved shapes much like the entrances to churches. Those iron doors were in sets, three high. There must have been more than ten of those sets, extending down that brick wall. Most of the doors were closed, but down near the middle a few stood open. Heavy metal trays had been pulled out of those openings, and on those trays were partially burned bodies. On one tray was a skull partially burned through, with a hole in the top; other trays held partially disintegrated arms and legs. It appeared that those trays could hold three bodies at a time. And the odor, my God, the odor.

I had enough. I couldn't take it any more. I left the building with Bill and Tim close behind me. As we passed through the door someone from the company said, "the crematorium." Until then I had no idea what a crematorium was.

It dawned on me much later--the number of bodies which could be burned at one time, three bodies to a tray, at least thirty trays--and the Germans still couldn't keep up. The bodies on the stacks outside were growing at a faster rate than they could be burned. It was difficult to imagine what must have been going on.

Later that evening, sitting on the front steps of the barracks with a group of people from the company, Sergeant Blowers among us, the three of us started to pick up the parts of the story we had missed because we were on guard at the towers. All of the German guards had packed up and moved out about three hours before our arrival. There were bits and pieces of personal gear still left around the barracks, but not much. We saw neither hide nor hair of those German guards. When the Germans left, the crematorium was still going full blast, burning up a storm, the chimney belching out that black smoke. Our First Sergeant, Sergeant Blowers, our Company Commander, and the Leader of the TD group found the source of the fuel, and played around with one thing and another until they figured out how to turn the damned thing off.

That was the start. That was just the "openers". There was more, but it was impossible to assimilate it all at once. General Patton had assigned us to this place for four days, ostensibly to keep the now-free prisoners off the roads needed to supply his troops who were racing through Germany at the end of the war. The full explanation was given the prisoners, and there was no problem, they understood. Patton had assigned a whole field hospital to the place along with a big kitchen unit. He eventually sent in an engineering outfit with bulldozers to dig a mass grave for those bodies. We were doing everything we possibly could for the prisoners. Later on, when things became quieter, military government people arrived to help the prisoners get home--if there were homes for them to get to.

A little later in the evening the three of us walked back into the camp, passed by the crematorium and the stacks of bodies, and wandered into the camp proper. There were temporary lights strung around for the medics to do their work. The prisoners came up and surrounded us, moving with us as they jabbered, but they spoke a language we did not understand--they were probably speaking several languages we did not understand. There was the slightest of communication. They gave way and moved along with us. We must have appeared as giants in their midst: we well-fed, healthy, strong, young men; they gaunt, shrunken, their ugly striped uniforms hanging on them.

They were jabbering, and we wanted to listen, to understand, but there seemed to be no way we could. After some moments we figured out they wanted our cigarettes. In no time we were out of them--they just disappeared. We had nothing else with us they really wanted, but they stuck with us and guided us to another set of buildings, which had the look of large barns with wide doors in the middle of the front. Entering the first of these we found we were entering their home. There were stacks of bunks five or six high, crowded together with very little room between a bunk and the one above it. (It was my thought that one would have a rough time merely rolling over.) The bunks were much too short even for short people. The lower bunks served as rungs of a ladder to the upper ones. How many hundreds of people slept in this one building was beyond me. Then there were all of those dead bodies outside that must have come from here. Where did the Germans get them all?

Just inside the door were people on the lower bunks so close to death they didn't have the strength to rise. They were, literally, skeletons covered with skin--nothing more than that--there appeared to be no substance to them. The next day when the press arrived, one of the photographers for LIFE magazine had one of the really bad ones propped up against the door frame in the daylight. He took the photograph, but out of sight in the darkness of the building, behind the man, were the people propping him up. I have seen that photograph several times in the years since, and every time I see it my stomach rolls a little, my mind goes into some kind of a dance, and it takes me a little time to return to normal. There are still altogether too many things that flood my mind once a trigger is pulled.

Later we were told the medical unit was moving around searching for the most desperate cases, in order to get them to the doctor as quickly as possible. They told us the story of one prisoner who was so close to death that even thinned chicken broth was too rich for his stomach. The doctors were doing everything they could, trying mightily; but in too many cases they had no chance at all and would lose in spite of their best efforts.

We were about to do what Sergeant Blowers had told us to do--take a walk in the woods. We headed for the woods talking softly to each other, the talk full of wonderment--the hows, the whys. We had no answers. As limited as our combat experience had been, we had seen dead men, we had seen wounded men from both sides with the immediacy of battle, with no time for conjecture. We had done what we could for the wounded and then had got on with the job that had to be done. None of us, no one in our company, even amongst those who had been the originals, was prepared for what we were now surrounded by. It was not "human". It did not seem real. But it was all too real, it was the only life that some of the prisoners had known for years. Maybe it was all too human. Maybe this is what we are.

No need to go all wall of text.

Sure..the ones posting on here have been from the US and UK...that fair enough?

The world would be a much better place today if the Nazis had eradicated Communism from Europe, which they would have done, if it weren't for the Zionists and international bankers, hellbent on global domination, that convinced Roosevelt to do everything he could do to get America into the war... which was never any of our business (I'm American).

The UK and USA were on the wrong side in that war.

Wall of f**king truth more like, walls of bodies. That nazitards should try and deny the truth these vets lived with means yeadh-why not a wall of text.

Shame we can't time travel nazitards back and have them dig graves and movies bodies so they could see what the nazis did and save these brave vets the horrow they had to live with their whole lives.

As I said, Hitler and the wars aside

You sad nazitard moron. You cool with what the Nazi allies did in Thailand? You get all horney about the attrocities like Siam Burma Railroad?

I guess you must have a greatdrandaay that liked to murder to...from the sound of uour intellect a Japanese NCO banged your greatgrandma

Nazitards seem to be voting for the moron option.

No suprise there....

Bullshit Allied propaganda. Go listen to any of Hitler's speeches, THE FULL SPEECHES, not the edited soundbites, and you will see he was all about helping your fellow man and improving the quality of life for everyone, in every country.

You have no clue what you're talking about, because I used to be like you, so I know where you are coming from. You were never taught nor have you ever studied what the Allies did to force Germany into war, and you are not aware of the things Hitler did to try and avert war, and the number of lives he saved from the Soviets. You have been completely brainwashed by Holocaust propaganda.

Stalin has never been even 1% as demonized as Hitler, and he was much, MUCH worse. In fact, Stalin and Communism is lionized even to this day. They are both responsible for an enormously greater amount of suffering than National Socialism.

Really? Name one mass grave the Nazis were responsible for.

I can barely understand what you're trying to say, since you can barely construct sentences.

Anyway, with regard to the wall of text you posted above, those people died from typhus and malnutrition, as a result of the heavy bombing campaigns and invasions from the Allies against civilian targets and supply lines.

Yeadh- that's why your hiding in Thailand is it?

Nazitard. Dont you get that that nazitards are a laughable joke in Europe because so many serivemen who had familes had a chance to see what the Nazis were like?

The only nazitards left are the sad chimps with a murderer in their family tree and some football hooligans too dim to realise that pogoing while tanked up on larger is not equivalent to a degree from a real university and their 'opinions' are not worth wiping your ass on.

Oh, ok.

I hold a degree in History and Political science and have read mein kampf. There is nothing even to debate here you fool. Your buddy hitler was a murderous piece of shit and you are a moron.

And the Allies and Stalin were also murderous pieces of shit. But you think they're all fine and dandy for some reason.

Do you believe you have seen ALL the evidence from both sides ?

Here have a look at this documentary series, If you dare.



14 parts so far.

What's wrong - did they justifiably put a bullet in your goosestepping ancestor and you've been hiding out in the jungle ever since?

You are of course insulting every decendent of a sericeman who fought for the USA or the UK in WW2 by saying that but you don;t give a shit because you are hiding in Thailand far away from Europe where the murderous savages called nazis had their ever so brief 15 minutes of fame.

Part of your problem is that you believe the lies about gas chambers, a "Final Solution" to murder all Jews, lampshades made out of human skin and shrunken heads. They are all lies.

Yes there was forced deportation and people accidentally died due to disease and malnutrition, but it was not German policy to murder masses of people. Once you realize this, then you can think about the issue more clearly.

Your crud does not last five minutes when faced with any history department in any University *anywhere* and yet here you are banging your shit filled drum on the internet like you have a clue.

Go get an education.

Look how angry you are. Your brain literally cannot process the information I am giving you because it goes against everything you have been brainwashed to believe.

You can't even explain how the Nazis were murderous savages, can you?