| Original caption: “A prisoner who died from Nazi maltreatment is covered and awaits burial as three other prisoners look on, after the Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald, near Weimar, was liberated by the Third United States Army in April 1945. German [Schutzstaffel] SS guards had killed hundreds of prisoners and executions were still taking place as the Americans entered the gates.” A detachment of troops under the command of United States Army Captain Frederic Keffer (May 23, 1919 – December 6, 1992), intelligence officer from Combat Team 9, Combat Command A, 9th Armored Infantry Battalion, 6th Armored Division, United States 3rd Army, with Technical Sergeant Herbert Gottschalk (July 7, 1917 – August 6, 1985), a German-speaking soldier from his intelligence section, as well as driver Sergeant Harry Ward (April 30, 1921 – September 26, 1984) and gunner Private 1st Class James Hoyt (May 16, 1925 – Aug 11, 2008) and 2 escaped Soviet prisoners, arrived at Buchenwald Konzentrationslager (KZ; “Concentration Camp”) in their M8 Greyhound armored car on April 11, 1945, at 1515 Hours (now the permanent time of the clock at the entrance gate). The soldiers were given a hero’s welcome, with the emaciated survivors finding the strength to toss some liberators into the air in celebration. 3rd Army Headquarters sent elements of the 80th Infantry Division to take control of the camp on the morning of Thursday April 12, 1945. Several journalists arrived on the same day, perhaps with the 80th. Byron “Beano” Heywood Rollins (April 26, 1913 – January 8, 1988) worked for World Wide Photos before World War II and joined the Associated Press for the Normandy landings. In March 1945, he was assigned to the 3rd United States Army as pool photographer. He had photographed the Orhdruf subcamp when it was liberated and followed 3rd Army to Buchenwald. During the Allied advance in Germany in April 1945, reports came in from the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, and from others at Bergen Belsen, Erla, Nordhausen, and later from the Hockert munitions plant in Leipzig, Auschwitz liberated by the Red Army in the East, Ohrdruf, and Dachau. At such places correspondents found men and women who were hardly more than emaciated and misshapen walking skeletons. They found naked corpses stacked like cordwood or tossed into open trenches, and they found gas chambers and crematoria for the mass executions. The 1st reports on these horrors came from Marguerite Higgins (September 3, 1920 – January 3, 1966), a young, multi-lingual correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, who had arrived in Paris in February 1945 and was attached to the United States 3rd Army in Germany. She and Sergeant Peter T. Furst (May 23, 1922 – March 8, 2015), Stars and Stripes, and Percival R. Knauth (June 17, 1914 – January 15, 1995), TIME magazine, reached the Buchenwald camp a few hours after it had been liberated. The stories were so unbelievable she rudely questioned the KZ survivors she encountered. Having seen Buchenwald, she regretted her initial reaction for the rest of her life. Rollins’s photos of KZ victims’ bodies, especially his photos of Ohrdruf, were circulated nationally. While there were stories of Communist prisoners liberating the camp, the SS practically offered no resistance and withdrew at the sound of battle approaching. American tanks appeared at the wire and followed the retreating Germans. The only SS left in the camp were those soldiers that did not hear the loudspeaker announcement to evacuate. The prisoners began to execute the hated Kapos that helped the SS with prison administration and rounded up any guards left behind. Some of them were also killed before the Americans arrived. Technician 5th Grade Kenneth Gerber (July 8, 1913 – February 20, 1977), 58th General Hospital, saw a group of liberated, armed Jewish prisoners execute several Kapos. “These were wild men bent on revenge,” he said of the vigilantes. “Their hatred for the kapos was visceral, of the kind reserved for traitors.” 1 group of prisoners hunted down a hated kapo and presented him to a group of American soldiers that included Sergeant Howard Cwick (August 25, 1923 – April 25, 2006), a Jewish American soldier with the 281st Combat Engineer Battalion. “If I ever saw pure animal terror, I saw it written all over his contorted face,” Cwick said. “He knew his end was near. His eyes pleaded for help.” A crowd gathered around and screamed for the man’s blood. ‘Give him to us!’ they roared. Here was a serious moral dilemma for the Americans. They were inclined to treat all liberated prisoners with compassion and humanity, as they knew nothing of the inner workings of the camp and the horrible atrocities this man might have committed. Even if he was a criminal and scoundrel — judging by the mood of the survivors, he must have been—they were still bound to protect him from reprisals. However, they were attempting to establish trust and rapport with the survivors. If they protected the Kapo, the crowd might well turn on the Americans or at least feel alienated from them. After all, what right did they have to deny these long-suffering victims their greatly anticipated moment of retribution? Of course, if they gave in to the crowd’s blood lust and delivered the kapo to their clutches, the man would undoubtedly be tortured and killed, thus making the Americans party to an atrocity, no matter how justified it might have been in their minds. Also, the prisoners probably could have killed the Kapo on their own, but they brought him to the Americans, almost as if they were seeking validation for revenge. Instead of taking a stand and making a decision, the Americans turned away to discuss the matter. In so doing they failed to protect the Kapo. The inmates apparently interpreted their indecision as de facto permission to do what they wished with the man, and they set upon him. “They punched, they kicked, they pummeled, and stomped that man to death,” Cwick remembered. They tore his clothing off and smashed his head with rocks, boots, and fists until the grotesque, misshapen carcass lay inert at their feet. Cwick felt an almost strange sympathy for the dead man. “I would like to say I would never have worked for the Germans,” he later reflected, “but no one knows his own ‘breaking point.’ No one knows how much pain or horror he could suffer or witness before he would ‘change.’ The need for survival is powerful! Until we walk in someone else’s shoes … we aren’t qualified to judge him!” In Cwick’s opinion, the moment he and the other soldiers turned away from the crowd, they all knew what would happen; in that sense, they chose to indulge the blood lust of the vigilantes. Cwick carried the guilt of the kapo’s death with him for the rest of his life. “I was as responsible for his death as I would have been had I put my pistol to his head and fired. To my dying day, I will see his terror-filled eyes pleading for our help.” Even the knowledge that the kapo had turned against his fellow Jews was never enough to abate Cwick’s terrible sense of guilt. In 1 of Buchenwald’s administration buildings, United States Army infantryman and interpreter Victor Geller (September 5, 1925 – March 1, 2017), a former Yeshiva student from New York City, struck up a conversation with a hardened survivor — a fellow Jew — who excused himself every 15 minutes, picked up a wooden club, and left the room. After several such instances, Geller finally asked the man where he was going. The man gazed at Geller and explained that the club had once belonged to Nazi guards. He, himself, had once been beaten with it. Now 1 of the guards was in custody elsewhere in the building, under the control of his former victims. The man told Geller: “During my turn on duty here, I used this club to beat the Nazi several times an hour. You want to know why I beat him? Maybe you want to know why I don’t kill him? Let me tell you because you should understand. As an American, as a soldier and especially as a Jew. A human being, no matter who he is, deserves dignity and justice. He very rarely gets his fair share, but he can hope and struggle. The man in the cell should be brought to justice, but not yet. Justice would mean putting him to death. That is too nice, too orderly. Before he shares death with his victims, he must first share their loss of dignity and a little of their pain. So I beat him, but I do not talk to him. I don’t care what he feels as long as he also feels pain.” Geller passed no judgment on the man and his actions. Nor did he intervene to put a stop to the beatings. He hadn’t suffered what the survivor had suffered, which probably made him reluctant to interfere in any way; or maybe he agreed that the Nazi deserved to be tortured in such fashion. Reflecting later on the man’s words and actions, Geller felt a powerful kinship with him, 1 that even transcended the strong bond he shared with his fellow soldiers. “Maybe the Jews of Buchenwald were brothers that I had never met, to whom I was linked by blood, shared and shed,” Geller opined. Even though he spent only a few hours at the liberated camp, he felt as if a part of him would always remain there. | |
| Image Filename | wwii0576.jpg |
| Image Size | 208.89 KB |
| Image Dimensions | 894 x 1288 |
| Photographer | Byron H. Rollins |
| Photographer Title | |
| Caption Author | Written or Adapted by Jason McDonald |
| Date Photographed | April 21, 1945 |
| Location | Konzentrationslager Buchenwald |
| City | Weimar |
| State or Province | Thuringia |
| Country | Germany |
| Archive | |
| Record Number | |
| Status | Caption ©2026 MFA Productions LLC Please Do Not Duplicate or Distribute Without Permission; Image in the Public Domain |
Author of the World War II Multimedia Database