Flint Whitlock - The Beasts of Buchenwald

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Excerpts from THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF HELL by Eugen Kogon. Copyright 1950 by Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, Inc.

More than half a century later, our grief and our outrage about what happened [here at Buchenwald] have not diminished. This place teaches us that we must be ever-vigilant about the spread of evil in our own times.

To this day, there are those who insist that the Holocaust never happeneda denial of fact and truth that is baseless and ignorant and hateful. This place is the ultimate rebuke to such thoughts, a reminder of our duty to confront those who would tell lies about our history.

U.S. President Barack Obama Address at Buchenwald Memorial Site June 5, 2009

They fell victim to hunger, sickness, the sadistic terror and systematic murder. I bow before you, the victims and their families. The death of millions, the suffering of the survivors, the torment of the victimsthis is the basis of our task to create a better future. We cannot change history, but this country can learn a lot from the deepest shame of our history. We will not allow lawlessness and violence, anti-Semitism, racism and xenophobia to have another chance.

Prologue: An Encounter with Evil
Introduction: The Coming of the Camps
Chapter 1: Before Buchenwald
Chapter 2:The Making of a Nazi
Chapter 3:The Ruler of Sachsenhausen
Chapter 4:The Commandant Takes a Wife Chapter 5: Hill of Horrors
Chapter 6: Ilse Koch, the Tattoo Lady
Chapter 7: Applying the Pressure
Chapter 8: 1939:The Year of No Turning Back Chapter 9: Escalation
Chapter 10: How the Mighty Have Fallen Chapter 11:The Ruler of Maidanek
Chapter 12:The End Comes
Chapter 13: Liberation at Last
Chapter 14: Further Evidence
Chapter 15:The Trial Begins
Chapter 16: Pister Takes the Stand
Chapter 17:The Trial of Commandeuse Koch Chapter 18: Prosecutorial Misconduct
Chapter 19: Appeal and Release
Chapter 20: A Trial at Augsburg, A Death at Aichach Epilogue
Afterword
Timeline
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Sources
Buchenwald Today

PROLOGUE An Encounter with Evil

Like some crazy dream out of this world. Capt. Frederic Keffer Buchenwald Liberator

CAPTAIN FREDERIC KEFFER could not believe what his eyes, ears, and nose were telling him.
It was April 11, 1945a clear, bright day. Keffer, the lanky S-2 (Intelligence) officer of Combat Team 9, U.S. 6th Armored Division, and his three-man patrol had just stumbled upon hitherto unknown KL Buchenwalda sprawling, filthy, foul-smelling encampment behind a barbed-wire fence with guard towers all aroundlocated high on a hill five-and-a-half miles northwest of Weimar, in central Germany.
His mind tried to comprehend what he was seeing and smelling, but answers refused to come. Keffer looked up at the ominous guard towers, now curiously empty. There were row after row of shabby, tarpaper-covered barracks. Suddenly, he saw thousands of people in ragged, gray-and-blue-striped clothing coming toward him. What was this, his brain silently screamedsome sort of prison camp?
Through a hole that someone had cut in the barbed wire fence, Keffer entered the compound and was suddenly swarmed upon by hundreds of inmates dressed in those loathsome, feces-stained uniforms, lifted up, and tossed into the air repeatedly by their filthy hands until he demanded to be set down.
Although he did not understand who all these frail, skinny, stinking people in striped suits were, and could not understand the babble of tongues, he understood the sheer joy being expressed by their laughing, cheering, tear-streaked faces.
Gradually, Captain Keffer, with the help of his sergeant and interpreter, came to understand that the place was called Concentration Camp Buchenwald and that, at the sound of the Americans approach (there had been a brief firefight with German troops at a village just beyond the camps northwestern perimeter), the camps secret resistance committee of inmates had sprung into action, distributed a clandestine cache of weapons, and rose up against the guards and administrators of the camp, chasing most of them away.

First Lieutenant (later Captain) Frederic Keffer (center) with two officers from the 6th Armored Division (Lieutenant Emanuel S. Manny Zizzi, left, and Captain James F. Redinger, right) somewhere in France, summer 1944 (Courtesy Leslie Keffer Rego)

The excited, rapidly speaking inmates, gesticulating wildly with their bony hands as if words were inadequate, explained to Keffer that they had been political prisoners of the Nazis for months and years, and that they were in desperate need of food and medical aid. The American officer, still stunned by the enormity of his surprise discovery, assured them that he would radio for help.

No one had ever told Captain Frederic Keffer, nor any of the men accompanying him, what a concentration camp was, what Buchenwald was, or pointed it out on a military map for him. There had been no briefings, no field manuals, no instructional films to prepare him for this moment. It was as if he had just stumbled through the woods and discovered the landing site of beings from another planet.

In a letter to his grandfather written on May 23, 1945, Keffer said, I was the first American soldier into the place. One might say that I had liberated it, except that it was already liberated by its inmates, who had killed many of the SS guards by the time I had arrived. What a mad mob greeted me that day! I couldnt possibly describe it; as I look back on it, it seems like some crazy dream out of this world.1

KEFFERS DISCOVERY ELECTRIFIED Lieutenant General George S. Pattons U.S. Third Army. Within a day or two of Keffers initial visit, various elements of Third Army began pouring into Buchenwald. Some units came to administer emergency medical assistance to the newly liberated inmates; others to carefully feed and provide clean water to those on the verge of death; others to provide proper sanitation facilities; others to bury the dead; others to handle the enormous task of identifying who all the prisoners were, where they came from, and help them start to rebuild their shattered lives. Still others came to bear witness to the incontrovertible evidence of mans inhumanity toward his fellow man.