Who liberated the Buchenwald Camp?

An American soldier named Harry J. Herder, Jr. claims that he was on the first American tank that broke down the barbed wire fence at Buchenwald and forced its way into the camp.

The first soldiers who arrived at the Buchenwald camp on April 11, 1945 were with the 6th Armored Division of the US Third Army, but the camp had already been taken over by the prisoners a few hours earlier and it was not necessary to break down the fence surrounding the camp.

Herder described how the American soldiers looked the other way when the Communist inmates hunted down an escaped SS guard, brought him back to the camp and forced him to tie a noose to hang himself.

The Communist prisoners did hunt down 76 guards and bring them back to the camp to be murdered by the inmates, but Herder's general description of Buchenwald has some suspicious details:

Herder wrote in his story of the liberation that he rode into the camp on a tank after breaking down the barbed wire fence that was on the side of the camp opposite the gatehouse, and then drove "down hill" to the gate house. The gatehouse was at the top of the slope on which Buchenwald was built, so it was up hill from the fence on the opposite side.

Herder mentioned that there was a "wooden beam" with the words "Arbeit Macht Frei" in German script over the gatehouse. Only Class I camps, such as Dachau and Sachsenhausen, had a sign with the words Arbeit Macht Frei. Buchenwald was a Class II camp and these words were nowhere to be seen. Buchenwald had the words "My country, right or wrong" written in German on the gatehouse and the German words "Jedem das Seine" written on the iron gate. The words "My country, right or wrong" have since been removed.

Herder wrote that the next day after the liberation, which would have been April 12th, a Life photographer came to take pictures. Margaret Bourke-White, the Life photographer who photographed Buchenwald, was traveling with the Third Army and she arrived on April 15th, along with General George S. Patton. Herder wrote, regarding the Life photographer: "He took a photograph...."

Herder described the dead bodies "stacked like cord wood" outside the camp enclosure, apparently not knowing that the crematorium was located inside the Buchenwald camp, not outside, as at Dachau. The bodies found at Buchenwald were stacked near the crematorium or on trucks, not in piles outside the camp as Herder wrote.

Herder described how the American soldiers gave chocolate to the young children in the camp; he wrote that one young boy had lived in the camp for years, never having the pleasure of tasting chocolate candy. Herder apparently didn't know that all the Nazi concentration camps received packages from the Red Cross which always contained chocolate. The prisoners were also allowed to receive packages from friends and relatives.

A factory at the Buchenwald camp was hit by an Allied bomb on August 24, 1944 and a tree inside the camp was killed, although Herder wrote that the camp itself had not been hit. The tree stump was still there when the American liberators arrived.

Herder wrote about visiting the medical building where human organs were stored in jars. These organs had been removed from condemned German criminals who had died during the medical experiments which were conducted at Buchenwald.

Doctors at Buchenwald were doing experiments in an attempt to find a cure and a vaccine for typhus, but Herder wrote that Jewish prisoners had been chosen for experiments in which they were sprayed with water and left outside to freeze. Then an attempt was made to warm them up by placing two women on either side of them. This sounds like the experiments for the Luftwaffe which were done at Dachau, not Buchenwald.

Lastly, Herder wrote that the mayor of Weimar and his wife had committed suicide after being forced to witness the atrocities at the Buchenwald camp. It was the mayor of the town of Ohrdruf who committed suicide, along with his wife, after General Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered the people of the town to visit a sub-camp of Buchenwald near Ohrdruf.

The American army was segregated during World War II, with white soldiers fighting in exclusively white divisions while black and Asian soldiers had their own separate divisions, commanded by white officers. Six days after General Patton's first troops entered Buchenwald on April 11, 1945, African American soldiers from the 183rd Engineers Combat Battalion delivered some supplies to the camp. For most of the liberated prisoners, this was the first time they had ever seen a black man, and many of them would recall it later in their survivor accounts.

Gunther Jacobs was a survivor of Buchenwald who had spent three and a half years in Nazi concentration camps. In an interview with Jeff Bradley of the Denver Post in 1989, Jacobs said: "The first Black people I ever saw in my life were the Black soldiers who liberated us on April 11, 1945." Jacobs told Bradley that he had never been able to speak out about what happened at Buchenwald, but he wanted to speak now "on behalf of his Black liberators" whom he had never thanked.

In 1989, Henry Kamm visited the former Buchenwald camp and then wrote an article about it for the New York Times. He quoted Eli Wiesel, Buchenwald's most famous survivor, regarding the black liberators of Buchenwald. In a telephone interview, Wiesel told Kamm : "The most moving moment of my life was the day the Americans arrived, a few hours after the SS had fled. It was the morning of April 11...I will always remember with love a big Black soldier. He was crying like a child -- all the pain in the world and all the rage. Everyone who was there that day will forever feel a sentiment of gratitude to the American soldiers who liberated us."

Gunther Jacobs and Elie Wiesel were both seventeen years old when Buchenwald was liberated. Jacobs told Kamm about the Black soldiers "coming to the camp with half-tracks and armored personal carriers. About a half dozen vehicles. These Black GIs came out and gazed at us -- we were very malnourished and dehydrated and I was hardly able to walk."

By 1993, the story of the black troops at Buchenwald had escalated to an account of how African Americans had been the ones to actually liberate the Jews of Buchenwald. Even though there were only 4,000 Jewish prisoners among the 21,000 inmates still in the camp when the liberators arrived, the irony of the persecuted people of America freeing the persecuted people of Europe appealed to the Politically Correct generation.

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