Lager Nordhausen: a soldier's point of view

Afterimage, May-June, 2004 by Betsy Phillips

April 12, 1945, the day that Roosevelt died, was the day when these images were made, not by a "war photographer", but by an regular American soldier, not assigned to photograph the carnage, but assigned instead to deal with it, to clean it up, to make it go away. Before he could do that, however, he felt a need to document what was. The images were made on a German camera taken from a German civilian on German film. The photographer, whose name could not be identified, served in the 612th Engineers Light Equipment Company, which followed the 1st, 9th and 104th Infantry Divisions and 3rd Armored Division as they pressed east towards Berlin, three weeks before V-Day on 5/8/1945. A soldier by the name of Orville Birkner had the negatives. Whether he is the photographer has not been confirmed. Prints were given to fellow soldier, Everett M. Phillips, then Army Corporal Phillips, Technician, 5th Grade, also present that day. It is through Mr. Phillips, now 85, that our attention was drawn to these photographs, which have never been published, and only rarely seen, as they remain a private testimony to the experience of that day.

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Interviewed on 4/20/04, Mr. Phillips recalled vividly that moment. He and his company had been pushing on towards Berlin, and came upon Lager Nordhausen Concentration Camp, home to a mixed, but non-Jewish population of war prisoners and "enemies of the state"--Belgian, Czech, Romanian, French and even German prisoners, detained as slave labor. Unfortunately, this episode was not the worst that he had witnessed since landing in Normandy on June 9th, 1944, 3 days after D-Day, but it was the magnitude of it that he felt was most horrific: over 6,000 emaciated corpses laid out in rows. They may have been dead for a week or more, some shot, some beaten to death. Mr. Phillips remembers a spring day, fairly sunny, and the stench of death and blood, an odor, that he had "become used to", if one can become "used to" such a smell. His assignment was to bulldoze long, shallow (3 ft.) trenches into which the bodies would be placed for mass burial. The bodies had already been moved from the buildings and were awaiting disposal. According to Mr. Phillips, German civilians were rounded up and marched to the site by American Military Policemen supervising the operation, and it was they who were forced to move the bodies to the trenches, placing them on doors, boards, blankets and stretchers to carry them across the road. The SS troops that had run the camp had fled prior to the arrival of the liberators. They were eventually captured and shot about 30 miles east of the camp.

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Mr. Phillips and his company remained at the camp a day or so, some staying within a mileor so away, some staying in the ruins of homes destroyed in the war. While there, he was able to speak with a young survivor, a stunted Frenchman, about 20, who had been at the camp for four years The young man told of how the inmates would scavenge even blades of grass near the fences for food, and how they would fight over corpses, for if they carried a corpse when receiving their rations, not only would they receive (from laughing German guards) their own ration, a moldy crust of dark bread and some gruel made of worms and bugs, but that of the corpse. They would sometimes carry the corpses until the limbs fell off.

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