After the infantry units (minus a small guard detail) moved on to their original destination of Munich, the task of caring for the 32,000 inmates in Dachau fell upon US Army Displaced Persons Team 115, which arrived on April 30. A mere ten men comprised the team: one commanding officer, one medical officer, three men concerned with provision and supply, two with administration, a clerk, and two drivers. The lone medical officer of the team, Lieutenant Marcus Smith, carried medical supplies consisting only of “a personal bottle of aspirin and a tube of penicillin eye ointment.”[1] When the team entered the concentration camp at Dachau, it had existed as an entity for a mere sixteen days, having been created by an order dated 14 April 1945. Although its members had some brief on-the-job training administering to Polish, French, Russian, and Italian displaced persons at Schwabach, about thirty miles south of Nürnberg, they could not be prepared for the logistical nightmare awaiting them.
The men of DP Team 115 came from a variety of occupational and educational backgrounds, but apart from that of commanding officer Lieutenant Charles Rosenbloom, who had worked in New York with troubled youths before the war, none of those backgrounds seemed to be even remotely useful or preparatory for the task facing the team. Lieutenant Smith emphasized the seemingly random assignment of these particular men to this particular duty: “No one has any special [END PAGE 29] knowledge of or desire to work with refugees or displaced persons … and no experience in organizing or caring for large numbers of people; none of us has been in the executive or administrative section of the Army.”[2] The five days spent in acquiring practical experience at Schwabach provided the team with its only real training in the care of displaced persons and concentration camp survivors.
The ultimate aim of the DP Teams, as prescribed by G-5, the Army’s civilian affairs section, was the safe and timely repatriation of the thirteen million displaced persons in Germany. A number of secondary aims served as means to this end. The first of these was the collection of displaced persons into camps, an action that would allow the Allied advance to continue unencumbered by masses of wandering DPs and refugees searching for food and shelter in the war-torn countryside. When possible, military authorities would construct large collection camps, but a liberated concentration camp provided them with an existing facility and, perhaps, some semblance of an infrastructure.
Displaced Persons Teams were also responsible for the care of displaced persons and concentration camp survivors. This care included not only physical rehabilitation through food and medical care, but also housing, recreation, religious activities, and communication with the families of their charges.[3] As part of this care, the authorities would involve the DPs in the operation of the camp as much as possible. While increasing the manpower needed for the effective administration of the camp, this policy would also be a means of rehabilitation for the inmates, who by [END PAGE 30] participating would come to understand that they were “no longer working for the Germans, but for themselves.”[4] Collection center or camp authorities would also be required to keep records identifying and registering those in their care as well as of the materials used in the running of the camp and distributed to its inmates.
“What do these people need?” Smith asks himself in his 1972 account, Dachau: The Harrowing of Hell. His answer: “Everything.”[5] The brief training that he and his team received just prior to their arrival at Dachau seemingly had little applicability to the colossal task before them. Not only the needs of the inmates, but also their number overwhelmed the team. When the members of the team trained in Schwabach, the displaced persons for whom they were responsible were closer in number to 2000 than the 32,000 now facing them in Dachau. Once again, the team would have to learn by doing.
Successful rehabilitation would necessitate a careful system of coordination and administration on the part of the American liberators, and from its inception this system faced an array of difficulties. Basic communication, so necessary to the smooth functioning of an administrative bureaucracy, proved problematic since the prisoners of Dachau were by no means a homogenous group. At the time of liberation, the camp’s population represented no fewer than forty nationalities.[6] With this diversity came a host of cultural, national, and political ideals and beliefs, as well as a variety of languages. Even the International Prisoners’ Committee struggled with the linguistic diversity of the camp’s population. The Committee [END PAGE 31] adopted three official languages (French, English, and Russian) and also grudgingly used German as an international language when necessary. Some American soldiers could speak and understand German, Polish, or Yiddish because of their European ancestry, but when the mass of them moved on with the campaign in the first few days following liberation, the number of Americans who could communicate easily with the inmates dropped sharply. In its dealings with the 32,000 liberated prisoners, the military administration, which grew with the arrivals of two Evacuation Hospital units on 2 and 5 May, employed no more than seven interpreters, and of these, four worked in stenography and the translation of written documents.[7] Hand gestures and body language assumed an important role in communication.[8]
Also, to a certain extent, it was an ironic reality that the former prisoners feared the American administration, as the SS had instilled in them a fear of camp authority. The wise (or, perhaps, the experienced) prisoner was suspicious of authority, because he never lost a clear understanding of the malevolent role and intentions of the SS staff. This understanding came not only from experiences with those guards or staff who openly and freely abused the prisoners, but even from those who appeared to harbor feelings of sympathy, pity, or even respect. Paul Berben provides the example of an SS man who might, in an apparent moment of “weakness,” poignantly share a picture of his family with a prisoner, then beat the same prisoner for not hurrying to the roll-call square. [9] [END PAGE 32]
A prisoner could never trust any camp authority because the reality of the situation was that “a fleeting sign of goodwill could be followed, for no reason at all, by savage brutality.”[10] Kay Foldvary, a nurse with the 116th Evacuation Hospital, presents a heartrending illustration of the prisoners’ inability to trust authorities: “[I]t wasn’t till we would go to straighten out their blankets [that] we saw they didn’t take the vitamins. They had gotten so suspicious of anybody doing anything for them, because the Germans had used a lot of experimenting on them and given them medication … that we found the vitamins underneath the blankets.”[11] This acquired fear had become a condition vital to a prisoner’s survival and remained one that was exceedingly difficult to discard.
Knowing this, the Americans attempted to break this condition, sadly without much success, by consciously exaggerating an air of relaxation. For instance, they would recline in their chairs with feet on their desks, offer cigarettes, chew gum, and speak in friendly and cordial tones. Lt. Smith noted of the inmates that “they knock timidly on the doors … edge fearfully inside, come to attention, … remain rigid even after we tell them to relax [, and they] find it difficult to express their thoughts.”[12] Despite the attempts to soothe the former prisoners’ apprehensions, “usually they are unable to unbend.”[13] The remnant of the “psychology of the camps” hampered effective communication between the Americans and the former prisoners by creating an association of authority with apprehension. [END PAGE 33]
Another remnant of this psychology, one that demonstrates the terrible psychological effects of the Nazi camp system, is revealed in the minutes of the 30 May 1945 meeting of the International Prisoners’ Committee. The knowledge that the Nazis had disguised gas chambers as shower rooms caused apprehension among the inmates concerning the use of shower facilities. The Committee noted that their comrades should be urged to use the showers, and the minutes of the next day’s meeting note that they had been persuaded to do so.[14]
The first administrative task to be communicated to the inmates was the necessity of a quarantine. XV Corps Headquarters rightly feared a preponderance of disease among the liberated prisoners, with special concern for typhus.[15] One difficulty in containing the typhus epidemic was the fact that typhus often has an incubation period of roughly two weeks. Even those survivors who did not show symptoms of the disease would have to be quarantined until the medical staff could determine that they were not affected.
For this reason, the liberating soldiers had the duty, seemingly incongruous with their very presence, to see that the camp gates remained securely locked and that no prisoners left the enclosure. When the prisoners first realized that they had been liberated and charged the main gate where the soldiers of the Forty-Second Division stood, the Americans even found it necessary to fire shots over the inmates’ heads to establish order so that the gates could be locked again.[16] One can only imagine the [END PAGE 34] confusion that this action stirred in the prisoners, still lost in the emotion of the liberation. Sidney Glucksman, who had arrived in Dachau in 1944, remembers: “[W]e realized, all of us, that we were free! I ran toward a [g]ate. I just had to get out! But American soldiers were standing in the way. They wouldn’t let us leave. … Slowly, all the other prisoners who were with me, walked back to the barracks. But I refused to go. It isn’t that I didn’t believe those American soldiers – it was just that I had to get out of there.”[17] Joel Sack remembers feeling disgust that the Americans were protecting the German civilians of the surrounding area, whom he saw as perpetrators by virtue of their apparent approval of the concentration camp.[18]
Besides the prevalence of disease, which along with the malnourishment rendered most of the prisoners unable to travel, a few additional factors necessitated a strict quarantine of the camp. Most immediately, some of the Capos and SS guards and officials who had avoided the initial arrests and executions had adopted the prisoner uniform in an attempt to evade detection. The Americans also feared that camp prisoners, if allowed to leave the camp freely, might plunder the surrounding towns and harass the local population in retribution for the horrific acts of the SS.[19] Beyond the reasoning behind the quarantine, though, remained the simple reality that the endgame of the European war had disrupted or destroyed transportation, making mass repatriations difficult to say the least.
The Army’s official mandate that the food and materials to be used in all displaced persons camps and former concentration camps would come not from [END PAGE 35] Army resources, but from German civilians, further complicated matters. The official attitude toward the requisitioning of supplies for displaced persons (and, by extension, concentration camp survivors) was that they “were brought here by the Germans. Therefore it is the Germans’ responsibility to provide for them.”[20] The Americans had come to Europe to liberate those nations invaded earlier by Germany. They came into Germany, though, as conquerors and occupiers themselves. As an occupying force, the Americans demanded “immediate compliance with all official orders and instructions,” and they were prepared to enforce these demands on the civilian population. However, that enforcement was not expected to be necessary. All Bürgermeisters that Lt. Smith and Displaced Persons Team 115 encountered pledged cooperation; they had seen the American Articles of Government, “which start with the ancient words, ‘We come as conquerors.’”[21] Harry Snyder, from the Forty-Fifth Division’s Quartermaster’s office, recalled an episode in which a Bürgermeister refused to deliver the bread demanded of his town. After Snyder threatened to have the newly freed prisoners come to the town to collect it, the town delivered its bread without delay.[22] [END PAGE 36]
[1] Smith, 32-4.
[2] Smith, 32-4.
[3] Smith, 10.
[4] Smith, 11.
[5] Smith, 89.
[6] U.S. Seventh Army, 101-2.
[7] Malcolm Vendig Papers, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives. RG-09.014
[8] Holocaust Testimony of Karessa Meitzke Foldvary, Holocaust Oral History Archive of Gratz College.
[9] Berben, 40.
[10] Berben, 40.
[11] Foldvary.
[12] Smith, 129.
[13] Smith, 129.
[14] Charles Rosenbloom Dachau Collection, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. RG-04.059.
[15] Whitlock, 353.
[16] Buechner, 65.
[17] Quoted in Dann, 203.
[18] Joel Sack, Dawn After Dachau (New York: Shengold Publishers, 1990), 37.
[19] Benz, 38.
[20] Smith 17.
[21] Smith, 47-8.
[22] Holocaust Testimony of Harry Snyder, Holocaust Oral History Archive of Gratz College.