The stench was overwhelming.
According to our medical officers, these slave workers could survive perhaps thirty to forty days without food under these conditions. They would lose 30 to 40 percent of their body weight, and their stomachs would be grossly bloated and distended due to the gases and the acid in their digestive systems. These people showed no such distended stomachs; they were nothing but skin and bones. They had been deliber-atetly, painfully starved to death. Even our combat tankers, who had experienced much of the death and destruction of war, were horrified at the barbaric treatment that these people endured.
General Hickey was ordered by General Collins, the corps commander, to assemble every able-bodied man, woman, and child in the city to bury the dead bodies. Collins also called First Army headquarters and requested a field hospital be sent immediately to take care of any survivors who might be rescued from the piles. Engineers with bulldozers dug large mass graves about ten feet deep and three hundred feet long.
German civilians made small wooden stretchers out of scrap lumber, picked up the bodies, and took them to the burial sites.
When I came back through Nordhausen on my way to maintenance battalion headquarters, I saw a steady stream of Germans carrying these lifeless skeletons, arms and legs dangling over the sides of the stretchers, to the burial sites. The whole scene reminded me of ghouls in a grave robbery scene from an old horror movie.
The bodies were laid side by side in the mass graves. The army sent a Protestant and a Catholic chaplain and a Jewish rabbi to perform ceremonies as these people were finally laid to rest.
General Sherman once said, “War is hell.” The Nordhausen tragedy made one think there must be different degrees of hell. Although the terror and violence of war can harden a person to new terrors, an unusually traumatic event can still shatter this external protective shell.
The 3d Armored Division medical officers cared for the survivors of the death camp until they could be relieved by the army field hospital. Of the approximately three thousand bodies stacked in the piles in the open field, about 10 percent were alive. Captain Comar, our battalion surgeon, said that some would survive but that malnutrition had probably already caused severe brain damage.
The V2 Rocket Factory
One of the columns of CCB discovered the entrance to an underground factory in nearby Robla. It was located in an old, abandoned mine that had been extended considerably for the production of the V1 buzz bomb and V2 rockets. The Germans had also been working on a new secret rocket motor for an interceptor.
The factory was staffed by slave workers, primarily from eastern Europe. They lived in wire-enclosed concentration camps and survived under the most primitive conditions. Those who were recalcitrant or failed to do their masters’ bidding were transferred to another enclosure, where they were slowly and deliberately starved to death. This was the enclosure we had found in Nordhausen.
The underground factory was elaborate, with some tunnels up to two miles in length. The Germans, highly ingenious engineers and inventors, had organized and built this factory in spite of day-and-night bombardments by the American and British air forces. After examining this system, I could understand how the Germans produced the V2s in such mass quantity. After the parts were fabricated underground, they were taken to the surface and sent to small towns in the vicinity of Nordhausen for the final assembly, which took more space than was available in the narrow underground passageways.
On the western edge of Robla was a schoolhouse with fruit trees planted in a geometric pattern behind the playground. Among the rows of trees were pyramid-shaped stacks of aluminum fuel tanks covered with camouflage nets. They were apparently meant to appear from the air as just more trees. This careful camouflage must have been effective, because there were no signs of bombing.
We broke into the schoolhouse and discovered a small but self-sufficient assembly plant with workbenches, cabinets, and parts for V2 rocket motors. In the larger rooms, the parts were being assembled and tested.
There were three subassemblies, each approximately five feet in diameter and ten feet long. The forward section contained a pointed nose cone, which flared to a bulletlike shape that contained the warhead and inertial guidance section. The midsection contained the large tanks for the fuel and the oxidizer. The rear section contained the rocket motor, piping, and pumps for the fuel and the oxidizer, and the controls for the rocket motor. The rear section was tapered from the main diameter and sloped back in the tail section, which included large fins to guide the missile.
Each section was assembled and mounted on heavy wooden pallets made from six-by-six rough-cut timbers.
After the motors were tested, the pallets were enclosed in large eight-by-eight frames covered with black tar paper. The doors at the end of each pallet were hinged at the bottom and held in the upright position with simple screen-door-type hooks.
The boxes were taken to a mobile launch site on three separate trucks. A crane was used to set the sections on the ground and line them up properly. The end doors were lowered and removed, and the three boxes were joined with additional hooks. A missile crew could thereby assemble the sections completely under cover. The boxes also provided some camouflage from the air.
Once the assembly was completed, the crews released the hooks, and the tops and sides of the boxes folded back. A crane then erected the missile on a launching tripod. Fuel trucks pumped the fuel and oxidizer into the tanks and the missile was ready to be launched. Once the launch was completed, another missile could be launched from the same position, or the tripod could be moved to a new location. The ability to use mobile launch sites was one advantage that the V2 had over the V1. The V1 required a long track at a fixed launch site, which was vulnerable to air attack.
Our ordnance reports came to the attention of Col. John Medaris, First Army’s chief of ordnance. Medaris sent a group to study the V2 installations. They found the Germans had developed a truly amazing organization, and that the underground plant was a lot more extensive than we had thought. Not only were some of these tunnels more than two miles long, but they extended in layers some 600 feet below the surface, completely impervious to bombing.
When we captured this plant, the V2 was in full production and they had turned out thousands of rockets.
Although there were many of these rockets in the distribution pipeline, all the launching sites in France, Belgium, and Holland had been taken. Prior to this, London and the south coast of England had suffered devastating damage from the rockets. Colonel Medaris became extremely interested in the V2 rocket system.
After WWII he was promoted to major general and commanded the German rocket team who established the Army Ballistics Center at Huntsville, Alabama.
That evening I returned to battalion headquarters to deliver my combat loss report. It was during breakfast the next morning, April 12, that we heard a BBC broadcast that President Roosevelt had died and Vice President Truman had been sworn in as our new president.
Although I never agreed with much of Roosevelt’s domestic policy, I always felt that we had been extremely fortunate to have a president who clearly saw the danger of Nazi and Japanese aggression long before we got into the war. I sensed that the troops felt that Roosevelt’s death was a great loss. He had been president throughout this worldwide crisis and had experience dealing with our allies. Truman, on the other hand, was relatively unknown.
Later that day, Truman spoke to the American people and particularly to the armed forces overseas. His speech was re-broadcast over BBC. I was impressed with his humility, especially when he asked for our prayers to guide him during his hours of great decision. I instinctively felt that anyone with such basic simple faith would be guided in the choices he would make.