Reprinted from 2006
Timmer remembers it was one of the first nice days of spring as they drove the 10 miles to Ohrdruf. German fighter planes strafed them along the way, but no one was hurt. As they entered the town of Ohrdruf, home to some 20,000 people, “No one came out to greet us.” Less than two miles past town they understood the reason.
“We came up to a 15-foot-high barbed wire fence and could see unmanned wooden shacks (barracks) behind it,” recalls Timmer. “We drove in and between the gate and the barracks were 30 dead … the blood still wet from the departing German guards” who had shot the prisoners before fleeing in trucks.
Seeing the American soldiers, the surviving prisoners who could still walk (about half of the 500 who were there) “cautiously” came out of the barracks.
Timmer, the son of Dutch-born parents, had taken German in high school, and suddenly he was thrust into the role of company interpreter. He would be the first to hear and tell others the tales of unspeakable horror that were already evident in the sights and smells surrounding them.
To hide the evidence of what transpired at Ohrdruf, the guards, he learned, had been trying to dispose of about 2000 bodies, mainly slave laborers. Half had been exhumed from a mass grave, and half had been stacked in several buildings awaiting incineration.
Since Ohrdruf was the first concentration camp to be liberated, “we were ordered to leave the bodies where they lay,” recalls Timmer. “The division commanders would be notified of what had been found and would probably want to see for themselves.”
Meanwhile, the GIs shared their rations with the living and looked around, stunned, at the scene before them. At noon, Timmer continues, the division commanders arrived, and Patton himself came at 3:30. Within half an hour, fearless “Old Blood and Guts,” as Patton was known to his men, was so sickened by what he saw that he “threw up.”
General Eisenhower flew in from Belgium early the next morning to witness the carnage firsthand. “Even Ike looked pale, and he wasn’t a pale guy,” says Timmer. The supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe had brought his own interpreter, so Timmer was temporarily relieved of his duties. “Ike stayed until dark,” Timmer recalls, talking at length to one of the articulate prisoners.
When Eisenhower left, Patton brought the mayor of Ohrdruf and his wife to the camp to see for themselves what they undoubtedly already knew. (When they were off duty, the guards would come into town to “brag, womanize and drink,” notes Timmer, “so how couldn’t townspeople know?”) Then Patton ordered the mayor, his wife and all the other able-bodied townsfolk to come back the next day and dig individual graves for the dead prisoners.
The citizens did as they were told, completing 80% of the burials and promising to come back the following day to finish the job. That night, the mayor and his wife hanged themselves.
Timmer was called upon to translate their suicide note. It said, simply, “We didn’t know! - but we knew.”
Almost 50 years after World War II ended, veterans of the 89th and their families visited France and Germany as part of our final “Tour of Remembrance.” Towards the end of the trip, we visited Ohrdruf and, to our surprise (although we had been forewarned) found nothing, absolutely nothing. All traces of it had disappeared. There is only a graveyard for POWs and a German Army Training Camp. It was like it never existed. But it did and we can testify to it personally. Most Germans today were not even born then but we pray that the German people never let future generations forget what a mad regime can do.
