World War II vet recounts horror of Nazi death camp

Crammed aboard the Queen Mary with 16,000 fellow soldiers on Feb. 12, 1944, Eugene Schulz had only heard stories about the enemy that waited for him on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

While reports broadcast from overseas spoke of Adolph Hitler's quest to control Europe and beyond, Schulz would learn firsthand of the unspeakable cruelty of the German Fuehrer.

Schulz, 91, who details his experiences in the XX Corps during World War II in his book "The Ghost in General Patton's Third Army," was the guest speaker at the Veterans Day program held Monday, Nov. 10, at Winnebago Lutheran Academy.

For more than an hour, Schulz held the audience of students and fellow veterans spellbound as he shared his story and photographs taken while walking through a Nazi death camp in 1945.

"It's important to share these memories and stories because there are people even now who say the Holocaust never happened," Schulz said. "I am an eyewitness. I have proof that this happened."

Inhumanity

Schulz, a son of German immigrants, received his letter of induction into the U.S. Army on Jan. 4, 1943, and was soon headed off to training camp. The 19-year-old was assigned to the Fourth Armored Corps (later named the XX Corps) where he was a typist tasked with typing up battle orders that were rushed to the front. His unit was attached to Gen. George Patton's Third Army that spearheaded the drive across France, Germany and into Austria where they met the Russian Army on V-E Day.

As the unit pushed west, Schulz said soldiers often debated the validity of rumors about Nazi death camps.

"There were rumors about these horrible death camps all around Germany, but no one had ever seen them," Schulz said.

That is, until American troops stumbled across one in Ohrdruf, Germany. In his book, Schulz said the town resembled countless burgs that military troops had swept through. In fact, the townspeople were quite proud that German composer Johann Sebastian Bach had penned some of his music there.

As soldiers were liberating the town of Ohrdruf on April 4, 1945, they made a gruesome discovery on the outskirts of the city: a Nazi concentration camp that had been hastily abandoned just hours before the arrival of American patrols.

Schulz said the camp was designed to supply slave labor to construct a railway to the new communications center in Weimar. One month before its discovery, the camp held nearly 12,000 prisoners. Days prior to liberation, Schulz said the German SS evacuated nearly all of the prisoners on death marches to Buchenwald, a major concentration camp. Those too weak to make the march were shot dead and left behind.

"Gen. Eisenhower arrived at the camp on April 12 and was appalled at the evidence of cruelty. He wanted as many people as possible to witness this atrocity, so he invited soldiers, journalists and even the townspeople to view this," Schulz said. "The townspeople of Ohrdruf kept saying 'We had no idea!' After walking through the camp, the mayor of Ohrdruf went home and hung himself."

Armed with his camera, Schulz and three others made the trip to Ohrdruf to see for themselves the cruelty of the German Army.

As Schulz stepped into the camp, the first sight that met his eyes was a pile of bodies of prisoners who were too weak to make the march to Buchenwald. All had been gunned down.

"These were the last living people in the camp. My head began to swirl and my eyes were so filled with tears. I couldn't believe it," Schulz said. "And nearby was a gallows where they hanged disobedient prisoners and beat them to death for all to see."

Inside of sheds, Schulz and his comrades found bodies of men stacked like wood in various stages of decomposition. Out in a field were other corpses ready to be buried in open trenches.

"The stench in the barracks was so overpowering it took my breath away. It left me in a daze," Schulz wrote in his book.

Revealing the truth

Schulz said the Nazis wanted to remove evidence of their crimes so they exhumed bodies from mass graves and built a makeshift pyre of railroad ties and tried to burn the bodies. While he could hardly believe the scene, his camera captured the horrible image of the charred remains of prisoners.

"That smell was so deep into my senses that I smelled it every day for three to four months following my trip back to camp," Schulz wrote. "I wrote a letter home to my brother, telling him that I was afraid he would call me a liar. I had heard rumors of these camps but had taken them with a grain of salt, thinking they were made up like an Edgar Allan Poe story. These sights of terror and horror were unlike anything the world had ever seen and I had proof."

Schulz elicited gasps from the audience when he recounted walking into the office of the camp's German commandant.

"You could tell the desks had been hastily abandoned. And when I took a closer look I was stunned to see that the cover of a book was made out of human skin, and a lampshade and there framed on the wall was the skin of a prisoner's tattoo of a nude woman," Schulz said. "What were they thinking? These Nazis were so brainwashed through all these years."

The farm boy from Clintonville, Wis., was in utter disbelief of the atrocities committed at the hands of the Nazis.

"The living conditions these people had suffered in were horrible. Can you imagine a human being living worse than a hog? They were treated a thousand times worse," Schulz told the audience. "I was an eyewitness to all this horror."

Contact Colleen Kottke at (920) 907-7968 or ckottke@fdlreporter.com; Twitter: @ColleenKottke.