Buchenwald: Arrival

Arthur Goldberg, Wile's driver

Wile: We had just been witnessed to the most fantastic episode to witness in terms of military might, when the Third Army and First Army were ordered in different directions. We were on our way to Berlin, as we saw it, and then we were ordered south. We had the planes overhead, and we had the half-tracks and the tanks and the trucks--it was just one constant din for three days of this tremendous war machine changing directions. And here I was, along with my buddies, witnessing an aspect of the war. It was shortly after that, that as I understand it, that every photographer within a range of a hundred miles of Buchenwald was ordered into that concentration camp. The reason given was that Patton didn't ever want it to be forgotten, and so he was recording it pictorially for all those that come after. We wound up in a copper mine and used all those facilities to store gallons of gasoline and barb wire fence, ammunition, and I don't know what else! Everything we needed! And then, the next thing, the Captain said that he wanted us to go to the concentration camp, Buchenwald, and to be part of taking pictures of that site.

Crawford: Was the captain of your unit with you?

Wile: It was another captain. He was anxious to go, and I guess he wanted to see it. If it hadn't been for him, maybe we wouldn't have seen some of the things.

Crawford: What were you thinking as you got up to those gates?

Wile: Well, I just had very little concept about what I was going to see. I wasn't really prepared to see human beings in the condition that I saw them in, nor was I prepared to see a human stacked like cordwood after they were dead. And of course, then they did have the table out next to the opening there with the lampshades of skin and the book covers and tattoos that they had...

Crawford: Did you have any trouble locating the camp?

Wile: No, I never had the opportunity to have to check maps. I always had drivers and people that were taking me somewhere, and so I paid very little attention to that. We parked outside, and I would judge the by the time we got there, it must have been, maybe three in the afternoon. And the first thing that I think I can remember was people coming up to me and pleading with me for handouts of either cigarettes or anything of that nature. And that there was a variety of age groups that were obviously prisoners here, but the majority of everybody I was seeing were not walking. They were sitting with their knees up against their chests and leaning over and their backs against the walls of what few buildings were there or fences. Scattered throughout the stacks of the dead and on one stack outside of the ovens--draped over the emaciated bodies of the inmates--were the strapping, young husky individuals in their twenties, maybe, or younger. They had conveyed to me that these strapping, husky, young people that were draped over the piles of emaciated bodies were the guards of the camp that were pummeled toward the very end by the inmates themselves and maybe just their fists or whatever they used. About that time an individual whose name I don't have, but who looked very well fed, began showing us around.