Buchenwald: Crematorium

"The crematorium"

Caption for "The crematorium"

Crawford: Now, this picture is of the ...

Wile: Crematorium, right...

Crawford: And the person in the middle of it is the person in civilian clothes who was well fed and who was now showing...

Wile: And he could speak some English. In fact, he spoke quite a bit of English, as I recollect. And it sticks in my mind that he told me that he was a New Yorker, and my obvious first question to him was "How can you explain your condition versus what I'm seeing around me?"--since he had already explained that he was Jewish. And he said, "One has to live!" and then explained it no further.

Crawford: How many people were with you in your jeep or in the group that went through there?

Wile: I would say that we probably went over in a three-quarter ton, and that all of these people, all these soldiers in this picture, here in the crematorium, were part of my group, so I would say that with the Captain and myself, there could have been as many as, maybe eight people.

Crawford: I noticed you've written some comments on the back of the picture.

Photo caption: The Civilian is a Jew--Polished apples for 6 yrs at Weimar Concentration Camp--Who knows what price he's paid for his life, or what deeds he's done. "We need a place to burn, our prisoners will build it and run it; we will supervise." 6,000 in one day--6,000 in one day--Russians--Belgians--Frenchmen-- Jews--Americans--English--The Aryan Race--The Nazis! S.S. Troopers! Supermen! Not For Publication

Wile: The "6,000 in one day" figure is as I understood what the guide was telling me. I seem to recall that he said that they had moved many bodies that they hadn't burned on flat cars or box cars to Dachau because this was one of the first camps that was over-run by the Americans. They were trying to cover up and hide their deeds, but Patton's forces moved in there just too quickly!

Crawford: What else do you remember about that afternoon?

Wile: Well, one of the things that I remember in detail was in the crematorium in the basement. There was a chute that came down into the basement area and a drain in the center of this room. And there were meat hooks hanging up along the side of the room, and something that looked like an old club that had a thong through the end of it, about three inches around! And what was explained to me was that they brought Russian prisoners in from the front in closed trucks. They had some sort of a way that they forced them in there-in the cordwood fashion as I recall--and they drew this top over them. Many of them, by the time they got to the crematorium, were dead--by the time they got to Buchenwald were dead! They backed the truck up to the crematorium where this chute that came down into the basement was, and as the bodies were pushed down the chute, any that were still moving, their skulls were cracked by this club. And then they were hung at the base of the skull on these meat hooks. They were stripped of their clothes, their teeth were knocked out, and all the gold was rendered from their teeth. And then there was a cart on tracks that they loaded these bodies on and an elevator arrangement--the details of which are too vague to me now--but this cart went up on these tracks, and they moved these carts up to these ovens and just kept throwing the bodies in.

Crawford: And of course, that work was really done by other prisoners!

Wile: By other prisoners, right! And that's why I say this fellow here--I don't know what he had done or how he had managed to survive in that kind of shape--but that was that aspect of it.