NAME: JAMES MAY INTERVIEWER: SEYMOUR ALSHER CAMP: NORDHAUSEN DATE: MARCH 16, 1981 Q: The date is the morning of March 16, 1981. Dr. May, could you give us your full name, your address, when you were born, and how old you were, what you were doing at the time of the so-called liberation in April or May of 1945? A: I am James W. May. I was born in Union Springs, Alabama in 1912. I entered the service in the winter of 1944 and went overseas in December of that same year. In April of 1945, I was with the 271st Infantry of the 69th Division. My duty was Battalion Chaplain with the Second Battalion. Our Division was assigned a mission of pursuit of the retreating Germans, and our final objective was the Mulde River. Q: When did you become a chaplain approximately? A: April 1944. Q: And you were ordained where? A: I was ordained a Methodist minister, and I had been serving a parish in south Georgia when I entered the service. Q: And what was your military rank when you were in the service? A: I entered as a First Lieutenant and at the time of this action I was Captain. Q: And when were you released or discharged from the service? A: In August of 1946. Q: As a captain? A: As a major. Q: Do you want to tell us how you found out about it when you say that your mission... just how did this come about? Were you notified orally or what's your recall? I know it is a long time ago. A: A mission, of course, was given to the Division by a higher command. And my Battalion had a subordinate mission within that larger mission. Q: Did you have any specific role as a chaplain or were you just one of the officers? A: At this time I was traveling with the Medical Battalion, because they felt the Chaplains' ministry was most important for the casualties who were coming through, so as long as we were on the move or in combat, I moved with the medics and set up with them in their aid stations. Q: When did you first hear about the camp that I will ask you to describe and identify in a moment? A: We moved in to the city of Tausha on April 20th. Q: You say "We." Was that the whole Division or just your Battalion? A: The Medical Battalion with which I was moving which meant, of course, that the forward elements of the Division had already moved beyond us up almost to the Mulde. Q: When you say "beyond," in what direction would that be? A: East. Q: In other words, you were going from west to east. And Tausha would be some miles, almost directly east of Leipzig? A: Yes. Perhaps I should mention that the Third Battalion of our Regiment took the city of Leipzig, which was hardly a major military engagement, because of the situation. But after the Third Battalion took the city of Leipzig, the Battalion with which I was moving by-passed Leipzig, went around it toward the east, and moved into Tausha in preparation to support the attack on the city of Eilenburg, which was on the Mulde. Q: Had you known anything about a concentration camp at the time your military group entered Tausha? A: No. And I should say that I knew nothing about the nature of this facility, but we had hardly settled in Tausha before the word was passed around that there was this facility of some kind out there which we should see. Q: Why do you use the word facility? Is that the word that comes to mind? A: It's the word that comes to mind. Q: You don't know how it was described at the time? A: No I don't. I have on the back of a photograph which I took this note which I sent to my wife. This was at an airplane factory near Leipzig. That's my note there, written at that time. Q: This is a photograph you are handing me. It is about one and a half by two and a half [inches], and it is a black and white photograph. On the back of it, you have written something. Is this in your own handwriting? A: Yes. Q: Will you just read it, please? A: "Two foreign workers burned to death in their barbed wire enclosure at an airplane factory near Leipzig. The work of SS men." Q: You took this photograph yourself. I notice on the back it has no date. Do you know the approximate date you took it? A: The date was approximately the 25th of April 1945. I was at Tausha from April 20th to May 2nd. It was some time within that period that this photograph was taken. Q: Do you want to tell us about what you called the facility -- the circumstances as to how you got into the camp or why you were at the camp. Were you directed to go? Was it curiosity? Was it official duties? I am using the word camp. You used the word facility. A: Yes. Q: From your own recollection, Professor May, tell us, specifically, how you happened to view as an individual or how you happened to go to the camp. A: It was common knowledge passed around amongst military personnel that there was a terrible scene, out here at this place, which was surely of interest and something which we ought to see. Moreover, the word was passed around amongst us that the military government was going to require the civilians to go see it and look at it, because many of them said they had no idea that this kind of thing existed. I don't recall the exact date that we went out... Q: Except that it was between April 20 and May 2. A: Within this period, yes. The day that we went out, there were a considerable group of civilian persons lined up there. Q: You say civilians. You mean Germans? A: Germans. Ready to be taken through to be required to view this. Q: You mean German civilians who were not part of the camp personnel. A: Yes. Q: Was it right in the city of Tausha? A: As I recall it, it was in the environs. Q: How big is Tausha? Is it a small town? A: I don't know. I simply don't recall. Q: Where were the American troops? Where were they housed, including yourself? A: As I recall, there was considerable real estate there, as we called it, which was not kaput, had not been bombed out, and this was always prized by the advancing troops because they wanted a more comfortable facility. And these were the most comfortable facilities that we had had for several weeks. At the same time, there was much devastation all around us , but there was surviving real estate which was fairly comfortable. Q: And the camp was outside? A: Yes, as I recall. Q: You said that when you approached the camp, there were a number of German civilians waiting to be observers or what? A: As I recall it, the military government required these civilians, I guess through subordinate German officials, to come out and view this camp, because so often in those days we were hearing people say, "We had no idea this kind of thing was going on." Q: What do you remember from the physical things? What do you remember seeing or smelling or observing? A: I ought to say in the first place that what I recall and the very little that I recorded was hearsay evidence. I did not try to find papers to validate or verify the information, but the "common knowledge"1 was that this was a facility which had housed workers in that airplane factory. My assumption was that they were largely "foreign workers."2 Q: You say aircraft factory. Do you know of an aircraft factory being in the immediate vicinity? A: No. Q: It was what you heard. A: All that my hazy recollection can recall now is this extensive facility with a great deal of barbed wire, watchtowers, and very plain minimum barracks facilities. One of the barracks, as I recall, had been burned down and there was a number of bodies piled up around the entrance way of this building. Burned. All their clothing burned off. They were naked. Q: Did you see if they were men and women, old, young? A: As I recall it, they were men. Grown men, mature men. I don't recall anything said about women or children. Q: You didn't see any? A:. Didn't see any, as I recall, but their clothing had been burned off, and the corpses were all stiff. Apparently they had been there some time. Several days. The word which we had was that just before the Americans came in, the SS men fired this whole thing, and there were some bodies caught up on the barbed wire fence around where they apparently had tried to escape. These we understood had been machine-gunned by the SS men. Q: When you say you saw the corpses of men and their clothes burned off, you mean they had no clothes at all or just part of it burned? A: As I recall it, practically no clothing in many cases. But that picture that I have there looks like that body has...that would look like all the clothing had burned off, wouldn't it? Q: Yes. I know this would be a rough estimate, but how many corpses do you remember having seen? In the dozens? Scores? A: I would say in the dozens as I recall it now. Q: Do you know how long they were lying there? Was it days, weeks? A: I assume they had been lying there for a number of days, because of the stiffness of the bodies. Q: At the time you got there, were there any German guards? A: Don't recall any. Q: Do you recall any camp personnel at all? What was there beside the buildings and some of the corpses? A: That I don't recall. I assume that this was under some kind of American command at this time. I don't recall any difficulty in getting in to see it. There was no need for permission or permits or anything like that, so it was apparently open to the public. It may be that it was under military government. Q: When you say military government, do you remember if that was run by the Americans in concert with the Russians or the French? A: There were no Russians there yet. We had a military government detail of some kind attached to our Division. I think it must have been rather small, and sometimes this military government unit with our Division would call in military government from Corps and [unintelligible] where there was special need for it. In other words, they could augment from higher headquarters when they needed to. But I simply don't recall the situation at that time there. Q: You don't remember seeing any SS men or any German military? A: No, they were gone. Q: But you do remember seeing German civilians, and what do you remember about them, other than being lined up to visit? A: It looked like just mostly older people, in civilian clothes, and my assumption was that they had been rounded up by the Burgermeister and the local German officials who said you got to go out there and look at this thing. Q: What was your reaction then when you saw the Germans going through? Did you realize at that time why they were required to go through? A: Yes. Because so long as we moved through, we had heard Germans denying that this kind of thing could have gone on, or incredulous toward this kind of thing. Q: So you realized at that time the reason for it. A: Yes. Q: Had you had any contact at the time with German civilians? Do you speak German? A: Not very well. Q: Do you recall ever having any conversation with any German civilians at that time about this? A: Nothing specific. After this, I remember a conversation with an aristocratic woman. We went back later and we lived in the [unintelligible] which was this woman's home. It was a few miles to the east of this. And she was in her 70s. I remember a long conversation with her, and I said "You are here, reasonably close distance to this thing that I saw." I called it this Tausha mess. "Why was nothing said about this?" She said, "Well, if we had opened our mouths, we would have been there too." Q: Did she speak English? A: Yes. Q: Some of the questions I will ask now are obviously subjective. You were, of course, a much younger man then. Do you recall what your feeling was at the time? You didn't see any women. You didn't see any children. You saw maybe dozens -- I believe you said dozens -- of burned out bodies. Did you see anything else other than corpses? A: Don't recall other than the incineration of the whole thing. Q: But there was no crematoria. A: No. Apparently they had ignited inflammables of some kind within these buildings and tried to lock the people in there and burn them inside the building. Q: Did you hear what these men were? Were they Hungarians, Romanians? Any knowledge as to who they were? A: The word we used in those days, because we had run into so many of them, was Poles and Russians . But not Russian military, but they were captured. Q: Not necessarily Jews. A: So far as I know, these were not Jewish people. That's what I'd like to know. That's why I called Fred.3 Q: My own knowledge is I think there were no Jews at that particular camp, but I'm giving you my own.... A: My assumption was that these were workers and they were in this camp for rigid controls. Q: Do you want to tell me your reaction at the time, not necessarily because you were a clergyman, but you can take that into consideration. A: It was ambiguous. On the one hand, it was utterly repulsive and sickening, and it tended to evoke hatred and resentment from me of all that Nazism stood for. On the other hand, I have to say fairly that I had encountered so much ugliness and cruelty and barbarism and so much suffering amongst the casualties of my own people that one becomes kind of hardened in defense against this kind of thing. I regret that, but I guess that's a human thing to do. Q: Professor May, at the time all this happened, back in 1945, do you want to tell us what your reaction may have been and how you may have reflected your thoughts as a clergyman in the military? A: The point at which I confronted "religious"4 issues at this time was in connection with the response of the ordinary GI, who tended to have a great deal of difficulty with seeing so many evidences of the religiosity of the German people. They would go into a village and the first thing they would see would be the church and they would see the priest. And when they were ransacking homes as some of the GI's did, they were confronted with crucifixes, religious figures, religious pictures, all kinds of evidence of German religiosity. They had a great deal of difficulty in squaring this with the evidences of cruelty, and they thought of it as being un-Christian. Q: Did they come to you? Do you remember some instances of some of the individual GI's coming to you about it? A: Yes, it would emerge in conversation. I tried to help them in my regular services. As we moved across and as we had opportunities for services, I frequently talked about this question -- the difference between "religiosity"5 and Christianity. These were Christian groups that I was with. Q: They weren't limited to Methodists, though, were they? A: No. And at certain times during combat I had both Catholic and Protestants. Q: Do you remember in this part of Germany, that is the Leipzig area, what the dominant religion was there? It's not Roman Catholic, is it? A: This area in here was pretty heavily Protestant. I remember commenting in my letters the number of times in which I found priests saying Mass in Protestant churches, which was something I had never heard of before. I think that may have been under wartime conditions, but my hunch is that Catholics were in a minority, but not a minuscule minority. They had enough Catholics around to have priests. Q: Is it largely Lutheran then? A: Yes. That's Luther's birthplace at Eisleben. And by the way, you might be interested in this, in that city of Eilenburg...I don't know if you recall a Christian hymn that Lutherans, particularly, sing. "Now thank we all our God, with our hands and hearts and voices." The author of that hymn was a pastor in Eilenberg in the 17th century, which was a time of great suffering and famine and pestilence. And after we took the city of Eilenburg -- I did not know until later about this association -- I conducted a service in this wrecked church, up on a hill, and we opened that service singing this hymn. Q: 300 years after it was originally written. A: Only later did I find out that that hymn was written by the pastor of this church in this community. Q: Interesting footnote. You were talking about the conflicts some of the GI's thought between the symbols of religiosity and the actual combat that was going on. Do you recall what some of their comments were and what your reaction may have been? A: They were incredulous that the people who had committed some of the crimes that they had run into should be as religious as they were. And they saw around them, particularly the Catholic boys, all of these crucifixes, Catholic para phernalia, and everything. I don't know the technical name for it, but a home would have the little thing on the wall where you have holy water Over in the Rhineland, where it was almost 100% Catholic, they had a great deal of difficulty. My preaching was an effort to try to help them see the difference between religiosity and Christianity. I think I used the terminology real religion and phony religion. I don't remember specifically....in my letters I've got some of the texts listed that I preached on, but I don't recall specific developments. Q: Do you recall if your experience at Tausha had any specific relevance to any of your sermons? A: Yes, it surely did. On Memorial Day we had moved back, occupying a number of towns and villages, awaiting some decision as to what they were going to do about the Russians. I was in the tiny little town of Baunersroda. There it is right there. Q: I believe that is southwest of Leipzig. Were you there with your military outfit? A: Yes, my headquarters was there, and we were there about six weeks, awaiting the Russians. Apparently they were negotiating with the Russians in higher headquarters. Q: And this would have been after VE Day. A: After VE Day. And the Russians had come up to the Elbe, which was over this way. Q: Which was east of Eilenburg. A: Yes, about 30 miles. Our division met the Russians. We were the first persons to meet the Russians . Q: Where? A: At Torgau. Q: That's by the Elbe. A: Yes, that's on the Elbe. I remember standing in Eilenburg and seeing all of the big brass and the generals coming through in their jeeps going over to Torgau to talk to the Russians. Wasn't one of the big summits held about this time? Q: I don't remember. A: Anyway, they were negotiating with the Russians, and ultimately the Russians came in and occupied all of this, but we were holding this territory in here waiting the arrival of the Russians. Q: Tell us about when you were in Baunersroda. A: I was there for about six weeks, conducting services, in a wide circle around here . We had two battalions that I was meeting with. We would have a company here and a company there and around different places. And all in all, on Memorial Day we had a tremendous Battalion formation. We had trucked all the battalions in to Freiburg. Let me see where Freiburg is. Freiburg is on the Saale River. Q: That's just due south of Baunersroda. A: We trucked the whole battalion in there and had a Battalion formation in a very big outdoor amphitheater, up on a mountain. I don't know whether it had been a Nazi thing or not. I had no idea. But at any rate, it was a very attractive outdoor place. I have a picture upstairs if you want to see it that bad. I made the Memorial Day address, but one of the things I hammered on....would you be interested in seeing that? Q: Yes. [Interruption in tape. Conversation resumes as follows.] Q: Professor May, you have given me a copy of a paperback booklet, which was captio ned Shelby to the Elbe, Fighting 69th, Company A, 369th Medical Battalion. I understand this is a sort of an informal history of the Company A of the 369th Medical Battalion which you just got a copy of. It consists of approximately 80 pages, and there are small segments of various places that the Battalion had been in during World War II. There is a portion referred to as Tausha, Germany, and written by a Jim Crossley, and it is approximately a page long and there are brief references to Tausha. Would you be good enough to read just these two paragraphs, which briefly refer to th e camp or facility at Tausha, or outside Tausha? A: "There are many liberated slave laborers here in Tausha. At each meal they waited patiently for the food that might be left over and thrown away. It was in this town that we met and adopted our friend, Steve, the Greek sea captain." And the last paragraph: "We visited a former German concentration camp on the outskirts of Tausha and saw horrors that seared our memories, leaving a scar that will remain forever." Q: You don't know who Jim Crossley is, do you? A: He was an enlisted man, that's all I know. Q: Professor May, you have given me a copy of a two-page letter addressed to "Dear Folks " and which ends "Love to you all, Jimmy." The caption is 271st Infantry, APO 417, c/o Postmaster , NY, NY, June 15, 1945. It is my understanding that this letter, copies and the original of this letter, was sent to a number of your family and friends. You are giving this to me as part of the Holocaust Project. You make reference to Father Kelley and to Ernie. I understand Father Kelley is...what's his first name? A: Joseph. Q: Father Joseph Kelley, who is the Catholic priest assigned to the Regiment. And Ernie is his driver. You also make reference to a Roy, and Roy is your driver. You make reference in the letter to a camp, Dora Camp. Camp Dora. Do you remember how far Camp Dora, or Dora Camp is from Nordhausen itself? A: I can't remember that. I assume it was in the immediate vicinity. Q: Within 10 or 15 miles? A: Less than that. Q: The fifth paragraph in the first page of that letter makes reference to your personal observations of Camp Dora. The paragraph starts out "4,000 more had been shipped out the day before." Would you care to either expound on what you saw at Camp Dora, and what your feelings were then and are now? You made reference earlier to the fact that you were incredulous when you saw what you saw. Do you remember how long before you wrote the letter you actually saw this? The letter is dated June 15, but do you know, approximately, when you actually went to Camp Dora? A: Just a day or two before. Q: Do you know when, approximately, the camp was liberated? A: I would assume that it had been about the time that Buchenwald was liberated, because they are approximately the same...Buchenwald is down here near Weimar. Isn't that where Buchenwald is? Q: Yes. I think so. A: Right south of here, and so you will notice that Nordhausen may have been liberated before Buchenwald. Q: Was it liberated by American troops? A: I assume so. Q: When you saw it some time during the first part of June, how long had it been liberated? A: It must have been liberated over a month. Q: Do you want to tell us how you felt then, if you remember, when you first saw the crematorium? Is it singular? Is there one crematorium or is there more? A: There were two furnaces. Q: Two furnaces? A: Yes. Q: You actually saw two furnaces? A: Yes. Q: And the bodies were...bodies or bones? A: Bones. Q: The bones. They had already been incinerated then? A: Yes. Q: You saw no bodies, actually? A: No. Q: They had already been incinerated. You made references to Poles; that is, with a capital P. A: Many people had been shipped out. I refer in the letter there to the fact that the preceding day they had shipped out 4,000 people. Q: In other words, those that were internees? A: I assume so. And UNRAA was apparently in charge of the camp. They were feeding the people and I suppose were organizing it, though there was an American headquarters of some kind there. But the thing that I remember that distracts me as I look back on this experience is my own incredibility...rather, I found this simply incredible. Q: What...by the fact that they were ashes? A: Yes. This was in the crematorium. Polish laborers in their striped uniforms had played on GI's and their liberators to get what they could so this had left me somewhat hardened and skeptical about the stories that these people were telling. Q: Do you know if they were Polish Jews or wouldn't you have any way of knowing? A: I doubt if they were Jews. I think they were foreign laborers, POW's. My hunch is that all the Jews were gone by this time, if there were any left. And this camp apparently was in connection with this huge factory that went under this mountain. It's unbelievable. Two tunnels of trains could run through and then tunnels feeding into it. This is where they were making V-1's and V-2's.6 Q: Is it your understanding that the inmates at Camp Dora were supportive labor for this? A: Yes. I know nothing about the Jewish situation. That's what I called Fred about. I'd like to know. If you find out... Q: We'll let you know. A: But the ones that we saw were these...we called them Poles but they weren't necessary Poles. They could be Hungarians or Gypsies or somebody else. Q: They had the black and white striped.... A: Yes. Black and white stripes that you saw on all of these people. Many of them had Ost, from the East, up on their [unintelligible]. But as these people who were standing about the furnace there, obviously interested in cigarettes.... Q: They were sort of acting as guides? A: Sort of acting informally as guides. Self appointed guides. So I was skeptical as they were telling the story there. Q: In what language? A: Broken English. We'd pick it out of them. But as I look back on it, I am struck by the fact that I found it hard to believe that these were human ashes and that people had really been burned in those instances. As Elie Wiesel once said, you've got to be ready to believe. And I wasn't ready to believe. Q: That's interesting. I remember when I was in the service I got either Newsweek or Time magazine and that was the first knowledge that I had of the actual death camps. That was somewhere in 1945. At the time you saw this, was this your first physical observation? A: Closest I had been to it outside of my experience over in Tausha which was not a death camp. Q: Did you believe it then? It was 35 or 40 years ago. A: I didn't believe it then. As a matter of fact, it's only after I saw the Holocaust picture on TV that the burden of this thing began to bear down on me. It was kind of a confession experience. You just maintain a distance to it. I was maintaining my distance then. Q: Did you disbelieve it or figured this was some sort of exaggeration? A: I thought it was a sort of exaggeration. I didn't disbelieve it. This also goes back to my own dehumanization. Q: What do you mean dehumanization? It wasn't unique to you? A: I had become hardened to it. I had seen so much suffering. Q: In the military. A: Yes. You don't go through...you don't ride through city after city [unintelligible] and see people scratching around in the ruins without becoming hardened to it. Q: Hardened or insensitive? A: Insensitive. I didn't tell you this a little while ago, but I conducted services on a hill, overlooking that town of Eisleben while they were pouring artillery shells in there. Q: Who was pouring? A: We were. All day long on Sunday. We sent our troops in there on Saturday. Q: This would be what month? A: April 20 or 21st. I was [unintelligible] back at Tausha. I got in my jeep... Q: And you drove toward Einsleben. A: Yes. Our troops were all in here, going into Einsleben. Q: Einsleben or Eilenburg? A: Eilenburg. Q: Eilenburg, that's what you mean. A: And on Sunday I conducted two or three services. Q: In Eilenburg? A: In little towns on the outside here. Q: You conducted services in the third week in April before the Americans had taken the city of Eilenburg? A: Our First Battalion was going in, and I was with the Second Battalion. Our Second Battalion was not in the fight. [End of Side One. Side Two continues as follows.] Q: I want to amplify your letter on Nordhausen. A: I was just saying that... Q: Being incredulous is what you said. A: The experiences which we had been through overloaded us emotionally, and we got to the point where it was hard to believe, hard to be sensitive to the thorough dimensions of the tragedy which we were viewing. Q: Do you think that your colleagues had the same reaction? A: I am afraid they did. Q: They were all incredulous? Do you remember? A: There were just two or three others there with me, and we all had that same experience, but I really ought to speak only for myself. Q: You didn't associate the observation of the bones, the crematorium, necessarily with the planned destruction of the Jews, did you? A: No. I knew all that in the back of my mind, but.... Q: You didn't see this as primarily...that is, your observation of the crematorium and the stacks of bone ashes as primarily a Jewish persecution? A: No. It is going to take a long time for us to begin to gather some of the dimensions of all this Holocaust business. Q: When, in light of your experience or what you have seen, did it really come down to you what this really was? You mentioned the Holocaust. Are you talking about the TV show? A: Yes. Q: Do you think that may have been the thing that really solidified it or...? A: It kind of gathered it up. Over the years...that's 35 years ago. Q: Yes. A: And over the years as I began to read more and more, such as the Anne Frank story and other material, we began to understand this and to accept the fact that there were brutalities there that we could not even dream of. Q: Professor May, when you went to Nordhausen, as described in your letter, you didn't see...by that time all the SS guards had gone. A: Yes. Q: Do you recall at that time talking to German civilians either at Camp Dora or in the general area about this? A: I believe we had practically no conversation with German civilians. This was a very rapid trip we made and we had lots to see. If you go on through the rest of my letter, you'll see that we went through that factory, and, again, it was almost incredible for me to believe that all of this was going on underground. Nobody told us that they would keep these workers underground there for five months at a time in order to ensure secrecy. I picked that up somewhere, I've got that in the letter. Q: Looking back at it now, were you more impressed at the time with the underground facilities than with the crematorium? A: I suspect so. It just took time for that crematorium thing to [unintelligible]. Q: At the time you saw it, it was not what you would characterize as a traumatic experience? A: No. I had defenses against it. Q: And you say this was a very short trip and from your recollection it made no impression upon any of your colleagues either? A: I would say they reacted pretty much the same way that I did. Q: You have already mentioned that you didn't talk to any German civilians at the time. I am going to keep this letter. A: Yes. Q: In conclusion then, Professor May, your visit to Nordhausen, or specifically Camp Dora, is very brief, and you've already described that the impressions were, would you say, rather fleeting. They didn't stay with you. Your observation of the crematorium was less than an hour, or how long was it? A: Twenty minutes, I guess. Q: Twenty minutes and you were with a lot of other people? A: Yes. Q: And then it took a little over a generation for this thing to really sink in. Is there anything you want to add before I leave and turn the machine off. A: No. I think not. As you said, the passing years have blunted the memories on many details, and I would remember very little about Nordhausen if I hadn't written that letter. Q: You saw the letter. A: The letter is what helps me keep that alive. Q: I want to thank you. 1Professor May put quotes around this word/phrase himself. 2Ibid. 3Fred Crawford, the director of the Witness to the Holocaust Project at the time of the interview. 4Professor May put quotes around this word/phrase himself. 5Ibid. 6V-1's and V-2's are German rockets.