retaliation

I've read the Rock of Anzio, where they say some guards were torn apart after liberation....., and I think some informers/etc...I take it, this would've been common in the camps?? to retaliate?? I remember reading of some Japanese getting ''it'' from former POWs....

 

I know many of the prisoners in the extermination camps (Poland), before liberation, staged rebellions, though small and unsuccessful.

 

I don't know about "common", but it certainly did happen in quite a few places.

 

I would think there would be more than a few instances, per camp, of revenge...it is a common human trait, no?

 

http://remember.org/liberators.html

It appears most of the "brave" guards fled before the allies arrived, and liberated the camps. Most of the inmates in the many camps were probably not in any condition to do much in the way of acts of revenge.

“My first impression of it was the odor The stench of it was all over the place and there were a bunch of very bewildered, lost individuals who came to me pathetically at the door in their unkempt uniforms to see what we were doing and what was going to be done about them. They were staying at the camp even though their guards and staff had fled because they didn’t know where to go or what to do. They had heard news that the Americans had taken over that area and they were waiting for somebody to turn theirs back straight again and they were just lost souls at that time. Well, my feeling was that this was the most shattering experience of my life,”

- John Glustrom
333rd Engineers

“We walked inside and saw these skinny people who were still living, and one of my enlisted men who walked in with me realized they were starving. We had nothing but some candy bars, which we got in a ration, and one of my men gave the candy bar to one of these people who grabbed it and ran away and gulped it down so fast that he became unconscious and probably choked on it when he tried to swallow it before someone took it away from him. These Jewish people and these Polish people were like animals. They were so degraded, there was no goodness, no kindness, nothing of that nature, there was no sharing. If they got a piece of something to eat, they grabbed it and ran away in a corner and fought off anyone who came near them.”

- Samuel Glasshow,
liberator of Woebbelin

Of all the horrors of the place, the smell, perhaps, was the most startling of all. It was a smell make up of all kinds of odors –human excreta, foul bodily odors, smoldering trash fires, German tobacco — which is a stink in itself — all mixed together in a heavy dank atmosphere, in a thick muddy woods, where little breeze could go.
The ground was pulpy throughout the camp, churned to a consistency of warm putty by the milling of thousands of feet, mud mixed with feces and urine. The smell of Gunskirchen nauseated many of the Americans who went there. It was a smell I’ll never forget, completely different from anything I’ve ever encountered. It could almost be seen and hung over the camp like a fog of death.
As we entered the camp, the living skeletons still able to walk crowded around us and, though we wanted to drive farther into the place, the milling, pressing crowd wouldn’t let us. It is not an exaggeration to say that almost every inmate was insane with hunger. Just the sight of an American brought cheers, groans, and shrieks. People crowded around to touch an American, to touch the jeep, to kiss our arms — perhaps just to make sure that it was true. The people who couldn’t walk crawled out toward our jeep. Those who couldn’t even crawl propped themselves up on an elbow, and somehow, through all their pain and suffering, revealed through their eyes the gratitude, the joy they felt at the arrival of Americans.

- Captain J.D. Pletcher,
71st Division at Gunskirchen

“[The prisoners] were so thin they didn’t have anything didn’t have any buttocks to lie on; there wasn’t any flesh on their arms to rest their skulls on…one man that I saw there who had died on his knees with his arms and head in a praying position and he was still there, apparently had been for days.“

-William B. Lovelady,
Commander of the Task Force of the Third
Armored Division and liberator of Nordhausen

“When we walked through those gates…1 saw in front of me the walking dead. There they stood. They were skin and bone. They had skeletal faces with deepset eyes. Their heads had been clean shaved. They were holding each other for stability. I couldn’t understand this. I just couldn’t. So I walked around the camp; I wanted to…understand more. I went to a building where they stored body parts from ‘medical experiments’ in jars of formaldehyde. I saw fingers and eyes and the hearts and genitals. I saw mounds of little children’s clothing. Little children who didn’t survive. I saw.. all of those things that belong to little children. But I never saw a child….If this could happen here, it could happen anywhere. It could happen to me. .1 often wonder what I would have done if. in 1939, my family and I had been caught up in this and for all those years nobody, hut nobody, would help us. I would have been a bitter man…"

- Leon Ball of the 183rd
and liberator of Buchenwald

“We pulled into Dachau, after the medium tanks had taken it. .. I was commanding a platoon of five light tanks. One of my drivers says, ‘Sarge go in there and see what’s happening.’ So I got down and went into a building, and the smell of burnt bodies stifled you. I said, ‘Oh, my God, I can’t stand this.’ I put my handkerchief to ax nose and walked to a furnace. I opened it and I saw a burnt body….I said, 0h, no, it can’t be.’ I went to the next one and opened it and… ‘it can’t be.’ Against the wall were people, I guess the ones who would have gone into the furnaces if we hadn’t got there, and they were moaning and groaning. I just looked at them; they were dying from malnutrition, Then I went in the back to the shower room. I didn’t go in, I just peeked through the window… I came out and went to my tank, and I sat and cried. My gunner says, ‘What’s happening?’ I said, ‘Oh, nothing.’ The tears came out of my eyes. I cried and I said to God, ‘How could man give such an order, so cruel to human beings?’ “Regardless of the war."

- Walter Lewis

“My driver didn’t want to go into the camp. He said, ‘Colonel, I can’t take it here anymore. I said, ‘Well, you, stay here with your jeep.’ I found a young captain who took me over to the camp…the enormity of the number of bodies around, thousands of bodies. Then we came to piles that had been heaped up, orderly in some cases, like a stack of logs; other places, helterskelter. Many people died before my eyes. I stood beside one medic who was working on a victim, and the man finally died. The medic said to me, ‘Why is it that there’s no respect for life?’ We both said a prayer together. Mine was partly in Hebrew and partly in English. I said the prayers for the dying and the dead, the Sh’ma Israel and the Kaddish. When we finished, we threw our arms around each other and he said, ‘Why do humans have to do this to other humans? Why can’t they just be human?'”
- Colonel Lewis Wienstein
member of General Eisenhower’s Staff
and liberator of Dachau

I found a reference to the following incident, but am very uncertain of the veracity:
"On April 11, 1945, soldiers in General George S. Patton's Third Army discovered the Buchenwald concentration camp near the city of Weimar, and were astounded when they were shown lamp shades allegedly made from human skin. What the newspapers didn't report was that the liberated prisoners were given guns by the Americans and allowed to ride in American Jeeps to Weimar where they terrorized the population, raping, pillaging and killing civilians at random. "

I find this highly unlikely. There is another event at Buchenwald which is probably more accurate to the truth, and which may have sparked the rumour.

"Buchenwald was partially evacuated by the Germans from April 6, 1945. In the days before the arrival of the American army, thousands of the prisoners were forced to join the evacuation marches. Thanks in large part to the efforts of Polish engineer Gwidon Damazyn, an inmate since March 1941, a secret short-wave transmitter and small generator were built and hidden in the prisoners' movie room. On April 8 at noon, Damazyn and Russian prisoner Konstantin Ivanovich Leonov sent the Morse code message prepared by leaders of the prisoners' underground resistance (supposedly Walter Bartel and Harry Kuhn):

To the Allies. To the army of General Patton. This is the Buchenwald concentration camp. SOS. We request help. They want to evacuate us. The SS wants to destroy us.

The text was repeated several times in English, German, and Russian. Damazyn sent the English and German transmissions, while Leonov sent the Russian version. Three minutes after the last transmission sent by Damazyn, the headquarters of the US Third Army responded:

KZ Bu. Hold out. Rushing to your aid. Staff of Third Army.

After this news had been received, Communist inmates stormed the watchtowers and killed the remaining guards, using arms they had been collecting since 1942 (one machine gun and 91 rifles).
A detachment of troops of the US 9th Armored Infantry Battalion, from the 6th Armored Division, part of the US Third Army, and under the command of Captain Frederic Keffer, arrived at Buchenwald on April 11, 1945 at 3:15 P.M., (now the permanent time of the clock at the entrance gate).



Post liberation, (14th April 1946) the Nakam group claim to have murdered some 300-400 German PoW at the US Internment camp in Langwasser by poisoning their bread with arsenic (1900 were seriously ill from the incident).

I still wouldn't say it was "common" given the numbers of people that suffered at the hand of the Nazis.

 

Franz Zieres, Commandant of Mauthausen. Yeah, there was some revenge...




View attachment 21798

 

I don't see many pictures like that, in the regular books