The quote below is from the Jewish Tribune, a newspaper in Canada:
Carrier was an assault reconnaissance combat engineer attached to General Patton’s Third Army during World War II. He was following the advancing American infantry in the German city of Weimar on April 10, 1945, tasked with finding and securing engineering equipment, vehicles such as trucks and cement mixers, and road- and bridge-building supplies left behind by the Nazis. He had to find the materials, map them and get the information to his superiors.Churches were always a good place to go for information, Carrier had learned, so when he spotted the spire of a cathedral, he “drove over the rubble to find that church,” he told the Tribune. People at the church told him about a stone quarry and lumber mill at the site of a prison camp nearby and offered to take him there.One of them told Carrier that Russian prisoners had overpowered camp guards following the evacuation, just a few weeks earlier, of thousands of Jewish prisoners who were taken on a forced death march to Auschwitz.
It seems that the “people at the church” in Weimar were misinformed about the Buchenwald camp which was 5 miles from the city. Why would “thousands of Jewish prisoners” have been taken on a forced death march to Auschwitz in April 1945? The Auschwitz camp had been abandoned by the Germans on January 18, 1945 and 60,000 prisoners had been taken on “a forced forced death march” to Buchenwald and other camps in Germany.
The photo below shows the church in Weimar which is still standing in the rubble after the town was bombed on February 9, 1945 by American planes.
City of Weimar after it was bombed on Feb. 9, 1945
When the soldiers of the American 80th Infantry Division arrived in Weimar on April 12, 1945, the bodies of German civilians were still buried under the fallen buildings and the stench was unbearable. The classic building, where Germany’s Weimar Republic was born, lay in ruins; the 18th century homes of Goethe and Schiller, both of which had been preserved as national shrines, were severely damaged. All the historic buildings on the north side of the main town square had been demolished, and the rest of the buildings were damaged.
The Buchenwald camp had been liberated by the Communist prisoners, who were in charge of the camp, at 3:15 p.m. on April 11, 1945. The photo below shows the gatehouse with the clock on top permanently stopped at 3:15 p.m., the time of the liberation. The first Americans did not arrive in Buchenwald until around 5 p.m. that day.
Gatehouse at Buchenwald with clock stopped at 3:15 p.m.
Among the first American soldiers to enter the Buchenwald concentration camp was First Lieutenant Edward A. Tenenbaum, who spoke “American German,” according to The Buchenwald Report. He arrived on April 11th, along with a civilian named Egon W. Fleck, at 5:30 p.m. in an American jeep. The two men stayed in Buchenwald that night in Block 50, the medical building.
Fleck and Tenenbaum wrote a detailed report on what their lengthy investigation of the camp had revealed. Alfred Toombs, who was Tenenbaum’s commanding officer, wrote a preface to the report, in which he mentioned how “the prisoners themselves organized a deadly terror within the Nazi terror.”
The following quote from Fleck and Tenenbaum’s report describes the power exercised by the German Communist prisoners at Buchenwald:
The trusties, who in time became almost exclusively Communist Germans, had the power of life and death over all other inmates. They could sentence a man or a group to almost certain death … The Communist trusties were directly responsible for a large part of the brutalities at Buchenwald.
According to The Buchenwald Report, the bible of the camp written by a special intelligence team of the American Army, led by Albert G. Rosenberg, it was not until Friday the 13th that the rest of Patton’s troops arrived, accompanied by Generals Eisenhower, Bradley and Patton.
Although the Buchenwald Report says that the three top American generals saw the camp on April 13, Patton himself wrote that it was not until April 14, 1945 that he heard some of the gory details about Buchenwald from General Gay and Colonels Pfann and Codman, who had visited it.
Patton wrote in his book that he immediately called General Eisenhower, even before seeing the camp himself, and suggested that he send photographers and members of the press “to get the horrid details.” General Dwight D. Eisenhower and General Omar Bradley had visited the Ohrdruf sub-camp of Buchenwald, along with General Patton, on April 12, 1945 but neither Eisenhower nor Bradley ever bothered to visit the Buchenwald main camp.
General Patton’s impression of the camp being controlled by the inmates was confirmed by Colonel Donald B. Robinson, chief historian of the American military occupation in Germany, who wrote an article for an American magazine after the war about the report of Fleck and Tenenbaum: “It appeared that the prisoners who agreed with the Communists ate; those who didn’t starved to death.”
Getting back to the story in the Jewish Tribune, this quote tells more about how Frederick (Rick) Goss Carrier blew up the lock on the Buchenwald gate to free the Buchenwald prisoners:
Carrier spent part of the night at the church in Weimer, then returned to Buchenwald and took refuge high in a guard tower at the edge of the camp where he waited until morning, “watching for dawn.”
He met the US armoured guard at the gate. He wrapped explosives around the heavy padlock and chain, ignited it, and opened the gate. More horrible discoveries awaited them inside the campgrounds. Carrier had served under General Dwight Eisenhower on D-Day and “was used to seeing corpses lying around but never people who had been tormented and starved to death. The look in their eyes! When I first saw it I upchucked; I couldn’t handle it.”
Thanks to Carrier’s discovery and actions, Buchenwald was liberated by the Americans the day after his 20th birthday.
“The war was fought for a purpose and we achieved that purpose: we defeated the Nazis.”
This year, Carrier will be one of a delegation of from 80 to 100 WWII liberators who will join the 25th annual March of the Living, to walk and bear witness together with about 100 Holocaust survivors. “I’m 86 years old and I’m only too happy to be a part of this whole mission,” said Carrier.
Thankfully, the sign on the gate into Buchenwald did not suffer any damage when Carrier blew off the lock. The photo below shows that the original sign is still in pristine condition.
Sign on gate at Buchenwald concentration camp
