Capt Nixon and a German Lady

Band of Brothers- Liberation of Concentration Camp

Liberation of BUCHENWALD and DACHAU Concentration Camp

No words over the tongue of men can describe the horrors inside these camps. Viewer discretion is advised

This video shows the Liberation of BUCHENWALD and DACHAU Concentration Camp. Among this footage you see the German Towns people who were ordered to go to the concentration camps after US officials declared Marshall Law upon these regions. 
During the Liberation of Dachau you can spot some faces that seem to be well fed. These where German camp guards, after they were picked from the crowd by camp prisoners. There was little mercy for these people as all emotions where thrown at the German Camp Guards

An Incredible Moment on The Price Is Right

New color video released showing liberation of Nazi concentration camp

As Jews around the world are celebrating the liberation of Egypt, new color video emerged of the liberation of a Nazi concentration camp, according to video uploaded to the internet.

Almost 70 years after the end of World War Two, new images showing the Nazi horror still appear. A specialized photo website posted images and a video documenting the Dachau concentration camp after it was liberated by Allied Forces on April 29, 1945.

The website did not specify the source of the photos "or the exact date they were taken. They were later published by the website of o leading British newspaper, which quoted an expert who confirmed that the images were actually taken after the camp was liberated.

"French and Yugoslav flags can also be seen on the video and it is very unlikely that the Nazis have adorned their camp with the flags of other nations," the expert said.

Founded in March 1933, just two months after Hitler became chancellor, Dachau was the first Nazi concentration camp.

Rabbi Herschel Schacter, former Chair of Presidents Conference , Dies at 95

Rabbi Herschel Schacter, a former chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, has died.

Schacter, the first U.S. Army chaplain to enter and participate in the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp, died Thursday. He was 95.

Along with serving as chairman of the Presidents Conference from 1967 to 1969, he was president of the Mizrachi-Hapoel Hamizrachi, founding chairman of the American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry and chairman of the Chaplaincy Commission of the Jewish Welfare Board. He also was director of rabbinic services at Yeshiva University.

Schacter, a student of the esteemed Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, served as rabbi of the Mosholu Jewish Center in the Bronx, N.Y., for more than 50 years.

“Rabbi Schacter was an exemplary leader who often spoke of his deep commitment to Jewish inclusiveness and unity,” Presidents Conference leaders Richard Stone and Malcolm Hoenlein said in a statement Thursday.

Schacter led a Kindertransport from Buchenwald to Switzerland after World War II. In 1956, he was a member of the first rabbinic delegation to the USSR and escorted a transport of Hungarian refugees from Austria to the United States.

Reb Meyer Birnbaum z”l

It is with great sadness that we report the passing of Reb Meyer Birnbaum z”l. Known to many as “Lieutenant Birnbaum,” after the book written about his life - growing up Jewish in America, liberating the DP camps, and resettling in Eretz Yisroel - Reb Meyer was a warm, endearing personality who shared his love of Hashem and simchas hachaimwith the thousands of people he came in contact with during his lifetime. He was 94.

Reb Meyer grew up in the East New York section of Brooklyn, where he attended public school and all of his friends were non-religious.  As a young boy, he davened at the Malta Street Shul near his home and then joined the Young Israel of New Lots, which became a second home for him and remained so for nearly three decades.

A few days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Reb Meyer’s was drafted in the army and ended up in England.  Reb Meyer’s experiences during the war were many, and they are chronicled in his book, Lieutenant Birnbaum, written by Yonason Rosenblum and published by ArtScroll. The stories are replete with examples of hismesirus nefesh for Yiddishkeit, his bravery, and constant examples of siyata diShmaya.

Reb Meyer later liberated Buchenwald and remained in Europe to assist at the camps for displaced persons, including Feldafing, Frenwald, Landsberg and Dachau, encountering a number of unforgettable Torha giants.

After returning to America and being reunited with his wife and their seven children, Reb Meyer worked with the likes of Mike Tress and Irving Bunim, assisting in the Vaad Hatzolah efforts. Reb Meyer then worked for the Young Israel and later went into the poultry business. In 1969, Reb Meyer remarried to his devoted wife Goldie, whose nine children he considered like his own. In 1981, Reb Meyer, Goldie and their children resettled in Eretz Yisroel.

From the crunching poverty of Brooklyn during the Great Depression to the experience of the spiritual awakening in Young Israel, America’s first baal teshuvah movement; to meeting Rav Elchonon Wasserman, Rav Yitzchok Hutner and Mike Tress as a teenager; to encountering anti-Semitism in the American army, liberating DP camps, teaching Israeli youngsters skills they would use in Israel’s War of Independence, to chauffeuring Rav Beinush Finkel and raising a wonderful family, Reb Meyer lived a fascinating life and indeed held thousands of listeners transfixed for hours with his stories. His genuine warmth, his love for people, his zest for life, and his living example of mesirus nefesh and determination will be sorely missed.

Yehi zichro boruch.

Bergen-Belsen survivor meets grandson of liberator Mordechai Chekhnover meets attorney Yoel Hadar in Poland during a gathering sponsored by the Israel Police’s "Witnesses in Uniform" program • Hadar is a grandson of a British Army rabbi who was at the camp’s liberation in 1945.

An emotional meeting took place in Poland last week when 88-year-old Mordechai Chekhnover, a survivor of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, met attorney Yoel Hadar, the grandson of a British Army rabbi who was at the camp’s liberation in 1945.

Over the past week, 160 Israeli police officers have toured Poland as part of the "Witnesses in Uniform" program. Their tour included visits to sites such as the Warsaw Ghetto and the Majdanek and Treblinka extermination camps. The program is scheduled to end on Thursday with a ceremony at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp.

Polish-born Chekhnover, who as a teenager was sent to the Bergen-Belsen camp in Germany, has participated in such commemoration trips in the past, and again this year. Attorney Yoel Hadar, legal adviser for the Internal Security Ministry, who participated in the program last week, is the grandson of Rabbi Eliezer Zvi Hardman, a British Army chaplain who was with the troops when they liberated Bergen-Belsen in April 1945.

After the camp was liberated, Hardman recited the traditional Jewish mourning prayer beside a mass grave of tens of thousands of Jews who had been murdered there by the Nazis. He also sang Israel's national anthem, "Hatikvah," with camp survivors, while a BBC crew filmed the event and later broadcast it throughout the world.

Hadar, who met Chekhnover by chance last week, said, "This meeting has closed a circle for me." He said his grandfather had told him about the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, and meeting an actual survivor of the camp in Poland had been very meaningful.

Dachau Concentration Camp

Ohrdruf Concentration Camp Liberation April 4, 1945

Holocaust Liberation Video; Clips from Band of Brothers showing liberation of camp in Germany.

Civil Trial Attorney Baruch Cohen meets Sgt Rick Carrier, US Army (Ret) World War 2 Veteran & Liberator of Buchenwald Concentration Camp at the March of the Living Banquet

 

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