UNKNOWN SOLDIERS: Reliving WWII in Europe

the prisoners as enemies of the State, and systematic brutality and genocide that would breed hundreds of camps and institutionalize millions of murders as a way of death.

Here were invented and refined the New Order’s “progressive” methods of punishment and torture, Doctor Sigmund Rascher’s novel and fatal experiments with the decompression and freezing of inmates for Hermann Goering and his Luftwaffe, and the sophisticated gas chambers and ovens with their by-industries of soap manufacture, lampshades and so forth using body parts such as oil and skin.

Here were trained the like of Himmler’s chief bureaucrat of the “Final Solution” Adolf Eichmann and the most exalted commandants of many of the more notorious concentration camps that followed Dachau’s pioneering lead. And here were imprisoned such undesirables as the former French premier Léon Blum, tried but never convicted by the Vichy government of responsibility for France’s defeat; Kurt von Schuschnigg, Chancellor of Austria during the Anschluss defeat; and Pastor Martin Niemoller, imprisoned since 1937 for opposing Hitler’s preemption of German Protestantism.¹

Twelve years and about a quarter of a million prisoners after the modest beginning of a facility designed for a mere five thousand, when the handwriting was on all German walls but those of the Konzentrationslagern, a certain Hungarian Jew, Morris Rosenwasser, age twenty-one, was being railroaded into the camp in a boxcar to join a population of by then around forty or fifty thousand.

It was now toward the end of March, 1945, and the sweep of the 45th Division through the Reich was being held up in Aschaffenburg by the monocled Major Lamberth. Although no one except a few top brass knew it or had even heard of the camp, Dachau was on the agenda of the 157th.² Thirty-six years later, Morris Rosenwasser contacted the 157th Infantry Association to offer the hospitality of his hotel in Miami Beach to veterans of the American unit that had liberated him and his fellow inmates of the camp. In Florida I recorded his story.³

Morris Rosenwasser’s Road In

I was born in Ivbran, a town of eight thousand near Budapest with thirty-two Jewish families. When I was eight I was a Talmudic student in Hebrew in a small town eight kilometers from mine. One day I came home for a holiday. We had a big room, two beds, a door to the store, big table with eight or ten chairs. My brother, twenty-one, is going up and down the room with a little book, and he says, “Good morning” and then “Good evening,” translating from Hungarian. He was a tough kid. In Europe the big brother is in charge.

So I goes to my father, who was fifty-seven years old, and says, “Pa, what is Izzy doing?” He says, “Young kid, you wouldn’t understand nothing. Leave me alone. I got my own troubles. You don’t have to know what’s going on.” I says, “Pa, I’m asking you a question. What’s he studying?” “It’s a long story,” he says. “Times are not so good. Anti-Semitism is beginning. Izzy has to go in the army. We have an Uncle Herman in the Bronx in New York. I wrote to him that if possible he should send papers to your brother, and he will go to America.” “Really? Izzy to America? When I grow up I’m gonna go to America too.”