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June 13, 2009

STEPHANIE SALTER: G.I.’s letters from 1945 belie Holocaust denial

By Stephanie Salter

TERRE HAUTE — I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to “propaganda.”



— letter from Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower to Gen. George C. Marshall after touring a German concentration camp



In the spring of 1945, while James W. Von Brunn was serving as a midshipman in the volunteer U.S. Naval Reserves, an army private named Harold Porter was among the first G.I.s to confront, in person, the horrors of Nazi concentration camps.

A medic with the 116th Evacuation Hospital unit, Porter wrote a series of letters home to his parents about the unimaginable situation he encountered at a recently liberated Dachau.

Early on Porter acknowledged, “I know you will hesitate to believe me no matter how objective and factual I try to be. I even find myself trying to deny what I am looking at with my very own eyes. Certainly, what I have seen in the past few days will affect my personality for the rest of my life.”

Sixty-four springs later, after an increasingly dark and twisted journey, the Navy vet, Von Brunn, would view his own life as approaching “the end of the diving board.” Seething with hate, anger and the mother of all conspiracy theories, the old man would storm the national Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., killing an African-American security guard before being critically wounded by another museum guard.

If Von Brunn ever read Pfc. Porter’s letters, he forgot their riveting content. Or he fashioned some gnarled thread of absurd logic (as his online screeds tell us he did with the conversion of the Apostle Paul) to dismiss the letters as bogus, just another set of Jewish “lies” in the conspiracy to “destroy the White gene-pool.”

Photocopies of four of Pfc. Porter’s letters, written in a small, clear hand on Waffen SS stationery he found in a Dachau officer’s quarters, are accessible in the Dwight D. Eisenhower archives of the federal research collection: Eisenhower.archives.gov/Research/Digital_Documents/Holocaust. Their innocence, candor and pain seem peculiarly and poignantly American, as do the young G.I.’s salutations at the beginning and end of each missive: “Dear Mother and Father” and “Love, Harold.”

Porter’s struggle to comprehend the enormity of the prison — irrefutable testimony to man’s inhumanity to man — is searing. Like the general under whom he served, he understood the inclination of people far removed from the reality to mistrust or disbelieve.

The hospital unit knew Dachau was a concentration camp, “but while we expected things to be grizzly, I’m sure none of us knew what was coming,” Porter wrote in his May 7 letter. “It is easy to read about atrocities, but they must be seen to be believed.”

The G.I. described a pleasant trip through the picturesque German countryside and the outskirts of Dachau. Then, in the center of the city, “we met a train with a wrecked engine — about fifty cars long. Every car was loaded with bodies. There must have been thousands of them — all obviously starved to death. This was a shock of the first order, and the odor can best be immagined [sic]. But neither the sight nor the odor were anything when compared with what we were still to see.

At the sprawling prison, Porter saw the scattered bodies of SS troops that had been killed after the U.S. military took over the camp April 28. “[B]ut when we reached the furnace house we came upon a huge stack of corpses piled up like kindling, all nude so that their clothes wouldn’t be wasted by the burning.

“There were furnaces for burning six bodies at once, and on each side of them was a room twenty feet square crammed to the ceiling with more bodies — one big, stinking rotten mess … They were nothing but bones and skin … There were both women and children in the stack in addition to the men.”

Still the corpses arrived, wagons full of them that were unloaded by liberated inmates.

“Watching this unloading was horrible,” Porter told his parents. “The bodies squooshed and gurgled as they hit the pile and the odor could almost be seen.”

The young medic described mounds of charred bone fragments and stacks of sorted clothing that “numbered in the thousands.”

“Although I stood there looking at it, I couldn’t believe it,” he wrote. “The realness of the whole mess is just gradually dawning on me, and I doubt it ever will on you.”

In Porter’s next letter a few days later, he turned his chronicle toward the unit’s patients, the thousands of “living corpses.” He observed that Mohandas Gandhi after a 30-day fast would “still look like Hercules when compared with some of these men … on some their vertebrae can be seen rubbing on their stomach.”

Pfc. Porter reviewed a litany of the patients’ afflictions, from “pus dripping infections” and “continuous bloody dribble” dysentery to scurvy and tuberculosis.

“We don’t even think of them as humans,” he admitted. “If we did we’d never be able to do the work. They look like weird beings from Mars — with their shaven heads … knobby joints, huge hands, feet, and popping eyes. Many are toothless. They lie curled up in the oddest positions, and when morning comes we go around and remove the corpses — still stiff in the freakish pose they held when they died.”

The medic thanked his stars he was not a ward boy, stuck with the hands-on tending to and cleaning up after the patients. He compared the sounds he heard from the jammed hospital to the scary radio show “Inner Sanctum,” non-stop “wails, sobs, groans, rattles, gnashing of teeth, and above it all the chant of men praying.”

He told his parents he had been able to pick up “complete bodies in a blanket with two fingers to carry them to the crematory.”

Sex slaves

who survived

Porter’s next letter, May 13, explained that the dates on his reports might appear confused because they were written weeks before mailing. The unit was prohibited until May 16 from acknowledging to the outside world that it was in Dachau.

In this 3-page letter, which included a photo of stacked corpses and another of the officer whose stationery Porter used, the private detailed the fate of female Italian prisoners, many of whom survived to tell of physical and sexual torture at the hands of the SS.

A Yugoslavian man told the G.I.s “of having to go to the SS barracks to get the bodies of the girls after a particularly wild evening. Girls who refused to cooperate were burned alive before their companions — who soon decided to cooperate.”

In the first ray of light to crack through Porter’s letters, he wrote, “Tonight some prisoners formed an orchestra and held a dance with a lot of the slave girls. Things are getting less morbid lately.”

Referring to the German officer in the photo, he told his parents: “The surprising thing to me was the normalcy of his life. There were pictures of his wife, his little girls, his dogs, his houses, motor boats, etc., yet within view of his office window was the mound of corpses beside the crematory.”

In Porter’s final letter in the Eisenhower archives, he wrote of improving conditions, of the many German wives, mistresses, Russian show girls and children left behind, and of a maternity ward that had been set up by the 127th Evacuation unit.

As for Porter’s patients, “More and more of them are beginning to look like people and less like animals,” he wrote. Still, when fresh oranges were given to the former camp inmates, “some were too weak to even peel them.”

Pfc. Porter’s last paragraph made reference to the U.S. government’s official war information filter.

“Perhaps you’ll see much of this in the news reels,” he wrote. “If so you’ll miss the most grisly part. An article in the Stars and Stripes says that the Hay’s office has decided you couldn’t take it.”

On this Flag Day in the United States, in appreciation of Harold Porter — and with the profound hope of preventing another James Von Brunn — let us “take it” in 2009 and renew our commitment as liberators to never forget.



Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.

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