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MARYSVILLE, Wash. - Leo Hymas, former World War II soldier and
liberator of Buchenwald concentration camp, was the keynote speaker
at the Marysville, Wash., Armed Forces Reserve Center April 8, 2013
as the Army's 364th Expeditionary Sustainment Command observed the
Holocaust Days of Remembrance.
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Keynote speaker Leo Hymas, the former World War II Soldier and liberator of Buchenwald Concentration Camp, outside the town of Weimar, Germany, shares his story with the audience during the 364th Expeditionary Sustainment Command observance of the Holocaust Days of Remembrance at the Armed Forces Reserve Center in Marysville, Wash., April 8, 2013. (U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Mark A. Cloutier)
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Hymas was born Feb. 2, 1926, in Sharon, Idaho. At 12, his
parents moved the family to a dairy farm in Cache Valley,
Utah. Just seven years later he would liberate the Nazi
death camp known as Buchenwald.
Having never ventured
any farther than Salt Lake City, the young Mormon farm boy
said he hadn't paid much attention to the distant war in
Europe until, in June 1944 he was drafted into the United
States Army, trained as a heavy machine-gun operator and
delivered to the 97th Infantry Division at Fort Bragg, N.C.
Leo was just 18.
Buchenwald concentration camp was built in 1937, on a
mountain slope five miles outside the town of Weimar,
Germany.
Built to hold 6,000 to 8,000 prisoners, it
had 30 wooden barrack buildings and 15 two-story brick
buildings.
According to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust
Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority, during the eight
years of the camp's existence prior to Hymas' arrival,
around 240,000 inmates from 30 nationalities had passed
through.
An estimated 54,000 of them had either been
killed or else had died from harsh conditions.
In
March of 1945, Hymas and the 97th ID sailed for eight days
across the Atlantic Ocean, to Le Havre, France. They had
voyaged aboard the USS Brazil - an Italian cruise ship that
the U.S. Navy had confiscated and turned into a
troop-carrier.
Upon arrival, the unit was assigned
to Gen. Patton's Third Army in support of the 6th Armored
Division. Before long, Hymas' unit found itself advancing on
the small town of Weimar, Germany.
It was April 9, 1945
- Leo was 19-years-old and had yet to be in combat for a
whole month.
As the 97th ID was only minutes away
from assaulting the town of Weimar, one of the soldiers had
observed a large fence, a short distance off through the
tree line.
“My commander instructed me and three
other heavy machine-gun operators to go see what was behind
that fence,” Leo said. “He said that if they heard any
shooting they'd be right behind us. When we got to the
fence, I simply could not believe my eyes. On the other side
of the fence, was some sort of POW (Prisoner of War)-looking
camp, and there were piles and piles of dead, rotting and
stinking corpses. They were stacked one on top of the other
– so high - like cordwood. I got so mad!
“We used
Bangalore torpedoes to blast through the barbed-wire. By
then the Nazis had spotted us and were pouring out from a
brick building just in front of us on the north side of the
camp. They were blasting at us with their rifles. We killed
all 14 of them.”
As the rest of the unit began to
arrive, Leo and his three comrades entered the brick
building.
What they found was much more than they
could have ever imagined, and according to Hymas, way more
than they could stand, “There were six ovens in that
building. It was a crematorium, and they had been using all
six ovens to cook the dead bodies. Up until that time, I had
never even heard of such a thing as a concentration camp. I
just could not believe the horror of what I was seeing and
smelling. It was such a terrible smell, one that we had
noticed when we arrived at Weimer, but since I hadn't ever
smelled burning, rotting, human flesh, it wasn't until we
got inside Buchenwald that we finally realized where it was
coming from.”
The silence in the auditorium was
almost palpable, as Leo began to close out his story.
Once inside Buchenwald, Hymas said he and his fellow
soldiers found around 18,000 prisoners – alive, but all
emaciated from starvation. In just a few days following
their liberation, many would die because their systems could
not handle solid food.
In addition, there were
hundreds and hundreds that were already dead. Hymas said the
bodies were stacked like cordwood, waiting to be burned or
cremated. Most had been tattooed with numbers on their
wrists.
Hymas told the audience that Gen. Dwight D.
Eisenhower, had showed up almost immediately following the
liberation, along with generals Patton and Bradley. He
described the scene for the next two days, as the mission
became one of saving who they could, and burying the dead.
On Eisenhower's command, Hymas' unit rounded up all of
the German civilians that could be found in Weimar, around
300, and marched them the five miles to Buchenwald – hands
in the air the whole time. Hymas said that some of the women
were wearing high-heeled shoes, but not for long.
Once inside of Buchenwald, the civilians were forced to
carry all of the dead and rotting bodies to the mass grave
that the engineers had dug on site.
“I must continue
to share my story with others,” Hymas said. “Because there
are so many who will never be able to share theirs. People
need to know what happened over there – so we can make sure
nothing like it ever happens again.”
By U.S. Army Sgt. Mark A. Cloutier
Provided
through DVIDS
Copyright 2013
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