Snapshots from Hell
Snapshots from Hell
| At left, U.S. soldiers talk to a survivor of the Kaufering concentration camp, near Landsberg, Germany. Center, Technical Sgt. Robert Hartwig during World War II. Hartwig was part of the 134th Ordinance Company of the U.S. Army’s 12th Armored Division. Hartwig is shown right, recently at his daughter’s home. (Robert Hartwig photos) |
By CHRISTOPHER DIEM Journal Staff Writer
MARQUETTE — In the last days of the Allied campaign in Europe during World War II, Tech. Sgt. Robert Hartwig and his unit, the 134th Ordinance Company of the U.S. Army’s 12th Armored Division, were patrolling near Landsberg, Germany, as U.S. forces sped toward the Rhine River.
Hartwig, who had grown up on a rural farm near Hadley in downstate Michigan, was an avid photographer and carried with him a folding Welta 35mm camera. His friends in the unit encouraged his hobby, picking up film from German communities they passed through, as well as an enlarger and chemicals — all the elements needed for a crude but mobile darkroom.
On a morning in late April 1945 — about a week before Germany surrendered, effectively ending the war in Europe — Capt. John Paul Jones told Hartwig to grab his camera and get in a jeep with him.
“It’s a field of bodies up there. It’s the craziest thing you’ve ever seen,” Hartwig remembered Jones saying.
Hartwig and his unit had heard about atrocities committed by the Nazis on their prisoners in concentration camps, but they had thought them too impossible to believe — the word Holocaust was not yet known to the international community. What Hartwig was about to document irrevocably changed his life, and would prove to be, quite literally, a snapshot of one of the darkest chapters in human history.
Now, a month away from turning 92 years old, Hartwig is one of the few fragile links to a generation of Americans that were tested unlike any other. He is in stage three of Alzheimer’s disease, a progressive, irreversible neurological disorder that destroys memory and the thought process. He lives in Marquette with his daughter Susan Wolfe and her husband Doug.
“The effects of age, notwithstanding Alzheimer’s, is obvious,” said Jon Hartwig, Robert’s son and superintendent of the Marquette school system. “He spends his days quite inactive and that’s following a life of extreme activity.”
Jon Hartwig said that the elder Hartwig’s years of hard physical work on the farm as well as the intellectual work he did as an English teacher for many years led to his longevity.
“We were aware as kids that our dad had went through a pretty significant experience when he was younger,” Jon Hartwig said, adding that he was 10 or 12 years old when he first learned about his father’s experience with the Holocaust. “You can tell by the pictures he took — it would probably influence a lot of what you thought about the rest of your life.”
It’s difficult for Robert Hartwig to communicate, with Alzheimer’s affecting his cognitive abilities. But even with the disease playing tricks on his memory, the impact of the experience on his life is clear.
“You’re not near the same person,” Hartwig said quietly. “I can’t think of anybody it wouldn’t be difficult for.”
Back on that April morning in 1945, Hartwig and several officers and interpreters noticed a sickening odor in the air as they approached the Kaufering concentration camp — an odor of burning bodies. Signs in German and English warned of typhus — a disease transmitted by fleas and lice causing headaches, fevers and exhaustion — but the American G.I.s continued.
In a small notebook Hartwig made during the war, which contains photos of the camp, he wrote:
“As we rode toward the buildings the sight that met our eyes seemed unbelievable. There were rows upon rows of dead — dead who had died many and horrible deaths ... We know that some of them were as long as thirty hours dying. Even when we were there, an occasional groan could be heard from someone dying in that mass — or movement of an arm or leg could be seen. The expressions on their faces were indescribable.”
It was a similar scene at Nazi concentration camps across Europe. As Allied forces approached, the camps were liquidated in an attempt to hide evidence of Nazi atrocities — the prisoners were marched to camps further from the front, those too weak or sick to march were killed. The buildings were burned, sometimes with prisoners still inside. The prisoners were mostly Jewish, but there were also political prisoners and other members of society deemed unworthy.
At Kaufering, the prisoners slept in 50-by-15-foot shacks. The floors were of dirt and dirt covered the roofs to hide the buildings from Allied aircraft.
“(The shacks) had a shelf two feet high and five feet wide along each wall,” Hartwig wrote. “A small pad of straw was the bedding if any for the prisoners sleeping on the shelf. They slept with their feet toward the middle of the aisle, either partly doubled up or their feet hung over the end. One stove in the middle of each building without fuel.”
Some of the men from Hartwig’s unit soon marched 200 German citizens from Landsberg to the camp and made them carry the bodies and dig mass graves for the dead prisoners.
Despite the wide-spread death, the Americans did find survivors. Some were so malnourished they couldn’t be given solid food. Through Army interpreters, they told of being overworked under the poorest conditions, being starved, having to eat snails, dandelions, weeds and only occasionally some very thin potato soup.
As Hartwig and the others left the camp they saw more horrors. Prisoners that may have escaped or were overlooked in the Nazi’s rush to retreat were laying dead or struggling to walk away.
“One particular fellow I’m never going to forget. I haven’t seen a better soldier. He heard our jeep coming a long time before we got to him. With the most painful effort he turned toward us, brought himself to attention and saluted. The effort he used to do that was more, far more, than he could spare,” Hartwig wrote.
During the 1970s and 1980s, after time had sufficiently healed the scars of the war, Hartwig spoke about his experience and showed the pictures he took to Holocaust museums and school groups around the country.
“It wasn’t like a cause of his that he just got blinded by, it was maybe just feeling an obligation to do his part because he was a first-hand witness and not that many people are,” Jon Hartwig said.
Hartwig is a first-hand witness whose ties to the past are deteriorating with every passing day. But his experience will live on, thanks to the photographs he took more than 60 years ago and the people his story has reached since.
“He’s living out his life in a very small way,” Jon Hartwig said. “But he always did enjoy Marquette.”
The camera Robert Hartwig used, the negatives and the notebook he made will one day be donated to either the National Holocaust Museum or the Library of Congress, Jon Hartwig said.
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