Editor’s note: This article contains depictions of deaths during a concentration camp in World War II.
Bill Kongable shares his message at events across the United States, most recently at the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum. He does so whenever he gets an opportunity, which over the years has been a release from what he has seen and experienced.
And he has seen images that have haunted him for the majority of his 95 years on this earth.
Kongable detailed his experiences again at a family gathering in the Aledo home that has been in the family since 1950. Some of his relatives have not heard his WWII experiences, and for those who have, it is a dramatic refresher course.
The Veteran’s life changed in May 1944 when he received his draft notice and reported to Camp Fannin, an Army infantry facility near Tyler. He was later assigned to the 89th Infantry division, 354th Anti-Tank Company.
Kongable’s weapon was a 57mm anti-tank gun with a long barrel, a big powder charge, and a uranium-weighted projectile designed to penetrate a tank and spew molten metal into its interior.
Entering combat in Luxembourg in March of 1945, Kongable’s division was among the troops chasing the faltering Nazi army. Two months later he was in Czechoslovakia assigned to the Fourth Armored Division.
“That shows how fast things were moving,” Kongable recalled. “The armored units went blazing like hell through towns, knocking out major resistance, and then the infantry had to come along and if there was any further resistance, they had to take care of it.”
In doing so, Kongable’s division came upon Camp Ohrdruf, Germany, the first concentration camp liberated by Allied forces. The guards and staff had retreated and left a gruesome scene. Many malnourished and diseased prisoners were left alive at the camp while some were killed just before the guards fled.
“What they left behind was pretty grizzly evidence of the kind of cruelty that the German Nazis practiced on subjects.” Kongable said as he lowered his voice and described what he saw. “At the gate of the camp there were 25 fully clad prisoners who had been executed with a bullet to the head. We assume these were people who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, go with the guards when they abandoned the camp.”
In the center of the yard was an area where bodies had been incinerated in a bonfire. Although the fire was extinguished, parts of bodies, skulls and bones were visible in the ashes. Outside the camp was a long, open pit with what Kongable estimates were 3,000 naked skeletal bodies piled on top of each other.
“Inside the camp there was a shed where they’d been storing bodies. They were naked, skin and bone bodies dusted with lime. They stacked them up like cordwood against the walls of the shed,” he said.
General Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered Camp Ohrdruf to be photographed and documented by the media, and General George S. Patton and Eisenhower also toured the camp.
Eisenhower wanted the atrocities to be witnessed by captured Nazi leaders. He ordered former prison guards and Nazi comamnders to tour the facility, stand at the pile of burnt bodies, and walk through the shed of the dead. Emaciated surviving prisoners wearing rags or prison uniforms stood face-to-face with their former captors as a list of the war crimes was read.
Citizens of the town of Ohrdruf were trucked in infantry vehicles to the camp and made to walk among the bodies to see first-hand what they had been denying.
Several graphic vintage films of the aftermath of the Camp Ohrdruf can be viewed on YouTube, including footage of Nazi leaders reluctantly being forced to enter the shed full of bodies.
The Allies were shocked at what was found at this first concentration camp, and Ohrdruf was only one of an estimated 40,000 concentration camps and ghettos in Europe where similar scenes of mass executions would later be found.
“The fact that these things happened in two countries that were dominated by a single autocratic dictator whose every word was law and there was no opposition allowed is what allowed all these terrible things to happen in both countries,” Kongable concluded. “I tell my audiences there are people in this country who want to throw out the constitution, destroy democracy, and create a single-party dictatorship.
"Then I ask the question, 'Could the holocaust happen here?’ I tell the people they can be sure that doesn’t happen if they use their influence at all levels of the political process, and most of all with their vote.”
Comments
No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here