Soldiers' Reaction to Buchenwald

Crawford: What time did you leave the camp that day?
Wile: It was very close to last light when we walked out the gates and left the camp. I think the first thing we did was to go to a little town south of Weimar in the mountains, and we were some of the first in the town. They didn't have any military government in there, and we took over their facilities. I ended up in a wash-house in a very old kind of a quadrangle type construction, getting these prints ready for Patton's war room.
Crawford: Did you talk much in your own unit about it after you left the place?
Wile: I don't believe that we talked about it a lot. We went back and were abandoned at the site [the copper mine] because they needed my truck for hauling barb wire, as I recall. And there were about three or four of us left at this copper mine. Two [German military] prisoners, the next morning when I was on duty, came out of the woods. One of the fellows, I know he didn't come from the concentration camp. In fact, they said that they had escaped from an S.S. Trooper--that they didn't want to fight any more. We wanted to shoot them right there, but I said. "no, we're not gonna do that" and then we turned 'em in to one of our sites where we had--I couldn't count the prisoners. As far as you could see, German prisoners. And I took some photographs. A classic one shows a naval officer [see above]. How in the hell we ever got him, makes no--I guess he might have been home on leave or something. He looked pretty perplexed about what was going on around him, I know that!	Prisoner of War Camp
Crawford: Did you say anything to your own officers about it? I bet they saw all the pictures of it.
Wile: Well, yea, everybody saw the pictures. You see this was the impact of my visit to Buchenwald. I guess I did discuss it because everybody in headquarters company was always wanting to see what came out of the dark room. And so they were seen by all of the officers and many of the G.I.'s that were with me and that I depended on to help me out.
There were some mean things going on by Americans at this time. In this little town--if I could think of the name of it, south of Weimar--where we wound up and I did the developing of these particular pictures-- there was a curfew on. No German was suppose to be on the road after seven P.M. or so many an hour before sundown. There was one military government person, a private first class, and he had gone out and brought in two men dressed in civilian clothes and had them in the back of the jeep. He wanted to know if anybody wanted to go with him while he interrogated them. Nobody did. Later, it was discovered that he had taken them out in the field and shot them. He claims that he did that because be found a list of towns on these people where ambushes had occurred, but I didn't feel that the PFC had the authority to take life, myself.
Crawford: Were these men S.S.?
Wile: Well, they were dressed in civilian clothes. Who knows what they were! In this particular town, we do know that every night there was an influx of people from out of the woods from surrounding countryside. We could hear them coming in, but we were headquarters company and that wasn't our function!
Crawford: What do you think the civilians knew about the camp?
Wile: Well, we were told that Patton had already made them come out and see it! We were told that when we got there that they had already been out there and seen the camp.
Crawford: Did your own feelings about the German civilians change after you'd seen the camp?
Wile: No! Part of the reason for this, I think, was some of the contact that I had in talking with the Germans. I don't think I said to myself, "Well, I'm here and I have no choice [not to be here], so what control do these people have if their government goes bad?" You know, I don't know that I thought about it until later when I was in Frankfurt, and I talked with some of the Germans and they posed the question, "What could we do about it? You know, if we were against the government, or if we didn't agree with it, what could we do about it?" It was a good question!

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