IV2: I am pleased to do it.
IV: Und Du sagst..
BF: And you got a pretty good interview incidentally.
IV2: That is eh..
BF: Don't you think?
IV2: Then you have..
BF: You got..
IV2: Abs.., absolutely.
BF: It, it..
IV2: Overwhelming.
BF: At this..
IV3: Will you?
IV4: She will, that I am sure.
BF: Okay.
IV: Eh I think..
BF: Okay.
IV: Okay, so today, if you hear the name Flossenbürg.
What comes up in your mind?
BF: A concentration camp in Germany comes out of my mind.
A horrible experience, time of my life, when I am running from one concentration camp to another.
To try to collect the evidence of crimes which nobody would believe happened.
Eh so Flossenbürg is a, is a name I will never forget.
Eh along with some of the other camps.
IV: So, eh can you remember how many camps you have been to, in this time?
BF: I can..
IV: In searching..
BF: I cannot tell you precisely, because of some sub-camps.
Before we went into Buchenwald I went to a sub-camp.
Then into Buchenwald.
The same way with Mauthausen.
That was some of the camps.
But I would guess, at least ten camps.
And at least eh half a dozen of them became the basis for trials based upon the crimes that were committed in that particular camp.
Flossenbürg for example was one.
I have not, say, I do not know, if it was Mauthausen we had, we had Dachau of course, we had Buchenwald of course.
Eh so eh it was not a matter of counting camps.
It was a matter of moving with the front as quickly as possible.
Eh you had to get in and seize the evidence immediately.
If not, it would be destroyed.
Eh the inmates would run wild.
The SS was running out into the woods.
The inmates catched them sometimes, catched them, killed them, beat them to death, burned them alive.
The crematorio was still going.
And people were dying all over the floor.
You did not know, if they were dead or alive.
You would step over a body and they would wave a hand at you.
And you would call a medic to say someone is still alive, you know.
And get a hose and hose them down.
They were covered with feces and vomit and dirt.
And eh, eh you know, not a place to linger.
Eh as a matter of fact in Flossenbürg, if I remember correctly I got out of the camp as quickly as possible.
And I went to the town of Flossenbürg, where I slept in the villa of the, of the eh either the Gauleiter or the camp Kommandant.
I remember there was a big picture on the wall, a portrait of a nude woman that was about two yards broad.
Well the name Flossenbürg very well, because it was one of a stream of camps.
And eh most of the camps were amazingly similar.
Certain things they had in common, dead people lying all over the ground.
You could not tell if they were dead or alive.
The dead wouldn't mo.., certainly move.
You would step over a body and they would pick up a hand.
And dirt and filth and roaches and vomit and feces.
And eh a total chaos, everybody running in different directions.
A tank battalion would come in and would go right through the camp and, and pursue the SS which was running out into the woods.
Eh the inmates would grab one of the guards if they could beat him to death.
Eh with stones over the..., and grab his gun and beat him with that.
And then one case I remember that, I do not know, know if that was Flossenbürg.
I do not think it was Flossenbürg.
Eh well they eh tied the eh guard to a one of the trays they used to dump the bodies into the crematorium.
Eh and cooked him.
They fill him into the fire and they took him out and beat him up and put him in again.
Took him out and beat him up until they killed him.
Eh horrible, horrible scenes, you know, so real, so real ever.
Eh a nightmare of sorts.
And eh that was repeated pretty much in every camp.
It took a few days for it to settle down.
Ah I started to say that, If my recollection is correct in Flossenbürg.
The idea was, get out of the camp as soon as you can.
I would get the, go to the Schreibstube.
First go to the Colonel in charge who ever that c.. Major wa.., head in charge of entering the camp.
And I would say I am here from General Patton's headquarters, I am a special assignment.
I want ten men, surround the Schreibstube immediately, nobody goes in or out without my permission.
They would say: "Yes, Sir."
I did not have any insignia on me at all.
Eh and eh they would surround the camp I would go into the Schreibstube: "Where is the Schreiber?"
The man who had been working on it.
We would, found him.
He was usually an inmate.
"What is here?"
"Hier, das sind die Totenbücher."
Hier was this, here were the entries of camps coming in.
Everything is confiscated, seized as evidence, put it into my jeep, out.
"Oh I will not give it up, I want a receipt."
Here I give you a receipt, here is a receipt, bums.
Goodbye.
Eh and eh anybody who could give me a statement of some kind, take a statement.
Not waste too much time with it, you know.
Get out.
And eh, get out.
Because the front was moving.
And they were going to another camp.
IV: Yeah.
BF: Some place else.
And eh but I spent, to spend the night in Flossenbürg.
And I found out where the, I think it was either the Bürgermeister or the eh, eh or the camp commandant.
This they would, they did not stay in the camp, it was down, little outside the camp.
And I threw him out while I was in there.
There, the flat, I took over the house.
And I, I slept there in a big bed.
And I remember the big picture on the wall, about six feet long of a nude woman {laughing} lying over the bed.
I did not pick the house or the bed for that purpose.
But I remember it that way and I think that was in Flossenbürg.
The next day, I would get up early in the morning, wrap up whatever I may have still had to do in the camp, usually I was in and out.
And you go on to the next camp.
Oh, wherever it was, Gusen or Mauthausen or eh Hahn.
You know I would get the reports in from headquarters.
I would mo.. go on.
IV: And in Flossenbürg you can remember when you entered the Schreibstube, did you found any documents or had the SS destroyed everything before or..
BF: No I, I was very lucky there.
In Berchtesgaden I did not have such luck.
In Berchtesgaden I was looking in the eagle's nest, the hundred and first airborne division jumped in ahead of me and drag everything, {laughing} you know.
Eh but in Flo.., in the camps I was able to get in fast enough to get a lot of the records.
Eh and to remain I think it was in Flossenbürg on the first of May, that I was there eh, because there was a May-day celebration.
And they had a big tribune they had built in the middle of the camp, wood, the picture of Stalin, of Churchill and of Truman who was then President of the United States.
And they were marching to celebrate the liberation, victory on May-day.
And eh, there I noticed one very bedraggled group on the side and I said: "Who are they?"
Oh, they are the Jews.
I felt, it would, what about the rest of them.
Well you had the French and these are the Czechs and here the Spanish, there are the Germans and so on.
So within the camp itself, there was the same sort of discrimination and segregation eh which existed outside the camps.
That struck me as rather sad in a way.
I must say, when I entered the camps, I did not have in mind at all the question of Jewish persecution, none.
That may come as a surprise, but it's the truth.
Eh these were human beings and eh I, I knew that those with the star of David were Jews, eh but that was not my motivation or my main consideration.
I am (???) this was that was a terrible situation.
And eh everybody was the same.
But in the camp itself they made a segregation which struck me as being rather interesting.
IV: So, before being sent to the camps to investigate, did you know eh what a German concentration camp would be?
What you would expect to see?
BF: No, we did not know the word G.. concentration camp.
The first reports we got were, I have forgotten the name of the sub-camp before Buchenwald.
Eh my battery for names has run down.
But we got our report of stragglers along the road.
They look like they are starving, they are wearing some kind of pyjama.
And they seem to be coming out of a work camp of some kind.
That was the first report.
Eh and I would get into my jeep and off I would go.
And then pick up the trail.
And the trail would lead back of course to the, the Lager or the sub-camp and then on to the main camp.
And eh so the word concentration camp was unknown to us, absolutely unknown.
And I do not know at what time we began to call it that way.
We called it you know, eh camp at Flossenbürg.
Or camp at eh Ebensee or like eh we did not, we, we did not know.
And the towns were not even on a map.
Usually they were such small towns.
And that even a fairly good sized military map did not have them.
And then we have to say what is in between this and that you know.
And then go on the trail and try to pick up the trail.
But which that moved very quickly actually.
IV: And eh you had any idea what had been happening before in the last years in those camps?
BF: No idea whatsoever from based on that experience.
I did know, as early as 1943 when I was still a student at Harvard when I was doing research for one of my professors on war crimes.
And he was a member of the so called international eh law eh it was the international war crimes comission, which had been set up in London.
And they were receiving reports from occupied territories about crimes occurring.
And this was being channeled to different sources in the United States and he was one of them and I got them.
So I, we knew about they were determined to murder Jews.
That there was large scale massive programmes going on to kill them.
We did not know the details of how.
We did not know what went on inside the camps.
We knew there were work camps.
We knew about Dachau eh had been a work camp.
We did not know that there was this fine array of different categories of camps, Vernichtungslager, extermination camps and eh Arbeitslager and eh other kinds of Lager.
The methodical German preparation for murdering twelve million people, you know, that this had been so carefully prepared as it was in Wannsee planned out.
We did not know that until we found the Wannsee Protokoll.
IV: And getting to your first camp, eh, how did it effect you seeing what you saw for the first time?
BF: It was a very strange effect.
I would say in retrospect.
At the time I did not have time to think about how it is effecting me.
Yeah, I got in and get, get, do my job and get out.
But eh on eh reflection, my mind set up a blank wall.
A just blank wall.
I would, no feelings at all.
I am a doctor on a f.., battle field.
And eh these are the corpses and we have to deal with them.
You deal with them by triage or whatever it is.
You deal with them and move on to the next one.
And black it out.
So there was no eh, emotional response.
No schra.., cry of anger.
Kill them, how could they do this or, or sitting down and crying or anything of a kind.
Nothing, numb, completely numb.
Eh which was I think a eh a way of salvation, of keeping my own sanity.
Eh and it only, you know, later, that it begins to settle in.
And of course I was writing reports about what happened.
And I knew exactly what had happened and I was writing some letters home to my then girlfriend and who.
Eh I had for 65 years and a eh I was describing.
And some of these letters have been kept by the National Archives in Washington as part of the national archives is a, eh, eh they call them treasures, national treasures of some kind.
Because they were authentic reports of you know what I saw, the day after I saw them eh a day or two after I saw them.
And eh I think some have long range effects.
IV: Did you think later on, what you saw there had an influence of that what you started to do?
BF: Absolutely, absolutely.
Eh it may have been a decisive influence.
Eh and certainly you don't forget that, you don't brush it inside.
Eh but eh you realize that you know man's inhumanity to man has no bounds.
And eh if you do not try to change the way people think, the whole world would warp that way.
That was a conviction of mine.
And I, it may have been an exaggeration, but maybe it was not.
IV: So another question, going from one camp to, to another, sometimes you, you pass this eh roads (???) of the death marches?
BF: Yes.
IV: Death, death walks.
BF: Yes.
IV: What do you remember what you saw there?
BF: Yes, yes, of course.
Eh very often, usually I would say the eh inmates were marched out of the camp who were able to march.
As the troops were coming in, they were mostly fleeing away from the Russians.
They were afraid, everybody was afraid of the Russians, for a very good cause.
I mean, I know from my Einsatzgruppen trials the massacres over the Russians which took place by the German troops eh giving them something to fear, very real fear, when the ta.., tables were turned.
Anyway they were running away from the Russians.
Running into the woods.
And I would follow the trail.
And eh these were trails of dead bodies really.
It would be, come to a place.
Obviously a small ditch had been covered over with some branches or some leaves, maybe five or ten people in the ditch.
A few steps on somebody whose top of his head was blown off.
Eh I learned what a Genickschuss looks like.
Eh somebody is kneeling and you put a bullet through the back of his cranium and blow the top of his head of.
And the brains are scattered all around.
Excuse me, but I have flash backs of these events.
Eh and this was standard routine.
It was standard routine.
And the SS kept on running.
Eh if they were caught, they did not run far.
You could not distinguish them from everybody else in the hall.
They had their uniform that is all.
Eh so, that was it.
IV: And did you also had to do some research on these death walks and death marches?
BF: I had no research possibility at that time.
I had no idea, none whatsoever.
I could only describe what I saw and who was responsible, who was the commandant for example.
What the orders were from Berlin I had no idea.
Later on, when I became a researcher for the Nürnberg trials, when I met the mass murderers, and they explained to me exactly who would had given the order when, where to do what.
I saw the total picture, better than anybody else, because I had seen that on the ground in action.
I had met the killers face to face.
I have heard their explanations.
I had seen their overall reports from the highest levels to the lowest echelons to see how it was carried out.
There was nobody in the world, who had that knowledge.
IV: And later on you have been acting as a witness in the Flossenbürg Prozess in Dachau.
Do you have any..., you can remember being at this eh..?
BF: I do not remember that at all, to tell you the truth.
Eh, eh, eh you are talking about the Flossenbürg trial that took place in the Dachau concentration camp?
IV: Yeah.
BF: In the earliest trial.
That is very possible, because I wrote the report for it.
And eh they probably may have called me to testify on the basis for the report.
They could whatever have it, but I do not remember it all, it was...
I had nothing but contempt for those trials frankly.
Eh it a, it let me very cold.
Eh I did not think they were proper trials.
On the other hand, we did not charge anybody who is completely innocent.
The guards that were picked up were complices to mass murder.
No doubt, all of them, all of them.
And the excuse that I was only the cook, I was on holiday, blablabla, baloney.
They were all guilty.
Eh if you saw what I saw, you do not have to have a trial.
And the trials were not really considered eh by me at least as a, as a fair trial.
You know it was: "Herr Schmidt stand up.
You are accused of being a guard in the camp.
Are you Herr Schmidt?"
"Yes."
"What have you got to say for yourself?
You are accused of being a complicet in the crimes against humanity and killing and suffering of innocent people," and so on.
They said: "Eh no, no, no I was just obeying superior orders."
Or "I was not there."
Or "I was only the cook."
"Sit down, next."
And go through 50 cases like that in about an hour or two.
And then come back and say eh: "So we are going to reassess."
Come back 15 minutes later.
All the defendants are found guilty.
Sentence of death by hanging.
Eh and some of them were hanged.
They were taken to Landsberg prison.
And when I visit Landsberg maybe ten years ago, eh for the first time.
Eh I inquired about what happened to them.
And say, said about a thousand prisoners were hanged in Landsberg.
Well that was a fast trial, but not my idea of justice.
Eh, but was it unjust?
I do not know.
IV: So, one last question, I forgot before.
Eh in Flossenbürg, eh you can remember you talk to, during your investigation you talked to any inmates or SS people who have been caught or..
BF: Certainly, certainly you talk to inmates.
Eh you tal.., you talk to anybody who, who was capable of talking.
Many inmates were.
They would come up and thank you and want some food.
Or some.., you had to be really careful.
And we had, we all carried an emergency chocolate bar on our belt instead of ammunition {laughing} or in case of food.
But if you gave them the Hershey bar, that would kill them.
Because eh they had been starved and this was a piece of strong food.
And so we were warned.
Do not give them any food.
And of course they were graveling in the garbage to get some food.
And so we could set up a soup kitchen to begin to feed them.
So we talked to the inmates, some of them, like the Schreiber, Schreiber, you could get good information from them.
As to who, what transports had arrived, when, where, who were the guards.
Eh and, and so on.
So we did collect very valuable information.
I took affidavits from them, they must be in the records somewhere, if the Army has not destroyed them or lost them or somewhere..
But eh this was part of the routine examination.
Not merely seizing the documents, but also taking statements from at least half a dozen, or maybe a dozen eh survivors, who were able to give you some important testimony.
IV: Are there in Flossenbürg you, are there any people, special people you, you remember eh you have been talking to?
BF: No, unfortunately not.
Eh I think my son one, did some research on this, came upon an affidavit, which I had taken from somebody.
I think it may have been from Flossenbürg or Mauthausen.
And he was so surprised, you know, because it was not important where it was or who it was.
It was a person, a survivor, an inmate and.
I, this was the time.
And this was, you know, in May of 1945 and it was still a very turbulent world.
IV: Okay, thank you very much.
BF: Okay.
IV4: Thank you.