Published: March 23, 2008 09:21 pm            

Kammer’s images of the Holocaust to be displayed at Bluefield College

BLUEFIELD — Max Kammer wasn’t a photographer when he served in the U.S. Army during World War II, but he photographed images at a Nazi death camp soon after Allied soldiers liberated it, and some of those images have become ingrained in the American psyche as grim reminders of the Holocaust.

“I had never even heard of Bukenwald before we got there — didn’t even know it was going on,” Kammer, who will celebrate his 88th birthday on Wednesday, said. Kammer was in his senior year at West Virginia University when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, and since he was in the ROTC at WVU, he was commissioned in the Army as soon as he graduated. By April 13, 1945, he had achieved the rank of captain and was serving in headquarters of the XX Corps Artillery.

“I was the only infantry officer in the XX Corps,” Kammer said. “I had been through anti-tank training, and I could read maps. That’s why I was there.”

At the time, the Allies were closing in on Berlin and in the process of making the final push of the war. On April 4, 1945, the American 4th Armor Division was in search of German secret communications on the Autobahn and moved on the city of Gotha and discovered the Ohrdurf-Nord death camp — first of the death camps uncovered by American soldiers.

Ohrdruf was a forced labor camp located near Weimar, Germany. It was part of the Buchenwald concentration camp complex, and had been created in 1944 to supply labor to build a railroad line to a secret communications center that was never completed. By late March of 1945, there were approximately 11,700 prisoners at Ohrdruf, but with the Allies closing in, the German SS troops guarding the prison moved most on a death march to Buchenwald, killed a majority of the prisoners who were too sick to travel, but some survived to be liberated.

On April 12, 1945, Generals Dwight Eisenhower, George Patton and Omar Bradley visited Ohrdruf and were sickened by the horrible scene they witnessed in the death camp. The liberators discovered piles of dead bodies, and some bodies partially burned. Eisenhower would later write in a cable to General George C. Marshall: “I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to propaganda.”

“General Patton wanted us to get on course (to take Berlin),” Kammer said. “He had no use for the Germans and thought seeing the death camp would make the soldiers keep fighting the Germans. We were only about 110 miles from Berlin at the time.”

Kammer had been serving at a center in Weimar where German civilians were required to turn in any weapons they had. “The day before I visited the camp, one of the Germans turned in a camera and I took it,” Kammer said. The camera Kammer took was a German Leica camera, but several other German Rolleiflex cameras had been turned in as well.

“I went over to the signal office to see what kind of lens it was,” Kammer said. “When I was there, one of the soldiers said: ‘Oh my God. That’s an expensive thing.’ The general came in and wanted me to go back and get the other cameras. He gave me a note and I went back and got them. I’m a captain. The line of people turning weapons in was three blocks long when the general and I got back to the center. We went inside and there were at least 40 more of those cameras there.”

After Kammer returned to the signal office, some of the soldiers showed him how to take photographs with the camera, and his colonel took him to Ohrdruf. Kammer was born into a Jewish family that immigrated to the United States from Lithuania near the end of the 19th Century. He took some pictures of the colonel, but he also took pictures of the prisoners huddled together three to a bunk, the scenes of inhumanity that surrounded him everywhere he looked and of the people — young and old — that had been liberated.

The scene calloused him. A few days after his visit to Ohrdruf, he and a major spent a night in a home near the Buchenwald death camp. The home was filled with expensive furnishings, and the two officers thought the family that owned the house must have been connected in some way with the death camp. After spending the night, the major took a small pillow from the home to soften the seat of his Jeep, but when a woman came out and complained that the pillow was her baby’s Kammer said that he was so upset that he didn’t care. “The major threw the pillow back in her face,” Kammer said.

Within 30 days of his return home to Bluefield, Kammer created a display that included some of the horrible photos he took in the death camps he visited as well as information related to the Allied army’s defeat of the Germans. From that point on, he has taken the display to civic and school groups and has recounted the story of what he witnessed. Several of his pictures will be on display on the first floor of Lansdell Hall on the Bluefield College campus throughout the month of April and will serve as part of a “Holocaust Symposium” sponsored by the college. The symposium will include lectures, music, theater, exhibits and travel and will start with a kickoff reception at 6 p.m., on April 1 in Lansdell Hall for the unveiling of an exhibit featuring Kammer’s photographs.

“I made a special trip up to the first Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., soon after it opened in 1993,” Kammer said. “I had sent several of my pictures to them. When I arrived there and rode the elevator to the second floor, when the door opened, I said: ‘Oh my gosh! There was the life-size picture I took of three men in one bunk. When I told the people around me that I had taken the picture, they started asking me questions like I was a tour guide.”

Kammer said that he has been working with Dr. Walter Shroyer of BC who has enlarged the photographs and placed them in attractive frames. Kammer said he is looking forward to the reception.

– Contact Bill Archer at barcher@bdtonline.com

        

• Click to discuss this story with other readers on our forums.