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Veteran ready to take part in honor flight
For years, Dale McNutt of McCook carried a tattered, black-and-white photograph in his wallet, taken when he was in the U.S. Army in Germany at the end of World War II.
Today, McNutt, 82, is getting ready to visit the World War II Memorial in Washington with 125 other World War II veterans, as part of the Heartland Honor Flight, but the photograph remains seared in his memory.
Taken right after the Nazi surrender in 1945, the photo shows what greeted the U.S. Army forces when they liberated the concentration camp Mauthausen near Linz, Austria.
Although he didn't enter the camp himself, McNutt lent his camera to a friend. The picture shows rows of naked, emaciated corpses, 12 feet across and about three feet high, stacked like cords of wood.
"People couldn't believe it happened," he said, when he tried to explain to friends after the war what was found in the camp. "But I know it happened. I kept this for years in my wallet to prove it."
What the Army stumbled upon that day near Linz soon became known to the rest of the world as the systematic, calculated effort by the Nazis to exterminate European Jews and others deemed dangerous to the Third Reich.
McNutt's picture came at the end of his nearly 2-year stint in the Army, that began in Hayes Center when he was 18 years old and drafted shortly after wheat harvest in 1944.
It was right after the Battle of the Bulge, McNutt remembered and U.S. troops were needed to replace those that were lost.
When he arrived in Germany at the front lines at the Rhine River, McNutt took the place of a jeep driver who had been killed by a sniper. His job was to drive the jeep while two officers listened to the radio dispatches that were sent overhead from pilots, who were monitoring the location of nearby German troops.
By the time the war ended, he estimated he drove about 500 miles from the front lines to Linz, Austria.
It was in early May when McNutt and his fellow soldiers bunked down for the night in Linz. During the night, they listened as German soldiers fled the area, he said, making quite a racket.
The next morning, the war with Germany had officially ended and as U.S. troops made their way outside of Linz, they found an abandoned German self-propelled artillery tank, the inside stuffed with bars of chocolate -- but the chocolate was too bitter to eat, McNutt recalled.
Sugar and especially chocolate were practically impossible to find in Germany during the war, McNutt said, which made the discovery even more puzzling.
Later in the afternoon, they arrived in a picturesque town called Mauthausen. Just outside the town, McNutt and some others decided to wash their jeeps in a shallow river nearby. While they were there, three men came down from the hilltop and their appearance was shocking, McNutt said.
"They were skin and bones and covered with sores," he said, shaking his head as if to rid himself of the memory. "I couldn't believe they were alive."
The starving men were from the concentration camp Mauthausen and they asked if anyone had food. The soldiers gave them all the C-rations they hard, McNutt said, and the men walked back to the camp but came back a short time later, asking if they had more.
That's when the idea of fishing with grenades came up. McNutt and others exploded hand grenades upstream and the starving men downstream retrieved the fish that surfaced after the explosion.
Afterwards, McNutt said he felt bad when he found out later that a few died after eating the fish, as their bodies were not able to handle food after months of starvation.
Later in the day, the 11th Armored Division of the U.S. Army, that McNutt was assigned to, made their way to the camp.
Mauthausen was one of the last of the concentration camps liberated in World War II and was situated near a huge stone quarry. Designated by the Nazis as an "extermination through labor" concentration camp, it included a series of more than 50 other "sub" camps where prisoners were systematically murdered by forced labor and exceptionally brutal and severe conditions.
With its own crematoria, thousands of Jews and other "undesirables" such as POWs died by torture, beatings, exhaustion or starvation, with many killed in the gas chambers disguised as shower facilities. "Medical" experiments also took place and thousands died from a catastrophic typhoid epidemic.
The death toll remains unknown but the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum puts the number at a conservative 200,000; this number excludes thousands of prisoners that died of disease.
In addition, many other inmates from other death camps were transferred there late in the war, to avoid the advancing Russian Army and were immediately put to death in the gas chambers, with no registration numbers recorded.
One survivor put the minimal food rations at a loaf a bread and a quart of "weed soup" each week to sustain seven prisoners. The life span of most prisoners was six months.
The experience of meeting the concentration camp victims and what was found at the camp later that day colored the rest of his time in the war, McNutt conceded.
"I had just turned 19, it was hard," McNutt admitted. "Afterwards, nothing was a horrifying to me as that."
After leaving Germany, McNutt was in training for the Pacific War with Japan when it came to a close in August 1945. McNutt had spent a total of 18 months in the Army.
Nowadays, McNutt spends his afternoons getting together with friends at a coffee shop downtown, where he's the unofficial "treasurer" for $1 bets on Bison and Nebraska football games. He's looking forward to seeing the memorial on Oct. 21, and said he remains grateful for time he spent serving his country.
"I'd do it again if I had to," McNutt said. "I would have felt bad if I couldn't have served. We were proud to be patriotic in those days."
The horrible, graphic scene that greeted American soldiers at the Mauthausen concentration camp can be viewed here.
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