August 20


Photographs give testament to the horror of the Holocaust


When Oscar Wilson went to war, the U.S. Army issued him the usual battle
gear, plus a jeep and a trailer, a submachine gun, a couple of cameras and
film.

In the end, it was the cameras and film that made all the difference. Mr.
Wilson, now 80, sits in a corner booth at a truck stop on Interstate 20
not far from Wills Point, where he and his wife operate a motel.

On the seat next to him is a small steel strongbox packed with envelopes.
Each envelope contains a photograph he took during World War II.

He passes them around the table: Here is the Berchtesgaden, near Hitler's
Bavarian retreat. Here is the Place de la Concorde in Paris. Here are the
ovens at Buchenwald, the Nazi death camp near Weimar, Germany.

And here are two photos that show the bodies, stacked like so much
cordwood. These photos are copies. He gave the originals to the Dallas
Holocaust Memorial Center because, he says, there are so many who deny the
Holocaust happened.

Mr. Wilson took the pictures the day after U.S. soldiers drove their tanks
through the walls at Buchenwald and liberated the camp.

The corporal was sent to photograph the place, he suspects, because
higher-ups back at headquarters could scarcely believe early reports from
the camp's liberators.

"I got the feeling the corps commander thought the troops in the field had
overplayed what was there," he says.

"So he said, 'You fellows go out and find out.' "

Into the Army
He was an engineering student and a member of ROTC in 1943 at North Texas
Agricultural College (now the University of Texas at Arlington) when the
draft plucked the Dallas native out of college.

After boot camp, the Army tested him and sent him off to St. Louis
University for more training as an engineer. Then they shipped him to
Europe aboard the luxury liner Queen Elizabeth.

He was waiting for further assignment in a replacement depot in England
when an officer came around.

"He had seen the information on me," Mr. Wilson recalls. "They were going
to set up a special unit. They warned me that it would be dangerous. I was
allowed to volunteer."

The 135 soldiers selected for the unit received special training in
London. The city was then under attack by lethal new weapons, and when air
raid sirens went off, he says, team members would head for the rooftops
where they would watch German V-1 "buzz bombs" come gliding in and blow up
whole city blocks. They were witnessing the first guided missiles.

Eventually the members of what had become the 2898 Engineer Technical
Intelligence unit were divided into teams of four, issued jeeps and
ordered into combat. A day or so after D-Day, Mr. Wilson and his team
embarked for Normandy attached to an armored unit.

"We had a ... pass signed by Gen. Eisenhower that said we could go to any
unit and get supplies and gasoline. Our orders were, anything new you
encounter mines, igniters, booby traps study it, lecture about it," he
says.

"I thought, 'What the hell, it's better than getting in the infantry.' In
boot camp, I had had trouble carrying a 45-pound pack."

In the months that followed, the team would check out German mines and
booby traps, photographing them and passing information along to the
troops in briefings and through a booklet they published and distributed.

Sometimes their research was close up and personal, he says.

"We were heating our coffee in the mornings with propellant taken out of
artillery shells, until an officer discovered what we were doing and
decided for the good of all we would work farther afield," Mr. Wilson
says. "I had 20 pounds of it in the back of the jeep. It would heat your
coffee in nothing flat."

In April 1945, members of Mr. Wilson's team found themselves near Weimar.

Once home to some of the luminaries of German culture Goethe, Schiller,
Liszt and Bach since 1937 Weimar also had been the home of the Buchenwald
camp complex, where the Nazis had imprisoned and systematically killed
tens of thousands of Jews and other "undesirables."

At the time, Mr. Wilson says, American troops knew none of this.

"There were no rumors about the death camps," he recalls. "I knew of the
fact that the Germans had been so brainwashed that they thought they were
superior to everyone else, that everyone else was like animals.

"But I had absolutely no concept they would carry it to this length."

On the morning of April 12, he received a special order.

"We had a call they'd discovered something, and the corps commander said
go see what it was and report back. I had no idea what it was, but the
reports were that it was unbelievable."

With his driver, a young Jewish soldier from New York City who spoke
German, he set out in the jeep.

"About five miles out of Weimar, we arrived at this place. It had this
impressive gate and fences. At the gate were two infantry soldiers from
the unit that had liberated it. One guy said, 'Boy, I hope you all are
coming to take over. This place gives me the willies.'

"The guy at the gate also said, 'By the way, don't give them anything to
eat, especially candy bars.' He said he had given one old man a candy bar
and that the old man had died almost immediately.

"We had no idea what we were getting into.

"When we got in, we could see just how bad it was. Everybody looked like
skin and bones you've heard that expression. I remembered one thing that
especially shocked me: There was a little boy who looked to be 7. They
told me he was 11. He had been given just enough food to stay alive."

Scenes of horror
Inmates those strong enough to walk seemed eager to show the two
soldiers around. While he took photographs, inmates spoke to the
interpreter.

"The first thing we did was to go into the offices of the head guard," Mr.
Wilson says. In the offices there were lamps whose shades, they were told,
were made of human skin. A gallon fruit jar stood on a desk. It was full
of gold fillings taken from prisoners' teeth.

"Then we proceeded to go through the different parts of the camp. A lot of
people were there in bunk beds, three to five tiers high. You could look
in and see rows and rows. You could see these skeletons looking out of the
bunks."

They were shown the large receiving room where people brought in on the
trains would shed their clothes.

"Then they'd come into the next room, the shower. The shower heads were
hooked up to gas cylinders."

From the showers, the bodies were taken to the ovens, which had been built
to accommodate two bodies at a time, Mr. Wilson says.

"But they knew to starve people to where they could burn three at a time."

He photographed the hay wagons used to transport the bodies to the ovens.
He photographed some of the bodies, stacked and waiting.

"They were evidently in the middle of doing this when our troops arrived,"
he says. "They had run out of coal."

At a different location, they were shown a large pit, perhaps 15 by 100
feet, 20 feet deep. It was full of bodies. Everywhere the smell was
overpowering, he recalls. Nevertheless, his driver kept taking notes and
he kept taking pictures.

"We were there three or four hours," Mr. Wilson says. "I shot seven rolls
of the 35mm film issued to us" perhaps as many as 100 pictures.
"Afterwards, as I normally did, I sent the film to corps headquarters.

"Usually they would develop it and make extra prints and send the film
back to us. In this particular case they processed it and sent back six or
eight prints to me. And they sent the film to Gen. Eisenhower."

Eventually he mailed some photographs home to his mother and forgot about
them. Over the years, in books and magazines, he's come across pictures of
Buchenwald that look familiar.

"They are probably the pictures I took," he says.

He was told that Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower and Gen. George S. Patton Jr.
had visited the death camp. On the same day he was there, but miles away,
Patton, Eisenhower and Gen. Omar Bradley visited Ohrdruf-Nord, a forced
labor subcamp of the huge Buchenwald complex. Both Patton and Eisenhower
wrote about the visit in their memoirs, and historic photos show the three
generals together.

A team of physicians also was sent to care for those victims who could be
saved. Except for shock at what he saw through the viewfinder of his
camera, Mr. Wilson says his own emotional reaction to the sights and
smells of Buchenwald was curiously flat.

"I was so damned busy doing my job I never stopped to think about it," he
says. He went on to other assignments and never returned to the camp.

"I saw a lot of bad things during the war," he says. "I learned very
quickly over there you take it a day at a time."

Remembering
Oscar Wilson came back from the war on a creaking Liberty ship. When he
returned to Dallas, he bought and sold cameras for a while, then opened
the photo-processing lab that eventually became Mizell Photo. After his
mother died, he found three of the photos he had taken, grim souvenirs of
Buchenwald.

He put them away for a while, then presented them to the Holocaust Center.

Though Mr. Wilson's photos are not currently on exhibit, the center's
executive director, Elliott Dlin, won't rule out future display. They are
graphic, he concedes, but "there are lots of Holocaust museums in which
photos like this are on display."

These photographs, or photographs like them, have appeared over and over
in media, in films, books, in newspapers, Mr. Dlin says.

"Pictures of ovens and piles of bodies unfortunately have become iconic
images in the history of the Holocaust."

A few days after Mr. Wilson photographed Buchenwald, he heard that the
Army made the local Buergermeister gather as many townspeople as possible
and march them through the camp "to see what the Nazis had done."

"They were incredulous," he says. "We heard some got sick and threw up.

"It makes you wonder, how do any of us know what happens? These people
didn't."

People will always find ways to get around what the camera tells them, Mr.
Wilson says. "We did photographs of the moon landing and we still had many
nonbelievers.

"The same is true of the Holocaust. It's such an unbelievable thing."

(source: Dallas Morning News)