In late April 1945, as World Battle II neared its finish in Europe, three new child infants and their moms arrived on the infamous Mauthausen focus camp in Austria. The ladies, Jewish prisoners who had endured months of pressured labor, had hidden their pregnancies from their Nazi captors. Their survival to that time was extraordinary; what occurred subsequent was one thing nearer to miraculous.
Lower than every week after their arrival, a small American unit of roughly two dozen troopers liberated the camp. Among the many liberating troopers was 22-year-old Military medic LeRoy “Pete” Petersohn of Illinois.
Petersohn had labored at a newspaper earlier than the warfare. When he entered Mauthausen, he discovered himself confronting horrors that he felt have been nearly past comprehension. He additionally understood that what he was seeing wanted to be documented to be believed.
“This can be a story as I witnessed upon arriving right here about two weeks in the past,” he wrote in a letter dated Might 20, 1945.
His son, Brian Petersohn, lately learn these phrases aloud to 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl. The letter was not only a message residence; it was testimony.
“It was a horrible sight upon arriving right here,” Petersohn wrote, describing “piles after piles of lifeless our bodies.” He recounted how ravenous prisoners, as soon as the gates have been opened, ran to patches of grass and started consuming it. “The sights have been horrible,” he wrote. “The camp was nearly past a human being to face.”
He described prisoners mendacity in opposition to the partitions. “We figured they have been simply resting, however no, they have been additionally lifeless and had been lifeless for hours. My blood runs chilly once I recall these sights, which I witnessed.”
Along with his written report, Petersohn and his fellow troopers took pictures and recorded movie footage of what they discovered at Mauthausen within the days after liberation.
Brian Petersohn says his father understood that historical past would require proof. He recalled conversations in regards to the function of Basic Dwight D. Eisenhower, who ordered troops to deliver native civilians to see the camps firsthand and to doc what they discovered by way of phrases and pictures.
Petersohn did precisely that. He despatched the letter residence to his spouse, who introduced it to the native newspaper, the place it was printed as contemporaneous proof of what American troopers had encountered.
“He was giving testimony,” Stahl noticed.
Brian agreed.
When requested whether or not he considers his father a hero, Brian paused.
“I will say sure,” he stated of his father, who died from a mind tumor in June 2010. “However then once more, I understand how humble he was — that it was simply what he was alleged to do. It was his job.”
Photographs and movies courtesy of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and Getty Pictures.
The video above was produced by Shari Finkelstein, Collette Richards, and Brit McCandless Farmer. It was edited by April Wilson and Scott Rosann.
