Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Subject: Holocaust Almanac: A Soldier's Testimony
Followup-To: alt.revisionism
Organization: The Nizkor Project http://www.nizkor.org
Keywords: Witten

Archive/File: holocaust/germany witton.001
Last-Modified: 1994/06/01

  "I, personally, was the first Allied soldier to enter the city square
  of Witten, a large city on the Ruhr River.  I led a patrol through the
  city, and incidentally, passed a slave camp that occupied the entire
  city square.  Behind the barbed wire of that camp were French, Dutch,
  Belgian, Polish, Czech and Soviet prisoners; most were prisoners of
  war; some were people that had been dragooned into slavery.  They
  worked in the local mills and mines.  I found, personally, I saw -
  personally, the effects of the German intent to destroy peoples by
  starvation, exhaustion and disease.  The prisoners were segregated by
  nationality.  The French, Dutch, etc. were the best off, the Soviets
  the worst. The Soviets were reduced to cannibalism, I saw!  I smelled
  it, all of A and B companies, 1st Battalion 289th Infantry Battalion
  saw it.  This was the first such sight as we conquered Germany.  It
  was far from the last.  These were not concentration camps with gas
  chambers and ovens.  In these slave camps people were systematically
  killed by starvation and disease.  This camp held  6,000 people.  A
  total of 30,000 had passed through it.  The 24,000 had died during the
  years 1943, 1944 and one-half of 1945.  This too was a death camp, one
  of thousands of such camps in Germany.  I personally saw, as a front
  line soldier, at least 200 such camps large and small.

  German is my third language.  I spoke with many Germans, every one to
  whom I spoke acknowledged the existence of these death camps.  At
  least one-third acknowledged the existence of the concentration camps,
  and the Einsatz Gruppen, the murder squad which operated throughout
  Eastern Europe.  No one admitted to being a participant.  Hundreds
  informed on their friends and neighbors as having been participants.
  I participated in identifying persons for arrest and trial as war
  criminals.  This was Kreis Brillon in Westphalia, Germany."

Philip R. Bradley, Lt. Colonel JAGC, retired

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