Black troops first to reach death camp

[Photo] The Denver Post / Kent Meireis
JACOBS: Gunter Jacobs, a 65-year-old Denver retiree, remains grateful to the American troops who liberated him from Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945.

he first black people I ever saw in my life were the black soldiers who liberated us on April 11, 1945," said Gunter Jacobs, 65, of Denver, a survivor of 3 1/2 years in Buchenwald and other Nazi concentration camps.

"I don't even have to close my eyes to see those people in front of me. There's no mistake in my mind, no doubt whatsoever. If ever I was 100 percent sure of anything, this would be it."

Jacobs is one of many Holocaust survivors who say blacks were among the first U.S. troops to reach Hitler's death camps. At the time, he had no idea who they were but later heard they were attached to Gen. George S. Patton's army.

"I remember them coming to the camp with half- tracks and armored personnel carriers. About a half-dozen vehicles. These black GIs came out and gazed at us -- we were very malnourished and dehydrated and I was hardly able to walk. I was 17 years old.

When Jacobs was taken with his father, mother and sister from their home in northwest Germany near the Dutch border, they all agreed to meet at home when the war was over. Only Jacobs returned.

"Until recently I could never talk about what happened," Jacobs said. But he wanted to speak out on behalf of his black liberators. "The army at that time separated blacks and whites, so blacks had to fight racism at home and then came overseas and had to fight it again." He described conditions in Buchenwald:

"Our (daily) food was a piece of dry bread and a scoop of soup with maybe some cabbage leaves. We had no heavy clothing and only wooden shoes. That last winter. I had body lice. They would eat on me so every night I had to look through my clothes for them.

"I was originally taken in December 1941 to a camp in Riga, Latvia, and remained there and in different camps until August 1944 when the Russians were coming close. They sorted us out and those able to perform labor were shipped by boat to Stutthof concentration camp in Poland and from there to Buchenwald. I was shipped to a nearby labor camp until about March 1945 when those of us still alive returned to the main camp at Buchenwald. There were about 40,000.

"Later on, they established more work camps to keep the war going and those were mainly inhabited by Jews. The idea was to work them to death, give them as little food as possible and little warm clothing. Near Buchenwald, I worked at a huge refinery that made gasoline out of coal and had been two-thirds bombed out. We had to dig up the sewer pipes.

"A week or 10 days before the Allies liberated us, the Nazis started mass killings. They took them out and shot them or burned or bombed the barracks.

"Our barracks was called to the main gate (to be killed) and we'd almost arrived when the air raid sirens went off. The SS guards went to their bunkers and we returned to our barracks and weren't called again.

"I was in a barracks with only young adults or teenagers. We were told that the Allies were closing in and if we heard shooting, we should lay flat on the floor. One day shortly thereafter, we did hear machine-gun fire. The Nazis didn't put up much of a fight. They threw up their weapons and came down from the watch towers. If memory serves me right, either 21,000 or 24,000 of us were liberated.

"I was put in another barracks and given . . . navy bean soup with chunks of ham. My stomach couldn't digest it and I had pretty bad diarrhea.

"When you're in the camps, you hear about America. It sounded like, my God, everything we didn't have. Like heaven. Earlier in 1944 when the GIs landed in France on D-Day, we heard about it and that gave us a lot of hope."

Jacobs got in touch with an uncle in Denver and emigrated here in 1948. After applying for U.S. citizenship, he was drafted during the Korean War and served 16 months in an army transportation unit.

Returning home, he worked in his father-in-law's cattle business and then spent 20 years with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He has three children and six grandchildren.