On This Day in History: April 13

The Bergen-Belsen Train Rescue

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Anne Frank died in the Bergen-Belsen death camp two months before it was liberated by UK and Canadian forces. Five days before the liberation, a train filled with 2,500 Bergen-Belsen prisoners fled the Allied advance to make for another death camp in Czechoslovakia. On April 13, 1945, U.S. troops encountered the train.

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: April 13, 1945 --

The fucking Nazis had stopped the train and abandoned it and the prisoners inside. It had left the death camp on April 10, one of three such trains crammed to bursting as the Nazi cockgoblins scrambled to hide their atrocities; 70,000 people were murdered in Bergen-Belsen. The war was only a few weeks from ending, and Germany was in chaos with Allies advancing from every direction. Knowing the Americans were near, those Nazi pieces of excrement ran away and left the train near the city of Magdeburg, about 70 miles west of Berlin.

Prisoners were milling about the train and could hear the sounds of fighting in the distance. Suddenly, American soldiers approached, guns at the ready, not sure what they were going to encounter. Many of the prisoners soon realized what was happening. One called out “The Americans are coming!” When the prisoners were asked who they were, one said, “We love you! We are Jews!” One of the American soldiers pulled out a Star of David on a chain around his neck and said, “So am I.”

Dr. Mordechai Weisskopf, who was a 14-year-old boy on the train, later said of the event, “The joy that seized us at the sight of the American tank is indescribable. Suddenly, from nonhuman slaves, we were transformed into free people.” Sgt. Gross described the encounter from the American perspective: “Each one of them was skeleton thin with starvation, a sickness in their faces … At the sight of Americans they began laughing in joy—If it could be called laughing. It was an outpouring of pure, near-hysterical relief.”

The soldiers’ mission had been to conquer Magdeburg, but upon encountering the prisoners Major Clarence Benjamin of the 743rd Tank Battalion realized it was his moral duty to rescue these prisoners instead. He took several photos of the instant of liberation. The newly freed people were transported to a nearby town for medical attention.

The story would remain largely unknown for almost seven decades. In 2001 a high school history teacher in New York named Matt Rozell met with Carrol Walsh, who’d been a captain in the tank battalion that rescued the train. It had been a general conversation about World War II experiences when the story of the train came up. Upon seeing the photos, Rozell realized it was a historical treasure trove. Soon the photos were published by major Holocaust archives, and people came forward to identify themselves as those in the pictures.

Rozell made it his mission to reunite as many of the train occupants and rescuing soldiers as he could, arranging a series of meetings between them. Rozell’s book, A Train Near Magdeburg, was published in 2016.

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