Anthony Greco

While on daylight recon through a forest on the outskirts of Landsberg, I saw a body clad in a black and white uniform lying on the ground. Upon close inspection, I was amazed to note that the body was all skin and bones - hardly any flesh to speak of. Our "Stars and Stripes" newspapers never wrote of these camps - some had ovens and some were work camps.

After I had passed a couple more bodies, all identically thin and clad in striped uniforms, I came to the edge of this forest. Using my binoculars and staying inside the forest with my men, James Hill and Ray Grai, I saw a barbed wire enclosure with wooden huts dug into the earth. I saw five German soldiers going around from hut to hut and setting fire to them with torches while other people clad in striped outfits scampered around. I said to my men, "This must be some sort of prison camp," so I radioed back to battalion headquarters and told them where I was located and what was happening. My commanding officer said, "Stay there, I will send some tanks and troops to help you."

As the tanks came up, we jumped on one and rode to the gate and had the tank blast open the gate. We went in and five German guards offered no resistance and surrendered. The prison inmates, those who were still string enough, ran outside and grabbed handfuls of grass and devoured the grass as quickly as they could. It was then that I noticed that inside the compound and as far as a hand could reach through the barbed wire, there was not a blade of grass to be found!

It was not long after that we noticed that many of the inmates were squatting and ejecting from their mouths and rear ends greenish fluids! I put the five German prisoners on a pickup truck and while talking to the driver, a Polish captain who had not been a prisoner too long and was still around 230 pounds or so and stood over six foot tall pointed at one of the Germans in the truck and said, "Das ist heim!", meaning "That is him!", my Polish interpreter, Leon Chrysanowski had told us. With that, the captain reached up and pulled this German, who was the camp tormentor out of the truck and started to beat him up. I could not bring myself to try and stop him after seeing all of those poor inmates and hearing about this German tormentor and how he mistreated these prisoners.

I went back to talk to the truck driver and turned around to see the Polish captain bring down a tree trunk on the German's head while he was lying on the ground. That one blow broke the German's neck and killed him instantly. I told the driver, "Take these four Germans to headquarters while they can still talk, the other one will not talk or torment anymore."