“You couldn’t grasp it all,” said Andrew Kiniry when asked about his time in the recently liberated Buchenwald concentration camp in the spring of 1945. These words, spoken during his oral history with The National WWII Museum, express a simple, direct truth. A member of the 45th Evacuation Hospital attached to General George S. Patton’s Third Army, Kiniry was not among the first to go into Buchenwald. Yet what he witnessed on the grounds of that place of horror, between April 28 and May 11, 1945, seared his memory and challenged his comprehension. “I can’t really describe it, to tell you how horrendous it was to see these people treated like animals. Even worse than that.”
Kiniry recalled all the bodies, human beings totally bereft of life, piled in trenches or on carts. And the dreadful stench. “I don’t think they told us what we were getting into,” he said. Once there, the 45th acted with urgency and dedication. Tuberculosis tests were arranged and soup provided to the emaciated former inmates suffering from shrunken stomachs. The necessity of maintaining good hygiene in the camp, however, was not easy; many of the freed individuals initially refused to take showers, remembering just how the SS used showering facilities. To aid their work, Kiniry and his unit supervised Germans brought in from nearby Weimar to clean the camp. Never did he believe their claims they knew nothing of Buchenwald. The smell of death emanating from the camp alone refuted such assertions.
