A photograph of an American sentry posted in front of the asylum is one of the lasting images we have of that event. This action revealed a hideous site of medical mass murder. Alerted by local townspeople, soldiers from the 2nd Division secured the institute on March 29, 1945, freeing 550 patients from the control of administrators, doctors, and nurses. This was not a place with barbed wire, guardtowers, and SS patrols, like the concentration camps soon to be liberated. What the men of the 2nd Infantry Division uncovered in Hadamar, though, was unlike anything they had confronted in the previous months of combat with the German Army. Altogether the “Indianhead” Division, proudly represented by the slogan “Second to None,” suffered more than 3,500 killed in the conflict. When World War II in Europe ended, Robertson’s men had arrived in the present-day Czech Republic. In April 1945, the 2nd Division was instrumental in the seizure of Göttingen and Leipzig. At the time it moved into Hadamar, it was part of V Corps, First Army, 12th Army Group. On March 21, 1945, the division crossed the Rhine. Robertson, the unit had fought first in Normandy, then in northern France, before seeing action in Belgium at the Battle of the Bulge. Having landed on Omaha Beach on June 7, 1944, under the command of Major General Walter M. The 2nd Infantry, nicknamed the “Indianhead Division” for its insignia dating from World War I, was no stranger to extreme situations. The town and one-time mental health facility, where 15,000 human beings perished, had been liberated in late March by the 2nd Infantry Division during its push through Hesse. Murder Mills: Hadamar, a crucial source, pinpoints the Allied discovery of the workings of the Nazis’ so-called “euthanasia” program even before the liberation of the much better-known network of SS-run concentration camps and sub-camps (Ohrdruf, Buchenwald, Dachau, and Mauthausen).īolker was not among the very first, however, to enter what Henry Friedlander much later categorized as a “killing center” at Hadamar. The evidence quickly accumulated for him and for investigators from other US units, such as the 28th Infantry Division. While there, Bolker went on to examine emaciated patients at the facility. Part of a war crimes investigation team, Bolker, as the footage shows, takes his scalpel and performs on-the-spot autopsies of the deceased.Īs historian Michael Burleigh documents, Bolker also found glass tubes of morphine hydrocholorate used to give lethal injections. The man is Major Herman Bolker, a pathologist from the Brooklyn Cancer Institute, but now with the Army Medical Corps. After the exhumation by German civilians of several bodies from recently dug mass graves, we see an American with a cap, wearing a white garment draped by a black apron. The date is April 7, 1945, and the location is a former asylum at Hadamar, Germany, in Hesse, close to Wiesbaden and just over 50 miles northwest of Frankfurt am Main. The WWII black and white footage contained in the documentary film Murder Mills: Hadamar, shot by an American crew, is grisly, almost unbearable to watch. Courtesy of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Top image: American sentry posted at Hadamar, April 5, 1945.
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