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Angelo Greco (2nd from right) and unidentified men look at graves dug by the 82nd to bury corpses of Wobbelin Inmates On May 2, 1945, the 82nd American Airborne Division liberated the few survivors of a concentration camp in northern Germany. The rescue effort was one of the last missions for the paratroopers and as a grisly part of the effort, the Americans also helped bury the dead.
As the war ground to a halt, the 82nd U.S. Airborne Division accepted the unconditional surrender document of Nazi forces east of the Elbe River. Not long afterward, the division came across the remnants of the concentration camp of Wobbelin, The Terrible Wobbelin, as it was called. Wobbelin had been created only 10 weeks earlier as a sub-camp of the Hamburg concentration camp called Neuengamme and was to serve as a work camp for 5,000 political prisoners The camp had no infrastructure and no sanitation or food facilities. It consisted merely of barracks with open spaces and no doors.
The 82nd Airborne Division discovered more than 1,000 of these prisoners dead, their emaciated corpses having been thrown into mass graves or left lying on the ground. Most had died of starvation. Under the orders of Gen. Gavin the paratroopers gave 200 victims a proper and decent burial. Before the burial ceremony, the townspeople of Ludwigslust and the entire command of the 21st German Wehrmacht Army were ordered to walk by the graves and pay their last respects for these unfortunates.
The American army also liberated 3,500 men from the camp. "It was a clear, blue sunny day and these guys [the paratroopers] showed up in the afternoon," remembered Laszlo Berkowits, who was liberated from Wobbelin that day and now serves as senior rabbi at a synagogue in Falls Church, VA. "If God had sent an angel down, he couldn’t have done a better job than these guys." For further 82nd mention, Wobbelin Concentration Camp Survivor Project |
