Memories of Liberator Nathan Schaeffer

Buchenwald was a Nazi concentration camp established near Weimar, Germany, in July 1937. It was one of the first and the largest of the concentration camps within Germany’s 1937 borders and housed 280,000 inmates, 95 percent of who were Jews.

Liberated on April 11, 1945, by the 6th Armored Division of the Third US Army under General George Patton, Buchenwald left a lasting impression upon Nathan Schaeffer, a 23-year-old sergeant (1922-2015). He is one of the South Carolinians who liberated Nazi death and labor camps. Buchenwald was second only to Auschwitz in the horrors it imposed upon its prisoners.

Jack Schaeffer remembers that his father did not discuss his war experiences when he returned from Germany. He never talked about them at that time. It wasn’t until Jack was in college at the University of Georgia that his father told him what he had seen. Nat was an amateur photographer and had carried several cameras with him. The photos he took were never shown to his children, Jack and his two sisters, Marilyn and Michelle. The photos were only shown when he was interviewed by Ruth Jacobs (obm) in 1991 for the first videos produced by SC ETV for the SC Council on the Holocaust featuring survivors and liberators in the state. These videos are available at the website of the SC Council on the Holocaust and on YouTube.

It was the smell of burned and rotting flesh that hit Nat’s group of soldiers as they drove closer to the camp. It was the second or third day after the camp was liberated. There were no gas masks in those days so Nat and the soldiers used their handkerchiefs to cover their noses to tolerate the strong smell.

Inside the gate were wagons loaded with bodies ready to be burned. A medical facility in a nearby building was used to experiment on children. They were not allowed inside this building. He could not believe this had happened to ‘his people,’ Jack said. His father took photos of piles of ashes, of bones, of emaciated men with sunken, dead eyes. He told Jack that when the soldiers entered the camp, many gave candy and gum to the inmates. The starved inmates refused the offer to join the soldiers to eat; instead, they ate out of the garbage cans.

Later, after his three children were young adults, Nat told them of the stacks of bodies on the ground and how wood was laid on top, and then other bodies stacked on top of the wood. Then it was set on fire and the bodies burned with the wood.

A few years later, back home in Charleston

In the late ‘50s, he became depressed from the trauma, the vivid memories. His conscience bothered him so much that he destroyed many of the photos.

Nat Schaeffer continually asked himself how could the people who lived nearby and in other places in Germany not know what had taken place practically on their doorsteps. How could they not know what was going on when the odor of rotten flesh, dead and burned bodies, filled the air and reached five to 10 miles around Buchenwald. To be there was terrifying and horrifying.

From that time on, Schaeffer involved himself with a stronger Jewish life, supporting Israel, Holocaust survivors and his local synagogue. He was a regular member and the Kiddush maven of the Brith Sholom Beth Israel Minyan House in South Windermere.

The Schaffer family had moved to Charleston in the early ‘50s. Nat opened a grocery store at Alexander and Judith Streets and later, one at Calhoun and Alexander, known as the Bargain Corner, probably the first supermarket and dry goods store on Charleston’s peninsula. His wife, Lee, was a successful and popular caterer for many years; and they were an important part of the kosher community when they owned the South Windermere bakery. ■