Liberator Horace Berry and the 71st Infantry Division The Liberation of Gunskirchen Camp

Horace Spartan Berry was born on February 3, 1920 in Greer, South Carolina. His middle name, “Spartan,” came from his grandfather, Spartan Commodor, and that name may be in honor of the “Spartan Regiment”, a military unit that fought in the Revolutionary War at the Battle of Cowpens in 1781; and, after which the City of Spartanburg, SC, was named in 1785.

Berry attended Greer High School and then enrolled in Clemson College — then a military school — and graduated with the Class of 1941. After he graduated from Clemson, he entered the Army and active duty on June 20, 1941, by reporting as a Second Lieutenant to Camp Croft, a World War II infantry training facility located near Spartanburg. After spending ten months at Camp Croft, he was stationed for much of World War II at Army installations from Georgia to California to the Canal Zone. He was sent overseas in early 1945 near the end of the war where he served as a captain, and thereafter as a major, of the 71st Infantry Division.

The 71st Infantry Division — also known as “The Red Circle Division” — was formed in the United States in February 1943. It disembarked at the French Port of Le Havre in December 1944, and entered combat as it advanced into the Alsace-Lorraine Region in France. Horace Berry joined the Division in early 1945 — as it was advancing into Germany in February 1945 as part of the U.S. 3rd Army, commanded by Lt. General George S. Patton, Jr. When it crossed the Rhine River, the Division was engaged in several battles with the German Army, most notably capturing the cities of Coburg, Bayreuth and Regensburg in April, 1945. Toward the war’s end, the 71st Infantry Division entered Austria, where it joined advancing military forces from the Soviet Union.

On May 4, 1945, the 71st Infantry Division — as it was moving through Austria — came upon and liberated Gunskirchen, one of many sub-camps of the Mauthausen Concentration Camp in Austria. Located just a few miles from the City of Lambach, the camp had a short-lived history. Construction began in December 1944. The camp did not open until April 1945 — and when it did open, thousands of prisoners were sent there — evacuated on death marches from Mauthausen. Because of overcrowded conditions at the camp, diseases such as typhus and dysentery spread rapidly through the weakened and starving camp population. With the exception of approximately 400 political prisoners, the prisoners were Jews from Hungary. It is estimated that some 17,000 Hungarian Jews passed through the Gunskirchen camp. As they approached Gunskirchen, Captain Berry and others in his unit saw inmates on the road leading to the camp. They all had striped clothes underneath ragged outer garments they were all wearing — and they all were starving. Members of his unit tried to give the inmates chocolate bars and cigarettes. Most were unable to eat the chocolate bars, getting stomach cramps — though a number of them actually ate the cigarettes. Inmates died on the road as they attempted to eat. When Berry and his men entered and moved through the camp, they couldn’t believe what they saw: human skeletons crowded around them — shrieking, groaning, cheering, crying — all from the joy they felt from liberation. Captain Berry saw dead bodies wherever he looked: in the barracks and scattered in all directions among the thick trees that surrounded the camp. Many of the bodies were in a state of decomposition and that — along with human excrement and smoldering fires — created a smell so horrible and sickening that it could and would never be forgotten. Berry was placed in charge of a platoon and ordered to bury the dead that he had seen — and to transfer any living inmates to a local hospital. He and his men spent about a week at that task — using German SS officers to gather and bury the dead.

What Horace Berry — and other soldiers in the 71st Infantry — experienced in Gunskirchen in May of 1945 reaffirmed forever why the world came together to oppose Nazi Germany: to defeat a government built on hate, race myths and murder. As the War ended, Major General Willard G. Wyman, Commander the of the 71st Infantry Division, ordered the publication of a booklet about the experiences of Horace Berry and others under his command at Gunskirchen. The booklet contains much more detailed information about those experiences than is written here and it is entitled: “The SeventyFirst Came…To Gunskirchen Lager”. In the Foreward to that booklet, General Wyman wrote, in part, something he believed should always be remembered: