There must have been anti-semitic soldiers who participated in liberating the concentration camps at the end of World War II. Did any of them write about their feelings toward Jews changing as a result of this experience?

by eleventeenth_beatle
MikeOfThePalace

I don't know if this is up to this sub's standards or not, but my wife's not-yet-completed dissertation talks about this, and she has done a great deal of primary source research on it - mainly reading letters GIs wrote home. Apologies to the mods if I'm just making more work for them.

The short answer is that, for the soldiers who actually liberated the camps, it seems to have made a good deal of difference. The letters she has been able to read are pretty universal in expressing horror/shock/outrage/disgust/sympathy, that sort of thing, when from soldiers that had (in earlier letters) said some pretty anti-semitic stuff.

There are exceptions, of course, and one of the biggest was none other than General George Patton. The man's attitudes towards Jews were downright vile, and since he was in charge of a large area, he was ultimately responsible for the care of a huge number of Jewish DPs - Displaced Persons, basically refugees who had been forced from their homes. The Jews were are a relatively small percentage of them, but the ones in most desperate need of care, and the ones that were almost impossible to repatriate since they had no home to go to.

Patton kept the survivors in terrible conditions, often in the very barracks they were "liberated" from and under armed guard. It took a specially commissioned report from a representative named Harrison appointed personally by Truman to get their conditions changed - the report basically concluded "we're treating them more or less how the Nazis treated them, except we're not actively murdering them." The report got conditions vastly improved.

To say a bit more about GIs, anti-semitism re-arose among them after the war when those who had done the liberating were sent home and fresh troops brought in. These new troops often saw Jews as being uninterested in work, even to improve their own living conditions (there was a belief among survivors that they'd did enough work already, the Germans should be put to work for them), living in terribly unhygienic conditions (their sense of hygiene was a bit out of whack after the camps), and showing a general sense of entitlement as if the world owed them (which is really kinda fair). The liberating troops had an understanding of what kind of trauma they'd been through, and were fairly patient with them. The new troops who only arrived after the war was over did not, really.

One very interesting figure in all of this was an Army Major named Irving Heymont. Heymont was Jewish, but kept that fact quiet so none of his Army colleagues knew, and served as commandant to one of the largest Jewish DP camps after the war. He wrote letters home to his wife nearly every day, and the entire set is in the archives of the Holocaust Museum in Washington (historians will appreciate just how much my wife loves this man). He talks a lot about how frustrating dealing with the DPs was - even basic hygiene like "if the toilet is clogged and overflowing, please don't just shit on the floor" was hard to get them to follow. He had to constantly remind himself to be patient with them, and more than once expressed the sentiment to his wife that he could entirely understand how someone dealing with them could develop anti-semitic feelings. After all, he was Jewish, knew exactly what they'd been through, and still wanted to throttle them sometimes.