While under American command on 16 November 1944, the division went on another offensive in support of Operation Queen, taking Stolberg and pushing on against heavy resistance. sanguine genocide in Turkey three decades earlier. [24] The 1st Brigade, 104th Division, activated at Vancouver Barracks,[25] and the 2nd Brigade, 104th Division activated at Pasco, Washington. SS doctor Heinrich Schmidt was largely responsible for the inhuman conditions. news that we were needed to evacuate patients from a concentration camp in one [1] The death rate was so high that a special work detail was formed to move the corpses. They dug mass graves on a prominent hill near the camp and carried the corpses skeletons wrapped in skin. Massacre was the word here, knives and bullets for the males, desert death marches, Mr. Downs certainly gives us a glowing account of the Timberwolves' bravery and military prowess, but nowhere in the article does he describe the 104th Division's role in liberating camp Mittelbau Dora, or the horrific Search the Holocaust Encyclopedia. The 104th Infantry Division was first constituted on 24 June 1921 as the 104th Division, before being organized and activated in October of that year in Salt Lake City, Utah. National Timberwolf Association. It was two miles in length, with two large In one bomb crater lay about twenty After several decades, the division then expanded its role to conducting entry-level training for soldiers of all branches of the Army in the northwestern United States. Would that it was possible to take the doubters by the hand, back through the years, and point out the tragedy of this minor concentration camp! Battalion,104th Infantry Division, was there and explained the impact of the Malnutrition and disease were rampant, and corpses lay unburied. SS guards hid in air-raid shelters but did not allow the prisoners to seek cover. lying around the camp and some 750 emaciated, starving and ill prisoners who had been left behind when the SS evacuated the inmates on death marches. immediately following the war. According to some accounts, soldiers of the 104th Infantry Division killed German civilians in Nordhausen who denied knowledge of the atrocities, believing that they were partially responsible. [7] Some were not concentration camp prisoners, but forced laborers who could no longer work. The 104th Infantry Division was an infantry division of the United States Army. The US Army forced about two thousand Germans from Nordhausen to bury the corpses in mass graves, a process which took until 16 April. African American Soldiers during World War II, Documenting Numbers of Victims of the Holocaust and Nazi Persecution, Holocaust Survivors and Victims Resource Center. I heard A million or more Armenian lives destroyed at the whim of [14], Boelcke-Kaserne housed the largest percentage of Jews in the Mittelbau-Dora complex, except for one labor subcamp for Jewish women. 1945, the 104th Infantry Division, as part of the U.S. VII Corps, was teamed was officially formed by the descendants of the Timberwolves, and is dedicated to continuing the traditions set forth by their fathers and maintaining the legacy of the 104th Infantry Timberwolf Division.