Peter D. Regis - Memories of WWII

Below is the article reset from the newspaper clipping Peter D. Regis sent me in 1998.

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THE PALM BEACH POST -- Sunday, April 9, 1995

Buchenwald: Memories of Death Remain

by Mary Jane Fine
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer


50 years later WWII

Fifty years ago Tuesday, press officer Peter Regis drove into the Nazi concentration camp hours after its liberation


Fifty years ago, Peter Regis witnessed history. He walked through its horror chambers. He took its picture with his ever-present Speed Graphic.

Regis was a former newspaperman at the time, a veteran newshound who hailed from central Maine, a press officer in Gen. George Patton's 3rd Army. And on the April day when Capt. Regis entered Buchenwald, just hours after its liberation, he kept an observer's distance.

In his arid telling, the account takes on a surreal quality: One man, riding alone in his jeep, drives west from the town of Weimar, two, three, four miles, and happens upon a huge encampment wound round with barbed wire. He drives through the entrance -- Was there an archway? He thinks so -- and parks the jeep. Inside the first building he encounters, men wearing striped pajamas rush to surround him, hugging and kissing him in joyous gratitude.

Regis was the man in the jeep, and the surviving concentration inmates of Buchenwald concentration camp flooded him with words. In Polish. In German. In Dutch. He understood none of them, heard only a babble of voices. He hugged them back, wondering as he did what diseases they might harbor.

***

He is 82 now, a taciturn man with a down-easter's reserve and frugal speech. He keeps his voice flat and emotionless, lets his intelligence sketch his story. At the dinning room table of his Jupiter mobile home, he sits surrounded by photo albums, snapshots, old letters and folding map of Germany.

"Here's Weimar," he says, tapping the center of the map. "Buchenwald is probably 3 and 4 miles from here."

At that point on the map, he has printed in block letters with black ink: "SS Lv 1:30 11 Apr. Buchenwald." The Nazi SS troops left the death camp at 1:30 on the 11th of April, 1945.

Later on that afternoon -- or perhaps the next morning; he can't be sure -- Regis, out on a reconnaissance mission, happened upon the hellish camp.

Until that day, that moment, he hadn't known it existed.

He told himself he had seen worse, and, if such things can be measured, perhaps he had. Just a few days earlier, he had seen the death pit of Ohrdruf, the first concentration camp liberated by the Allies. The pit measured perhaps 100 yards long by 150 feet wide, 25 feet deep. It was filled with bodies, all of them naked. His first sight of what, until then, only had been rumored.

"The effect was enormous," he says in his understated way. "These were ordinary people, just like us, treated with contempt. Treated like debris."

And then came Buchenwald with its emaciated prisoners who walked around bewildered or weeping "because crying was the last comfort they could fall back on."

Regis didn't cry. It would have been a disgrace, he says, for a soldier to weep in front of his comrades. And there was this: "I'd seen so many things," he says, slowly, groping for a way to describe what he felt. "Decapitated soldiers. Body parts distributed all over a battlefield. Everything seemed to be flat. Actually, I didn't know how to react. I just couldn't gather my thoughts."

"What kind of horrible, distorted mind did you have to have to do something like that?" he asks, a half-century later. "I can see where an individual might do crazy things, but a culture, a whole society, was doing it."

He stayed at Buchenwald for three days , during which the horrors mounted. He wandered into a roomful of children lying in bed, small human experiments injected by the Nazis with diseases. He found a room -- "the size of this," he says, gesturing toward his brightly attractive living room -- where the Nazis had hung death masks of dead prisoners on every wall. He saw the crematorium, its ovens still warm, skeletons visible inside.

Wherever he went, he snapped pictures, his camera a shield between him and the terrible sights he saw.

"I never tried to forget what I saw," Regis says. "It didn't fade over time."

Within months, the war ended. His memories endured.

A year later, he married Irene, an English singer he'd met when she was entertaining American soldiers at a club in Heidelberg. The couple stayed in Europe for several years before moving to the United States, where Regis built a career in public relations. They moved around -- to Maine, Boston, New York, Minneapolis -- until his retirement in 1970 and subsequent move to Florida.

Over the years, he and Irene visited Europe often, but he never returned to the places that might have stirred up the past, never took her to see the ground he had trod as a soldier.

But he did share with her the words of a prisoner, a Dutch Jew who had approach him just before he left Buchenwald, handing him a yellow sheet of paper covered with writing in Dutch.

In English, the man explained that it was his account of the final days of hours of Buchenwald. Regis took it, put it away for the day when a translator allowed the Dutchman's words -- stiff and awkward in the poor translation -- to speak to him for the first time.

"The chimneys of the Crematorium smoked all the time now," the man had written. And, at the end of his account, this:

"10 April. The commandant ordered again all the men to come at 10 o'clock at the main-place. By groups of 10,000 they should be evacuate[d]. We receive now plenty of food. The whole kitchen must be empty.

11 April. There are still 22,000 men in the camp. Again the order for all men to leave at 12. The whole morning the American airplanes are cirkling over the camp. At 10 minutes to twelve, the Germans give "Feindalarm" and we are all happy because we know that our friends are near the camp.

At 12:30 all the SS-men were ordered to leave the camp. Now we are all afraid, for we suppose that they will annihilate now the whole camp. But nothing happens. At 13:30 the SS-men leave the camp."

Regis can still re-read those words and summon up the April day when he first glimpsed Buchenwald from his jeep.

He struggles to explain how it is now to think back on that time. The images are strong -- indelible, even without the reinforcement of his snapshots -- but the long-ago feelings elude him.

"What has faded," he says at last, "is my memory of my reaction when I saw those things."

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