16,000 Survivors Thought He Was SS — He Answered Them in Yiddish

May 6th, 1945. The war in Europe was, for all practical purposes, technically almost over.

Germany had signed the preliminary surrender documents 2 days earlier. The fighting in most places had stopped, the massive logistics of ending a war were underway, the prisoner exchanges, the surreners of individual units that hadn’t gotten the word yet, the securing of territory that had been in German hands a week ago.

Most of the men in Major Heyman Con’s unit were already thinking about going home, about what the world looked like on the other side of all this.

Con had something else on his mind. He was serving as operations officer with the Third Cavalry Group, part of Patton’s Third Army, moving through North Central Austria in the final chaotic days of the collapse.

Beautiful country on paper. Alpine lakes, snowcapped mountains, small towns that in peace time looked like postcards for tourists.

His unit had received orders to clear and secure territory around two of those lakes, the Atay and the Trownay.

Routine work at this point. The organized German resistance had largely fallen apart. It was mostly a matter of collecting surrendered soldiers, establishing rudimentary order in towns that had been under German control last week, and keeping the men from doing things that would cause problems later.

Shortly afternoon on May 6th, Captain William Hal radioed in from a small town called Aensay at the southern end of the Tron.

His forward elements had found something. The report that came back to group headquarters several hours later was written in the flat operational language of military communication because there was simply no other way to write it and still transmit it quickly.

16,000 political prisoners badly in need of food and medical care. What shall we do about them?

Con drove down to Aensay that afternoon. To understand what he was driving into, it helps to know what the spring of 1945 looked like from the inside of a war that was collapsing on schedule, but had not yet finished its business.

The previous month, American forces had liberated Bukinvald, Dau, and Bergen Bellson. The photographs from those camps had already circulated through military channels and through the press back home.

Eisenhower had visited Ordruff in early April and sent cables back to Washington describing what he had seen in language that coming from a Supreme Allied commander amounted to an instruction.

Document everything. Bring witnesses. Make sure no one can ever say this didn’t happen. The mood among the men pushing through Germany and Austria in those final weeks was not clean triumph.

It was something more complicated. The enemy had lost. The camps were being found. And what was being found in the camps was changing permanently what the men who found them understood about what they had been fighting and about what human beings are capable of organizing against each other.

Before we get to what he found there, you need to understand what Ebony was.

Not the official definition, what it actually was. The camp had been built in November 1943, carved into the mountains above a lake in the Austrian Alps.

The SS established it as a subcamp of Mountousausen, and its purpose was to hollow out the mountains.

Underground tunnels, dozens of them, bored through the limestone by hand. The Nazis wanted weapons production facilities buried so deep that Allied bombs couldn’t reach them.

The labor to do it was not a concern because the men providing that labor were not considered people in any operative sense of the word.

Prisoners arrived from across occupied Europe. Poles, Russians, Hungarians, Italians, French, Yugoslavians, checks. About a third were registered as Jewish.

They worked shifts of 10 hours, then 12, then 14. The daily food allocation was half a liter of airsat coffee in the morning, 3/4 of a liter of watery soup at noon with potato peels floating in it, and 150 gram of bread in the evening.

That was everything every day for months. For some men, for the better part of 2 years, the barracks were wooden structures designed to hold 100 people.

At peak capacity, they held 750. Prisoners slept in shifts because there was not enough floor space for all of them to lie down at once.

There were no beds in most blocks. Some men slept on bloodcovered straw. Lice were constant.

The mortality rate climbed steadily through 1944 as the men’s physical condition deteriorated past any point of recovery.

The commonants who cycled through were not men who felt constrained by procedure or by any concept of limit.

Gorge Bachmire, one of the early ones, had a dog he kept trained specifically to attack prisoners.

He would tie a man’s arms behind his back and suspend him from a tree, then release the dog.

This was not an occasional thing. It was something he did regularly as a way of spending time.

Another commonant opened the guard role to competitive incentive, extra cigarettes, and leave time for the guard who accumulated the most prisoner deaths in a given period.

Guards who ended a shift without enough death to their credit would knock a prisoner’s cap into the forbidden zone near the wire and shoot the man who went to retrieve it.

This was not exceptional cruelty by the standards of how the camp operated. It was the operating logic of the place, the system that kept the tunnels getting dug on schedule and the prisoner population just barely alive enough to dig them.

By the spring of 1945, the German war effort had collapsed badly enough that thousands of prisoners from other camps were arriving at Ebony by train and forced march because Ebony was still nominally under SS control and still nominally functioning.

The camp’s population tripled in a matter of months. There was nowhere near enough food for the people already there, let alone the new arrivals.

The crematorium stopped keeping pace with the deaths. In April 1945 alone, 350 people died per day inside this camp.

Bodies were stacked outside the barracks. A trench had been dug into the earth outside the perimeter, and the dead were thrown into quicklime.

On one day in April, 80 bodies were removed from a single barracks block. Among them, feet were still twitching.

On May 4th, 1945, two days before the Americans arrived, the camp commandant called an assembly.

He announced to the gathered prisoners that they had been sold to the Americans. He told them to go into the tunnels for their own safety and protection.

The prisoners gathered, listened, and then did something that is remarkable in context. They voted.

They held a vote and they voted not to go. This detail tends to get lost in the broader historical record, and it shouldn’t.

The entire population of a concentration camp, people who had survived 18 months of conditions designed to destroy the capacity for organized resistance, looked at the man who had overseen their starvation, and collectively said, “No, they did not go.”

That night, some of the tunnels exploded, rigged with mines. If the prisoners had been inside them, this story ends in a mass grave and Con would have found something different when he arrived 2 days later.

On May 5th, the SS guards fled. The prisoners, many of them barely able to stand, killed 52 of the camp functionaries who had enforced the internal hierarchy.

Not the SS themselves who were already gone, the people who had done the administrative work of cruelty from inside.

On May 6th, the first American vehicles arrived. Captain Hul’s troop reached the town at noon.

Robert Persinger, one of the soldiers in that first platoon, recalled afterward that the prisoners appeared to be starving and barely clothed.

He could not find words for what he saw that didn’t fail in some way to capture it.

The men who had built those tunnels, who had survived the commonants and the dogs and the rations that were barely enough to keep a person standing, were now standing, many of them, in the open air of a camp that no longer had guards.

The SS had left 2 days earlier. The prisoners had spent those two days in a condition that is difficult to describe as freedom, because freedom implies capacity, and many of these people could barely move.

They had killed the functionaries who remained. They had waited. Now the Americans were there and the first thing many of them did when they saw the soldiers was to pull back because soldiers were what had been done to them.

None of those American soldiers had seen anything like it. The report went up the chain in the flat language of military communication.

16,000 political prisoners badly in need of food and medical care. What shall we do about them?

Con arrived that afternoon. He had been through a great deal by then. North Africa, France, Belgium, the grinding advance through Germany in those final months when the outcome was already decided, but the dying continued anyway.

Three and a half years of war that had by its end stopped shocking the men who had been in it long enough.

He had seen what armies do to each other and what they do to the landscapes and towns they move through.

He had read the intelligence reports about the camps. He had seen photographs. He thought he understood in broad terms what he was about to walk into.

He did not. The smell reached him before anything else. The compound odor of unwashed bodies, of disease carried for months, of human waste, and underneath all of it something he could not name.

Something his daughter would describe decades later as the stench of the sick and the smell of the dead.

The dead who were still lying in the open areas of the camp because the people who remained alive were not physically capable of moving them and the Americans had been there for hours, not long enough yet to have dealt with all of it.

About a hundred survivors were standing in the open when he walked in. Standing is the word that gets used, and it is the charitable version.

Most of them were propped against whatever surface would hold their weight. They wore the thin striped cloth of prison uniforms, cloth never designed for an Austrian mountain winter, or in some cases they wore nothing at all.

Their bodies showed 18 months of deliberate starvation in a way that Conn, by his daughter’s account, never fully stopped seeing for the rest of his life.

Some were clearly still in the process of dying. Some had already died and were still there.

Con was in full combat gear, helmet, military uniform, a45 caliber pistol, and a shoulder holster.

The standard equipment of an American cavalry officer in the final weeks of a war.

When the survivors saw him, they pulled back. They thought he was SS. Think about what that means.

These were people who had refused to enter the tunnels two days earlier when the commandant ordered them in who had voted to take their chances rather than trust one more instruction from a unformed man who had survived everything this camp could systematically do to a human body over 18 months.

And when a man in military uniform walked toward them holding a weapon, the only available category for that experience was the one they had been living inside since 1943.

They pulled back. Conn understood immediately what was happening. He spoke Yiddish. His parents had fled the anti-Jewish violence that swept through the Russian Empire in the early years of the 20th century.

They got out in 1906 and settled in Georgia where Hyman was born 10 years later.

He grew up with Yiddish the way you grow up with a particular quality of light in a house.

Not something you consciously carry, just something that is there. He had not imagined it would be useful in a concentration camp in the Austrian Alps in 1945.

Language is not a neutral thing. Calling out to someone in the language of their childhood, in the language their grandmother used, in a language that the SS did not speak and had no use for is a specific act.

It says, “I know what you are in a way that the people who have been doing this to you do not.”

It says, “There is a world outside this fence that still contains people who share something with you.”

It says, “The thing they have been trying to make you forget about yourself still exists.”

Con did not plan this. He responded to what he saw in front of him with the tools he had.

He called out to them in Yiddish. He told them he was not SS. He was an American major.

And then because the moment required something beyond that, he added, “And I’m you. I’m Jewish.”

His daughter Gail documented what happened next when she told this story at Fort Benning decades later.

They wept. They kissed his feet. They tore at his clothes. They tried to lift him.

Some instinct of gratitude so overwhelming that it overrode the physical reality of their own condition.

But they were too weak. Their bodies could not do what they were trying to do.

They had survived the camp and they could not lift one person. If you want to keep hearing stories like this one, stories that don’t make it into the standard textbooks and don’t appear in the mainstream historical narrative, go ahead and subscribe before we keep going.

There’s a part of this story that most people who know Ebony at all don’t know about.

Con spent several days in Ebony after that afternoon, long enough to understand in concrete terms what had happened in that place over the preceding 18 months.

He walked through the barracks. He saw the crematorium. He talked to survivors through his Yiddish when he could and through interpreters when he couldn’t, and he built up a picture of the camp’s history that he carried with him for the rest of his life.

The US Army Signal Corps photographers who arrived in those first days took images that became some of the most widely circulated visual documents of the Holocaust.

Eisenhower had given explicit orders that documentation was essential. He understood even then that people would deny what had happened.

He wanted evidence in a form that denial could not reach. The photographs showed emaciated men sucking on sugar cubes given to them by American soldiers because their digestive systems could no longer process solid food.

Men sitting in sunlight outside buildings that had been designed to kill them through attrition.

Images that do not become easier to look at with time. The practical work of those days was considerable.

How do you feed 16,000 people who are starving without killing them in the process of feeding them?

The human digestive system after prolonged starvation of this kind cannot process a normal meal.

Several survivors died in the days after liberation from eating too much too fast. The army brought in medical teams and field hospitals and food that could be absorbed slowly.

Supply lines had to be built from scratch. Con was part of all of that.

The coordination, the communication up the chain, the practical day-to-day work of caring for people who had been deliberately brought to the edge of death over 18 months and were now on the other side of it trying to come back.

He was doing that work while also living with what he had seen in that first afternoon in the yard.

What he had felt when those people pulled back from him. What it meant that they had been so thoroughly conditioned by what the camp had done to them over 18 months that a man in a military uniform walking toward them could only mean one thing.

There is a particular cruelty in that, separate from the starvation and the labor and the deaths.

That the camp had trained its prisoners to fear the sight of a uniform so completely that even liberation when it arrived arrived looking like a threat.

That the first response to rescue was to recoil. Con understood it immediately and responded to it in the only way that made sense.

At some point during those days, a prisoner approached him and made a request. We don’t know which day it was.

We don’t know where in the camp they were standing, what the light looked like, what language they used, or how the conversation found its way to this particular ask.

The man’s name was not recorded in any account that survives. What was recorded is the request itself that when Conn returned to the United States, he would tell people what he had seen.

He wanted someone to carry the testimony back across the ocean. He thought it mattered whether people knew what had happened in this place.

That particular thought in that particular physical condition is worth noting carefully. Everything the camp had done to those prisoners over 18 months, the systematic starvation and the forced labor and the deaths accumulating around them every single day had not taken that from him.

He was standing in a campyard in May 1945, thin enough that he could not lift a person he wanted to honor.

And he was still thinking about the future and about whether testimony had any power at all.

Still thinking that someone going home and speaking was worth asking for. There is a version of this story where that impulse seems ordinary.

People want to be remembered. People want what happened to them to be known. But what makes the request striking is the context in which it was made.

These were people who had spent 18 months in conditions designed to strip away everything that didn’t contribute to physical survival.

The camp’s logic was economic in the most brutal sense. Keep the body functioning enough to dig.

The interior life, the future, the idea that events have meaning beyond their immediate physical consequence.

These were not things the camp was organized to preserve. And yet there was this man still standing, still thinking about what someone else needed to know, asking a stranger who had just told him in Yiddish that he was one of them to carry the story back.

Con promised he would. He was born in Georgia in 1916, the son of immigrants who had made it out of Russia while they still could before the violence that was already underway could catch them.

His parents had fled in 1906. Part of the massive wave of Jewish families who left the Russian Empire in the early years of the century after the pgrams that killed thousands and destroyed entire communities across the pale of settlement.

They settled in the American South which had its own structures of discrimination and its own hierarchies of belonging and Jewish families navigated those structures alongside everything else.

Georgia was a state that had not 25 years before Conn was born lynched a Jewish factory manager named Leo Frank on the basis of evidence that historians have since largely concluded was fabricated.

It was the state where Conn chose to practice law after graduation and where he later chose to spend 46 years on the bench.

He graduated from the University of Georgia Law School in 1938, was admitted to the bar the same year, and at 22 years old was a practicing attorney in the American South.

2 years later, the army. He volunteered in 1940, a year before Pearl Harbor pulled the country into a war it had been watching from a careful distance, and he trained as a cavalry officer.

By the time the war was actually being fought, cavalry meant armored reconnaissance. Light, fast units that moved ahead of the main force, found out what was ahead and reported back without getting killed doing it.

The job required a particular combination of nerve and judgment, the ability to read a situation quickly and make decisions with incomplete information and with the knowledge that whatever you found out there, you had found it yourself without much help close by.

He served in North Africa beginning in 1942, then moved through the Allied campaigns in France and Belgium and the push into Germany.

By the spring of 1945, he was operations officer with the Third Cavalry Group, one of the units of Patton’s Third Army, driving through the final geography of the war.

After his active duty ended in 1946, he went back to Georgia and became a judge.

He also served 30 years in the Army Reserve, retiring eventually as a colonel. He served on the bench for 46 years.

46 years is a long time to sit in a position of authority over questions of law and harm and justice.

From the late 1940s through the 1990s, through the civil rights era and the Vietnam years and the long contested transformation of the American South from what it had been into something different and still imperfect.

All of it flowing through courtrooms where Con sat and listened and weighed and decided.

The people who came before him in those courtrooms did not necessarily know what he had seen in Austria in May 1945.

That is not the kind of thing that comes up in legal proceedings. He was a judge and he did the work of a judge and what he had experienced in aense was his own to carry in whatever way he carried it.

But the carrying was there. His daughter said it was visible in the things he chose to talk about when the subject came up in the specific words he used about what obligation means and what justice requires of a person with the capacity to act on it.

Not in an abstract or philosophical way, in a very specific way rooted in a very specific experience of what happens when no one does.

His daughter said the smell of Ebene never fully left him. That the image of those people pulling back from him in that yard, mistaking a Jewish American major from Georgia for one more unformed threat, stayed with him for the rest of his life.

That he talked about the obligation to speak out against injustice, about being steadfast in preserving justice and fighting for the common good.

These things sound like platitudes at formal observances. They sound entirely different when you know where they came from and what he had promised a nameless prisoner in a campyard in Austria in May 1945.

He kept the promise. His daughter kept it after him. The National Infantry Museum at Fort Benning established a Holocaust exhibit in 2012 dedicated to Con’s memory.

The exhibit spotlights the 35 American infantry and armor units that liberated German concentration camps in the spring of 1945.

And it is anchored by the story of what happened at Ebene when a Jewish American cavalry officer walked into a yard and spoke Yiddish.

Gail Conn spoke at the observance and told the story of the yard and the Yiddish and what happened when they understood who he was.

She told it the way her father had told it to her over the years carefully and with the specific details preserved because that is precisely how a promise of this kind gets kept across generations when the person who made it is gone.

There is something in the specific sentence he chose that I keep coming back to.

Not I’m an American, not I’m a soldier, not I’m here to help, and I’m you.

I’m Jewish. The precision of that matters. He was telling them something literally true that cut through every other possible category available in that moment.

He was the son of people who had fled the same violence that had eventually caught up with their families.

He had made it out, or rather his parents had made it out on his behalf before he was born, and he had grown up in Georgia and gone to law school and ended up in a uniform on the liberating side of the war.

The difference between his life and the lives of the people in that yard was not a matter of character or strength or any quality that separates one person from another in a meaningful way.

It was a boat ticket in 1906 and nothing else. And he understood that completely.

The people in that yard had not by and large come from families that lacked the resources or the will to get out.

They had come from families who had tried to get out and could not or who had gotten out to countries that were subsequently occupied or who had believed assurances that turned out to be wrong.

The history of the Holocaust is full of families who almost made it, who had the connections or the papers or the money and still did not because the window closed or someone with authority said no or the border closed at the wrong moment.

Con’s parents had made it through that window in 1906 when the window was still open.

And I’m you. The sentence is too specific to have been accidental. It was the most accurate thing he could have said in that yard and also the most humane because it acknowledged something true about the relationship between his life and theirs that most people standing in his position in that moment would not have had the presence of mind to say.

The man who asked him to carry the testimony back is not named in any source that survives.

We know only that he was standing in a campyard in Austria in May 1945, thin enough that he could not lift a person he wanted to honor and that he still had the presence of mind to think about what came next.

To think about testimony, to think that it mattered whether someone went home and told people what had happened in this place.

Everything the camp had done to those people over 18 months had not taken that from him.

Con did tell it. He told it when asked in the careful way of a man who understood that the telling was a responsibility and not just a memory.

His daughter told it after him, and it sits here now, nearly 80 years later, as a record of what happened in a camp in the Austrian Alps in the final week of the Second World War, when a Jewish American cavalry officer from Georgia walked into a yard and said something true in a language that connected him to the people he was looking at across every other possible difference between their lives and his.

What do you think was going through his mind in that exact moment standing in that yard in Austria in May 1945 when he called out to them in Yiddish and said those words?

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