The Liberators of Mauthausen

“That’s my father! That’s my father right there!” shouted Ann Cohen, the woman at my side. It was September, 2024, as we met for the first time at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. At an exhibit called, “The Liberators,” she spotted her father, Major Eugene Cohen in a video that showed the grim conditions awaiting those who were first to enter concentration camps after the Nazis fled.

Eighty years ago, Major Eugene Cohen was among the American soldiers who liberated concentration camps. Benjamin Ferencz, the last living Nuremberg prosecutor, who died in 2023, and Jack Nowitz, my grandmother’s first cousin, served alongside him. As men whose families were not far removed from Europe themselves, they were liberators, interpreters, investigators and prosecutors of Nazi war crimes. 

These three American Jewish men served together in the U.S. Army, taking testimony at the Mauthausen concentration camp, which was liberated on May 5, 1945. They lived with these experiences for the rest of their lives, and they shared them in three very different ways. Jack Nowitz wrote a novel that included the fictionalized account of a Nazi war crimes investigator. Ben Ferencz wrote books on international law and worked toward establishing international criminal tribunals. Eugene Cohen kept his story to himself until very late in life when, with the urgency of the elderly, he began giving interviews to Jewish periodicals and donating his archives to museums. 

The War Work of Jack, Ben & Eugene

Jack Nowitz was born in Newark, New Jersey, and lived most of his life in Connecticut, graduating from Yale College and Yale Law School. Then, in 1944, when he was 33, he enlisted in the U.S. Army. Initially, he served as a combat engineer, but in 1945, he was transferred to the Judge Advocate General’s War Crimes Branch because of his legal background.

Benjamin Ferencz, like Nowitz, had legal training. Ferencz graduated from Harvard Law in 1943 and entered the army as an infantryman, participating in the Normandy invasion. When the Army discovered that he had worked as a research assistant to war crimes expert Sheldon Glueck, they transferred him to the War Crimes Branch as well. 

Ferencz and Nowitz both served as translators and investigators under Cohen, a native of Pittsburgh and a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, who was the head of the War Crimes Commission of the 3rd U.S. Army, charged with investigating the Mauthausen Concentration Camp Complex. Several of the reports that Ferencz and Nowitz worked on were part of what came to be known as the “Cohen Report.”

 

The Cohen Report is a staggering document, the result of investigations led by Cohen, with the aid of many interrogators and translators, and covering the period in 1945 from May 6 to June 15. The report contains 253 pages of detailed testimony from more than one hundred witnesses, many of whom were survivors of the liberated camps. These testimonials were buttressed by detailed evidence, including the exact amount of dental gold extracted from the prisoners (24,499.1 grams, which was sent to Berlin) and a photograph of Zyklon-B, the poisonous gas used in the gas chambers. 

The war crimes team began by investigating crimes against American soldiers, such as downed U.S. pilots who were murdered or held in captivity. Ferencz and Nowitz were enlisted men, but their legal and linguistic fluency earned them leadership roles within the war crimes investigative units. The two men, whose parents had emigrated from Eastern Europe (Ferencz arrived with his parents from Transylvania, Nowitz’s parents were from Rzhyshchiv, a city near Kiev), became partners and friends. Ferencz described how: “I would get a jeep and Jack Nowitz would get a jeep. I’d say, you cover these cases there and I’ll cover these cases here and we [would] meet in three days, come back and report what we’ve got.”

As the historian Nicholas Warmuth writes, when Ferencz first entered the Flossenbürg concentration camp on April 27,1945, “all the stories, photos, and prior intelligence briefings about what actually occurred at these places were immediately laid bare in the most explicit manner; sick and emaciated prisoners filled the hospital ward, the stench of feces and death was inescapable, and piles of bodies were left heaped one upon the other in the crematorium.”     

Ferencz elaborated in 2000 during an interview at the U.S. Holocaust Museum on the experience of coming across victims of the concentration camps: 

…we received reports that we were coming upon strange looking people, wandering on the roads, they were dressed in pajamas, they looked—they were starving, they were completely bedraggled—we didn’t know the words “concentration camp,” at that time. We would come upon a camp and that was an out-camp for one of the concentration camps. Buchenwald, for example, was one of the first camps.

I would get a report at headquarters that this had been seen. I would rush out to the scene, because I knew that what was important was to immediately safeguard the evidence of the crime. You can do that by getting the victims to give testimony while they are able to, catching the criminals if you can, or securing the other evidence which may be available. I came, for example, in an actual case, into the Buchenwald Concentration Camp.

The first thing I did, I rushed to the Schreibstube, the office where the records were kept, and seized all the records. I would tell the colonel in charge of that particular military operation, a divisional commander…I must have immediately 10 soldiers to surround that office. Nobody goes in and nobody goes out without my permission, no document is to be removed.

I would go in and check the documents with the help of the inmates who were running that, and take into possession the important things, such as, the Totenregister, the death registries of all the people who had been killed in that camp, the names of the guards who had been in that camp, the names of camp commanders. With that information, I could again go back to headquarters, type up a report, and say, send out arrest orders to apprehend the following as criminals.

Ferencz, Nowitz, and other investigators simultaneously were confronting the horrors of the camps and gathering evidence of the war crimes that produced those horrors. A 1945 article from the Bridgeport Sunday Post titled, “Local Lawyer Helps Bring War Criminals to Justice” described the roles that Nowitz played as both a translator and investigator: 

Accused war criminals and witnesses for or against them…must be interrogated and cross-examined in the language which they speak so that the full facts may be brought out clearly…Sgt. Nowitz’ specific job is to question accused war criminals and witnesses in their own language, administer the oath to them, prepare their depositions of testimony for use in trials, deploy the photographer to obtain visual evidence, and recommend arrests, (and) if necessary, immediate trial.

Nowitz used these skills in his work under the direction of Major Cohen. One example of their collaboration was the investigation of Mauthausen that occurred during the liberation of the camps. Two inmates and survivors, Ernst Martin and Josef Ulbrecht, served as prison secretaries and secretly kept track of the true, as opposed to the official, causes of death listed in the Mauthausen registers. Nowitz translated their testimony (given in German), which appears in the Cohen Report. Without the Nazis knowing, and at great risk to themselves, Martin and Ulbrecht used “secret, tiny hieroglyphics” to maintain a hidden ledger. Upon liberation, they turned over this crucial evidence to the American soldiers. 

Nowitz and Ferencz translated the testimonies of many survivors, creating a historical record of the Nazis’ atrocities. One testimony translated by Nowitz from Yiddish that appears in the Cohen Report was that of a Polish Jew by the name of Dawid Zimet. In testimony dated May 11, 1945, Zimet told of the events that had happened to him and the other Jews in the camp over the past nine months since he had arrived from Poland and during the previous two weeks, as the camp was liberated. The translation states that “When the Americans were approaching, the S.S. destroyed all the things and broke all the evidence everywhere, including the gas chamber, gallows, etc.”

Zimet stated that the personnel of the crematorium were all shot by their German captors except for himself and a friend, who concealed themselves. 

The work of Cohen and his team of investigators had an impactful and lengthy legacy. The Cohen Report was used as evidence in the Nuremberg war crimes trials as well as in the Mauthausen trial that occurred in Dachau in 1946. A 1947 article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette described how “the Pittsburgher’s [Cohen’s] evidence helped to hang Nazis,” as 48 Nazis “swung from the gallows at Landsberg prison.” In 2009, the Cohen Report was cited in a Spanish court to support the testimony of Mauthausen survivors and relatives of victims in a case that sought to have the United States extradite “four alleged former camp guards on charges of genocide.”

 

The Stories They Passed Along

The role that Cohen played in investigating and writing the report that bears his name was not something he discussed for most of his life. Ann Cohen tells me that her father “disliked those who bragged about what they did when they were just doing their jobs.” 

It was not until Cohen’s later years that he opened up to his own family, and then to others, about the war. Ann recalls traveling in Israel in 1991: “I visited Yad Vashem, and, in an exhibit on the liberation of the concentration camps, I saw a picture of my father.” Ann Cohen had had no idea then of his role in the liberation of camps or the prosecution of Nazis. She came home and asked her father about it. “He started telling me, and all the pieces came together,” she says. “I remembered on a summer vacation seeing him crying. I’d never seen him cry, and my mother said he was remembering the war.”

Despite the impact of his war investigations on the successful prosecution of Nazis, Eugene Cohen did not feel heroic. One reason, Ann says, was that he was not given any resources or information on how to care for the survivors of the camps—no food, medical support or psychological support. In a letter to his mother, Cohen wrote: “The problem is so tremendous that we haven’t begun to tackle it, nor frankly are we prepared to tackle it.” Their task was to investigate crimes, but they had to do so surrounded by unfathomable suffering, which they were not equipped to alleviate. 

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Benjamin Ferencz also described the process of coping. “I went about my business the best I could,” he said in a 1994 interview at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, “putting myself into a mental cocoon which was surrounded by an ice barrier that enabled me to go on.”

This ability to steel himself may have enabled Ferencz to devote his life to prosecuting international war crimes. Shortly after the war, Ferencz became, at age 27, the youngest Nuremberg prosecutor, leading the Einsatzgruppen case, the most sweeping murder trial in history. As described in his obituary, Ferencz prosecuted “crimes that beggar the imagination—33,771 men, women and children shot or buried alive in the ravine near Kyiv called Babi Yar; the two-day liquidation of 25,000 Latvian Jews from Riga’s ghetto, forced to lie down in pits and shot.” Ultimately, all 22 Nazi defendants prosecuted by Ferencz were convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity. 

After World War II, Ferencz became a prolific author and supporter of international criminal courts. In 1980 he wrote An International Criminal Court: A Step Toward World Peace, a two-volume documentary history intended as a tool for countries to use the legal system to build peace. He told his life story as part of the 2018 documentary film Prosecuting Evil. 

Ferencz’s investigative companion, Jack Nowitz, did not leave the same sort of written record, although he, too, was an avid writer. Indeed, expressing himself creatively during the war seemed to be one way that Nowitz coped. He wrote poems during the war that were published in a Bridgeport Jewish newsletter, The Jeep, sent out to Jewish troops.

“My father spoke very little about the war to me,” says Nowitz’s son, Jon Nowitz. “Thinking back, I don’t think he wanted to involve me in the horrors of war. My father didn’t like to talk about himself. In fact, he never did; he didn’t like to be the center of attention. He did keep in touch with Ben Ferencz, and he loved and enjoyed writing.” 

By the 1970s, Jack Nowitz had become an established real estate lawyer in Connecticut and a leader in the Jewish community, serving as a trustee of Congregation B’nai Israel in Bridgeport.  He published a novel in 1979, The Crimes of War, inspired by his military service. It’s a reimagining of what Nowitz experienced as the war in Europe was ending and expresses how he wrestled with the complex issues of revenge, justice and religion. 

His characters grapple with existential issues that their religion forces them to contemplate: How could God let such horror happen? Does God exist? A dreamed conversation occurs between a survivor of the camps and God. The survivor asks for proof from the Almighty to show others that God exists. God’s response is that if the deity were to make an appearance, it would only cause people to have more doubt, which would give rise to fighting among religions and, inevitably, new wars. “But God created hope as well as despair,” the survivor reflects, “Let us all make our choice.”

Nowhere on the book jacket or author description did Jack Nowitz reveal that he was a veteran or had served as a war crimes investigator in World War II. As with many of his generation, he did not put the focus on himself. Rather, Nowitz focused on the characters he created and how they confronted the “crimes of war.” 

Liberation: People Saved and Unsaved

Eugene Cohen was haunted by the Jews who could not escape. Ann Cohen recalls her father weeping as he told her, “Annie, there were people I couldn’t save—there were people who had just come in from a death march and were in the infirmary, and I couldn’t save them.”

As an elderly man, Cohen was ready to share his story publicly. He was 89 years old and knew he was dying. In an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, he acknowledged that “We’re dying off now; there are only a few who witnessed what took place.” He also spoke of the role Judaism played in how he went about his work. Cohen shared the Jewish connection that he felt with the prisoners, the sense of purpose they felt while documenting the Nazi atrocities: “Being of the Jewish faith, we did the best we could to get as much evidence as we could.” 

Their experience of being both Jews and American soldiers was complex, and the three men experienced it differently. Donald Ferencz, Ben’s son, tells me, “I don’t think my dad being of Jewish background affected him in his work, which was more clinical than based on personal motives.” 

Nowitz addresses this issue in his fiction. Lieutenant Holman, the commanding officer, witnesses his father and uncle (a rabbi) murdered by Nazis, and wrestles with questions of revenge as his own motivation. The character in the novel finds that the motivations of Jewish investigators were continually questioned as they try to bring the Nazis to justice.

When liberators such as Cohen, Ferencz and Nowitz entered the camps, they were greeted by the survivors, Jewish and non-Jewish, who escaped the fates of the millions who were killed. Seeing survivors was coupled with the recognition of all who were lost. When Ann shouted in the museum after seeing her father in the liberation video, it was because it made her realize just what he had been carrying with him his entire life, his anguish at not being able to do more. Scenes of those who were saved, and those who were too late to be saved, never left him. 

The Jews See a Cohen

Eugene Cohen wrote about this emotional experience in an essay, “Crimes against Humanity: Three Months at Mauthausen” for the book Flares of Memory, published in 2001 by the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh. He describes the shock and the visceral experience that stayed with him for all those decades: 

For the first time, we gazed in astonishment at corpses piled high on horse drawn wagons. Inmates crawling on their hands and knees. Emaciated bodies only a few minutes before collapsing and dying…I smelled the dead, I heard their cries—I saw with my own eyes—I felt the despair—every sense was affected—it was inhuman. The Germans had fled, the camp was deserted of any authority, the inmates were left to die—and in their condition there was very little chance of survival.

In a 2005 JTA article, Cohen recalled that when the Jewish people saw that his name was Cohen, those who could “came rushing towards me.” As the liberators assembled the investigation to “prosecute the perpetrators,” a sign was posted letting the people know that “Maj. Eugene Cohen is here to investigate crimes against humanity.” 

Cohen shared the story of how he and Jack Nowitz took depositions from inmates who risked their lives to tell the true story of Nazi atrocities. Nowitz and Cohen discovered the Totenbuch (Book of the Dead) where the Nazis listed all those who died, and also those who were scheduled to die. At one point, Nowitz was taking a deposition from a Polish Jew when the man realized that his own name was on the list of those who were scheduled to die. Cohen wrote in Flares of Memory:     

Nowitz said, “Look at the Totenbuch, look closely. This man is scheduled to die May 13, 1945. Today is May 9. He is alive and will continue to live because Mauthausen has been liberated!” 

The liberated man broke down crying, and hugged Major Cohen, crying on his shoulder. Cohen writes that the surviving man’s “emotions at his reprieve were indescribable. We watched him pray his thanks that he was one of the lucky ones who was spared.” 

As the Nazis fled the Allies at the end of World War II, they sought to destroy evidence of their atrocities. European survivors of the camps prevented this at tremendous risk to their own lives, and they worked together with American soldiers such as Cohen, Ferencz and Nowitz. These soldiers used languages from the old country to translate and preserve this evidence. They then used legal training from the new country to prosecute the Nazis and hold them accountable. In the lives they lived and the stories they told, all three men embody the words that greet visitors to the U.S. Holocaust Museum: “For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.” 

David K. Sherman is professor of social psychology at University of California, Santa Barbara.

Opening image: American soldiers passing through Mauthausen, Austria, May 9, 1945. Photo from National Archives and Records Administration.