Embedded Files
To say that Marguerite Higgins was tough and resourceful would be an understatement. Right after Germany surrendered in April 1945, Higgins, who had been covering the war for the Herald Tribune, commandeered a jeep with a Stars and Stripes reporter and drove through the frontlines into Nazi-occupied territory. There the two journalists, who had governmental permission to roam freely in areas of armed conflict, came across the concentration camp Dachau. With rifles trained on them from a guard tower, Higgins realized they couldn’t flee. She steeled herself and demanded in German, “Kommen sie hier, bitte. Wir sind Amerikaner.” (Come here, please, we are American). And 22 guards surrendered with their hands up.
They entered the camp and she and her Stars and Stripes colleague informed the prisoners in English, German, and French that they were now free. Several hours later, an American military commander arrived and attempted to bar her from the camp, warning her about disease.
“Goddamit to hell,” she said. “I’ve had my typhus shots! Lay off me, I’m doing my job!”
Below is the story she published:
The Liberation of Dachau
By Marguerite Higgins
Herald Tribune
May 1, 1945
Troops of the United States 7th Army liberated 33,000 prisoners this afternoon at this first and largest of the Nazi concentration camps. Some of the prisoners had endured for eleven years the horrors of notorious Dachau.
The liberation was a frenzied scene: Inmates of the camp hugged and embraced the American troops, kissed the ground before them and carried them shoulder high around the place.
The Dachau camp, in which at least a thousand prisoners were killed last night before the SS (Elite Guard) men in charge fled, is a grimmer and larger edition of the similarly notorious Buchenwald camp near Weimar.
This correspondent and Peter Furst, of the Army newspaper, Stars and Stripes, were the first two Americans to enter the enclosure at Dachau, where persons possessing some of the best brains in Europe were held during what might have been the most fruitful years of their lives.
While a United States 45th Infantry Division patrol was still fighting a way down through S.S. barracks to the north, our jeep and two others from the 42d Infantry drove into the camp enclosure through the southern entrance. As men of the patrol with us busied themselves accepting an S.S. man’s surrender, we impressed a soldier into service and drove with him to the prisoners’ barracks. There he opened the gate after pushing the body of a prisoner shot last night while attempting to get out to meet the Americans.
There was not a soul in the yard when the gate was opened. As we learned later, the prisoners themselves had taken over control of their enclosure the night before, refusing to obey any further orders from the German guards, who had retreated to the outside. The prisoners maintained strict discipline among themselves, remaining close to their barracks so as not to give the S.S. men an excuse for mass murder.
But the minute the two of us entered, a jangled barrage of “Are you Americans?” in about 16 languages came from the barracks 200 yards from the gate. An affirmative nod caused pandemonium.
Tattered, emaciated men weeping, yelling and shouting “Long live America!” swept toward the gate in a mob. Those who could not walk limped or crawled. In the confusion, they were so hysterically happy that they took the S.S. man for an American. During a wild five minutes, he was patted on the back, paraded on shoulders and embraced enthusiastically by the prisoners. The arrival of the American soldier soon straightened out the situation.
I happened to be the first through the gate, and the first person to rush up to me turned out to be a Polish Catholic Hlond, Primate of Poland, who was not a little startled to discover that the helmeted, uniformed, begoggled individual he had so heartily embraced was not a man.
In the excitement, which was not the least dampened by the German artillery and the sounds of battle in the northern part of the camp, some of the prisoners died trying to pass through electrically charged barbed wire. Some who got out after the wires were decharged joined in the battle, when some ill-advised S.S. men holding out in a tower fired upon them.
The prisoners charged the tower and threw all six S.S. men out the window. After an hour and a half of cheering, the crowd, which would virtually mob each soldier that dared to venture into the excited, milling group, was calmed down enough to make possible a tour of the camp. The only American prisoner, a flyer, with the rank of major, took some of the soldiers through.
According to the prisoners, the most famous individuals who had been at the camp had been removed by S.S. men to Innsbrueck. Among them were Leon Blum, former French Premier, and his wife; the Rev. Martin Niemoeller, German church leader; Kurt Schuschnigg, Chancellor of Austria at the time of the anschluss (he was said to have been alive a few days ago); Gabriel Piquet, Bishop of St. Etienne; Prince Leopold of Russia; Baron Fritz Cirini, aide to Prince Leopold; Richard Schmitz, former Mayor of Vienna; and Marshal Stalin’s son, Jacob.
The barracks at Dachau, like those at Buchenwald, had the stench of death and sickness. But at Dachau there were six barracks like the infamous No. 61 at Buchenwald, where the starving and dying lay virtually on top of each other in quarters where 1,200 men occupied a space intended for 200. The dead—300 died of sickness yesterday—lay on concrete walks outside the quarters and others were carried out as the reporters went through.
The mark of starvation was on all the emaciated corpses. Many of the living were so frail it seemed impossible they could still be holding on to life.
The crematorium and torture chambers lay outside the prisoner inclosures. Situated in a wood close by, a new building had been built by prisoners under Nazi guards. Inside, in the two rooms used as torture chambers, an estimated 1,200 bodies were piled.
In the crematorium itself were hooks on which the S.S. men hung their victims when they wished to flog them or to use any of the other torture instruments. Symbolic of the S.S. was a mural the S.S. men themselves had painted on the wall. It showed a headless man in uniform with the S.S. insigne on the collar. The man was astride a huge inflated pig, into which he was digging his spurs.
The prisoners also showed reporters the grounds where men knelt and were shot in the back of the neck. On this very spot a week ago a French general, a resistance leader under General Charles de Gaulle, had been killed.
Just beyond the crematorium was a ditch containing some 2,000 bodies, which had been hastily tossed there in the last few days by the S.S. men, who were so busy preparing their escape they did not have time to burn the bodies.
Below the camp were cattle cars in which prisoners from Buchenwald had been transported to Dachau. Hundreds of dead were still in the cars due to the fact that prisoners in the camp had rejected S.S. orders to remove them. It was mainly the men from these cattle cars that the S.S. leaders had shot before making their escape. Among those who had been left for dead in the cattle cars was one man still alive who managed to lift himself from the heap of corpses on which he lay.
Marguerite Higgins Quotes
Marguerite Higgins Quotes
“I wouldn't be here if there were no trouble. Trouble is news, and gathering news is my job.”“I have known since childhood that if there was to be a war I wanted to know for myself what force cuts so deep into the hearts of men.”
Higgins was the Herald Tribune’s Tokyo bureau chief when the Korean War war broke out in 1950. On the plane over Frank Gibney of Time magazine tried to talk her out of going, telling her Korea was “no place for a woman” while another male colleague retorted, “But it’s all right for Maggie Higgins.”
There was no way Higgins was going to let anyone stop her. Getting to Korea was more than a story. As she wrote in her book, War in Korea: The Report of a Woman Combat Correspondent, “It was a personal crusade.”
I felt that my position as a correspondent was at stake. Here I represented one of the world's most noted newspapers as its correspondent in that area. I could not let the fact that I was a woman jeopardize my newspaper’s coverage of the war. Failure to reach the front would undermine all my arguments that I was entitled to the same assignment breaks as any man. It would prove that a woman as a correspondent was a handicap to the New York Herald Tribune.When she arrived the Army didn’t welcome her with open arms. Military brass warned there were few lavatory facilities for women in the field. She replied she would be happy to use either side of the road. Higgins carried a sleeping bag and typewriter wherever she went, and refused to be coddled. During the battle for Taejon, Lieutenant General Walton W Walker, Eighth Army Commander, ordered her out of the country, saying, “This is just not the type of war where women ought to be running around the front lines.”
Higgins walked straight into General MacArthur’s office to argue her case and he reinstated her. Back in the game, she covered the bloody invasion of Inchon in September 1950 by sneaking her way on a boat of Marines, grenades and bullets flying. The photographer accompanying her turned back.
Not Higgins, who wrote:
Heavily laden U.S. Marines, in one of the most technically difficult amphibious landings in history, stormed at sunset today over a ten-foot sea wall in the heart of the port of Inchon and within an hour had taken three commanding hills in the city.I was in the fifth wave that hit Red Beach, which in reality was a rough, vertical pile of stones over which the first assault troops had to scramble with the aid of improvised landing ladders topped with steel hooks.Despite a deadly and steady pounding from naval guns and airplanes, enough North Koreans remained alive close to the beach to harass us with small-arms and mortar fire. They even hurled hand grenades down at us as we crouched in trenches, which unfortunately ran behind the sea wall in the inland side.For her coverage of the Korean war, she shared a Pulitzer Prize with five other reporters. Later, she established the Tribune's Moscow bureau. In 1963, she joined Newsday and covered the Vietnam War, visiting “hundreds of villages” and interviewing most of the major figures of her time.
While on assignment in late 1965, she contracted a tropical disease (leishmaniasis) that led to her death on January 3, 1966. She was 45.
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