Battle-hardened men of the 104th wept too. The emotional impact was heavy on all who were witness to these incidents but considerably more so on this writer. As an American of Armenian ancestry I had been brought up, as have virtually all first and second generation Americans of similar background, on the eye witnessed horror stories of an even more sanguine genocide in Turkey three decades earlier. Massacre was the word here, knives and bullets for the males, desert death marches, hunger and rape for the women and children. A million or more Armenian lives destroyed at the whim of those who ruled the old Turkish Otterman Empire.
Time dulls the impact of events.
There are those who now maintain Hitler's holocaust never occurred. Sobered and drained each of us eventually left the area, in the words of a poet a sadder but wiser man . Additional Nordhausen accounts can be found in our War Stories .