Thank all of you so much. You have no idea how much it means to me to
read your comments. I see that some of you also had fathers who were
great heros. It was hard being a kid growing up under a man like
this. I had no idea until I was an adult what horror and terror this
man lived through, fought through and overcame to become a functioning
person in society. Actually, he never really connected with the
system after the war. He did well. He did function and go to work,
but he just was always clamped up to himself. He went to work each
day and supported his family, but he was tainted, he was worried, he
was scarred so deeply that he never recovered from the war.

He knew what can happen. That's what I think the real deal is. He
knew what can happen when the world goes to hell.

He should have never had a family, but things were not that simple.
He was so scarred from that war, the concentration camps, the death,
that he never recovered. I had a birthday party for him on his 70'th
birthday to honor him. All he could think about was the war. All he
talked about to his friends was the war.

After that as he grew older I couldn't ask him questions about the
concentration camps he'd been a soldier and helped liberate. He'd
break down and cry. So, most of what I know are those things he could
talk about until he was about 60 or so. When he's be explaining a
battle to me sometimes I'd ask him about the Jews and the
concentrations camps just to hear more of the details. It just
brought such agony and misery to him for my questions that he couldn't
respond without breaking down.

He told me that he was a seasoned combat soldier when they went into
the concentration camps at the end of the war. He was vivid too. He
told me that it was common place to see arms or legs or even sexual
organs, heads, ears, etc. hanging on branches of trees in combat
after shelling. He was used that. But when they went into Goettengen
near Stuttgart and saw the starved emaciated prisoners, it was like
their first day in combat. It was like they'd never heard a shell
explode. It was "Goofy" he said. No one could believe that the
Germans were torturing and starving people like this. It was a sick
feeling even for a seasoned combat soldier. So they reacted
appropriately. They let the prisoners go. They did all the medical
things they could do and then they went looking for the assholes who
were in charge. My dad admitted to killing the owner of the cheese
factory when he and his men tried to pursuade him to open the doors
and feed the liberated prisoners.

My father said, "I asked the factory owner many times to open the
doors. I had hundreds of mongolian prisoners behind me who were
starving. They hadn't eaten in weeks as far as we could tell. His
wife bitched and screamed at us then spit on us. His daughers were
standing there with him along with the Bergermeister (town mayor). I
told them I would assrest them then blow the door if they didn't move
aside. Instead, the rat-******* pulled a pistol on me and shot at me.
I shot him and his wife. My fellow soldiers shot his daughters and
the mayor. We blew the door and oppened the food supply to the
starving prisoners."

Dochau was the same. My dad said "you won't read it in any history
books but the city of Dachau was open ground. After they saved all
the prisoners they could, or during that effort, a small band of
soldiers went south a couple kilometers to that city and hunted down
that *******s who had run that prison camp. All ranking SS officers
(assholes) who had anything to do with that camp were executed."

"The ally soldiers were really ****ed from what they had seen at the
prison camp so the SS families, their children, even their dogs, cats,
rats, other insects in their homes, etc. suffered the same fate."

"We killed them all."

At that point, the occupational forces were moving in and knew these
ally soldiers were crazed and confused. Men with many hundreds of
days of combat like my dad just went "goofy" he said. The sight of
the crematoriums and the "God Damn Germans" shoveling living human
beings into the furnaces just ****ed them off. The soldiers could not
control their emotions...even after years of combat.

Dad said it was like his first day in combat, or the first day he was
ever shelled. It was just "Goofy" he said. It was like we'd never
been in a war at all. It was so horrible, so strange and so bizarre.

[My dad couldn't swallow a pill. It was an emotional thing from
childhood. Later, when I knew him as an adult, he could. But when he
was a kid, he couldn't swallow a pill.]

After they shot and killed all the SS-assholes they could find in
Dachau, the occupational forces knew they had a problem. I mean,
soldiers just don't go killing people in civilian clothing at random,
or even wiping out an entire city (you history buffs check this one
out). The medical folks made dad swallow a pill about the size of an
quarter. He remembers is to this day. He said it was a big white
pill and he couldn't even imagine swallowing such a large round pill
since he was unable to swallow even a tiny pill. So, he broke it up,
cut it up into four (4) pieces. He said the MP's had him at gunpoint
and made him "eat" the four pieces of the pill.

The next thing he remembers is that he was over in France. He was in
a bomb-crater under a canvas tent on a cot. Most of his buddies were
there too and they were all groggy. They had been knocked out and
loaded on a train to get them the hell out of Germany "completely."
He knows it's true because he couldn't swallow the pill.

He asked the officers about Dachau and what had happened and they
wouldn't tell him anything. They just told him the war was about over
and that they had a pile off books that they could read if they
wanted, and that they were in R and R. He never heard another word
about Dachau.

He said they'd been "OUT" for three days. I don't know how factual
that is, but he told me he checked the dates and he'd been unconscious
for three days. He looked at me and said, "How in the hell did I end
up from Dachau into France in a blink of the eye? The CIC was
covering up the murders of the the SS we pulled off in the little city
of Dachau south of the prison camp. They were so scared about us
getting caught and the treaty negotiations that they drugged us and
got us the hell out of there because they knew were were all seasoned
combat soldiers and didn't give a ****. Later I was told to keep my
mouth shut or I'd spend the rest of my life in Leavinworth (sp)."

My dad purposely avoided having a computer and never uncovered his
deep and horrible memories of Dachau or Goettingen.

I heard so much about it when I was a kid I went to Dachau in 1979. I
even felt that I might have been a prisoner there in the 1940's and
been reincarnated. I knew so much about the place, the human
experiments, and the crematoriums, I needed to see it.

My feeling about Dachau was that it was a strange place where I had
never been "In any life" and I had no identity with it at all.

I saw the memorial, the museum all of it. It was like any other
museum other than it was terrible to think that humans had ever done
that to one another in a more civilized society.

Goettingen is a completely different story. I will tell you what dad
said about that in detail in some book I write or so.

It's interesting that I have a neighbor who was raised in Munich and
she was never taught of any of this. The germans errased this history
from the children who grew up after the war. You ask Germans today
who are our age. Many don't even believe such a thing happened.

I mention this because I worked with a Ph.D. chemist for many years
who was born in Goettingen. He told me there was never a prison camp
there. I'd like someone here to verify that there was. My dad told
me hundreds of stories about the liberation of that prison and how he
liberated food for the starving Mongolian prisoners.

Have at it you guys. I'd like to see what you come up with. I'd like
to know what supporting facts there are about that concentration camp
which held Asians, not Jews.

Bill