My grandfather was a tank commander for the US Army in the European campaign of World War II. He saw intense combat that left him wounded and a recipient of a silver star, and he witnessed the horrors of a concentration camp after it had been liberated by a preceding group of soldiers. My grandfather narrated his memories to tape and my father digitized them for posterity. We still have photos and letters from his time in service. I have always felt a connection of sorts to World War II, as its memory was regularly present in my life via my grandfather even though the distance between my birth and his service is about as distant as my birth to the present day.

Here’s an excerpt of a letter that he sent his mother, recounting the moment that he saved the life of a fellow soldier. The letter was printed in a local newspaper at the time, from which I copied the text.

I was leading in the point vehicle when this 88 appeared. I started at him and was stopped by one in front of me. I started bailing out. A captain on top jumped off the rear. By the time I was in the ditch, three shells had hit my tank. I looked up to see if my men had gotten out and saw one tumbling from the tank. He rolled in the ditch. I noticed that one never came out and the tank was ablaze.

Then I heard a scream for help from inside. Machine gun bullets whittled off the tank and flames shot from the turret. I yelled back “I can’t do a thing.” Another yell came: “Someone’s got to help me.” I turned to the captain and said “Captain, I can’t do a thing” and he said “I know you can’t, Heppy.”

Then I saw a hand wave above the tank and yelled, “Oh my God, give me strength. Stay those shells. Oh my God, my God, help! Give me time, give me courage.”

As I yelled this, I climbed the tank, reached down, pulled out my loader — minus both his legs. He was still conscious. When I saw the condition he was in, I said, “Oh my God, he’ll bleed to death.” My loader said “We’ve got to get down from here.” I called back, “I know it. Oh my God, help, I can’t, he’ll bleed to death (Many afterward said that they heard me cursing, but I told them they may have heard me from praying and I wasn’t ashamed of it either).” I jumped from the tank and lay him in the ditch, thinking, “He’ll bleed to death before we can help. But thank God he won’t burn to death.”

I dashed up to see how the other man was that had tumbled off the tank and rolled into the ditch. I thought that I could at least save him. I found his wounds fairly slight and yelled to the captain if we could get my loader to help. His answer was “Sure can.” He ran his jeep up. Several men loaded him into the jeep and the captain drove like mad to the rear about a mile where our doctor was. There two medical men put tourniquets on while the doctor gave him a unit of blood plasma.

All this was done in 10 minutes from the time the shell hit our tank. The report came back, “He is doing fine. He has never lost consciousness and is talking and looking well.” Oh how I thanked God for His strong arm, His power to stay the bullets from me, and His power to hold the man from bleeding to death before help could be gotten. I also thank Him for the givers of blood plasma that it could be there so quickly after needed…

The loader’s name was John Mordo, who did in fact die later that day in a hospital due to his extensive injuries. It would appear that during the time my grandfather wrote this letter, he had not yet learned of the death of this young man.

My grandfather also wrote to his sister Ruth about arriving at a concentration camp.

Ruth, if you read about concentration camps and such over here. I want you to multiply it by about one hundred of what you read and hear and you may get an idea of a fraction of the cruelties delivered to some people. The best of the camps are worse than you can imagine by looking at the papers.

I had a chance to see one of those camps in our mopping up experience. This camp the people had been condemned to starve to death by slow torture. If they managed to survive several months of starvation rations, they had gasoline pumped into their blood to kill them quicker. Their ration consisted of a drink of coffee and a small bowl of soup (no meat in the soup) a day. Many days they had nothing.

When I came into camp the army had already started to salvage as many lives as possible. In one week only 9,000 had died after the army took over. Over 40,000 remained living; of which thousands. would undoubtedly die before any help could be given. Of the few thousand that lived nearly half would be insane. That is doctor’s estimate. 30,000 were lying about the ground, in barracks, stacked in piles, or strewn all over everything. To get things straight I’ll tell all about it from the beginning of my being there.

We came up to one side of the enclosure and walked around it till we found an opening. We saw ten graves with from 800 in the smallest to 5,000 in the larger ones that the army had already buried. There were several large ones the Germans made that the contents were unknown. Thousands of people were hobbling around or lying around the enclosure. They were as animals living together. When nature called they took care of it there not even taking as much care as a dog or a cat would. Men, women, and children so far gone they talked of nothing but existing and many didn’t even think of that, they just existed without thinking. Many were too feeble to get back on their feet after squatting. I’m talking plain because I don’t know of anyway to explain otherwise. Many died while they still squatted. All had the diarrhea.

I went inside and had myself dusted with lice powder to prevent typhus. We started from that point to look the camp over. The doctors were busy cleaning the people up. Ambulances ran steady day and night taking those too feeble to move away to a hospital. Those still able to walk came in, stripped naked, took a shower, put on their clothes and were deloused. I stood there and watched about two hundred come in. They thought nothing of dropping what clothes they had on in front of us as we stood there. They had lost all personal pride or cared nothing about men watching them. If you would take the average size woman and cut every scrap of flesh off her hips and arms and face and pulled a light skin over the bones you would have a pretty good idea of how they looked. Parts that should stick out, stuck in. Parts that should stick in stuck out. Their busts looked like a toy balloon with all the air out of them.

A young woman who had been an inmate for a couple weeks and was still in pretty good health showed us around. She told us that in the two weeks she had been there she had had three bowls of soup. She took us around. We visited a woman’s barracks. On a floor about the size of our army floors, were from 500–600 women. They were all dying. No one was able yet to get to that building to help except to feed them a little better. Most of them were hysterical and out of their heads. A few dropped their heads in shame as we went through. People lay on top of one another. Some raised their heads and pleaded for help. We were there about three minutes and while we stood there two women died. They were dying at the rate of two to three hundred a day even yet after we were helping all we could. In a building that you might think crowded for forty chickens they had a hundred women. If ever in my life I wanted to help it was then, and I was helpless. I could do nothing. It was up to the doctor and his men. The men were taking the women by the hundreds (those too weak to walk) to a hospital where they stripped them and laid them on a table enclouded in steam and ran warm water over them and washed them. Then they deloused them and left the rest for the nurses and doctors. They were doing a swell job.

We went to the crematorium. Thousands beyond numbers had been burned there. There was a large pile of human ashes there. They (the Germans) would bottle up the ashes and send to the people’s living relatives and charge burial services for them.

We went to the men’s section and there saw that feeble men still able to walk were dragging the dead out to make more room for the living. Often the ones dragging the others out would fall and die while we watched. We didn’t dare give a hand because of too many diseases and we weren’t prepared against them. Men strew the streets.

Many of the buildings the size of what we generally have 33 men in in our army had 1,000 men in it. About six hundred of those were dead. They were lying four deep and the bottom three layers were dead with their hearts eaten out.

We walked around the camp on tip-toes to keep from stepping in fresh deposits of humans. The dried ones were thick enough so it was several inches thick all over the ground but by being careful we wouldn’t need to have any cling to our shoes. The smell was so terrific we could scarcely breathe.

I watched them unload several hundred women that had died. By the time their last breath was taken some one else would have every stitch of clothing off her body in order to keep themselves warm. Women usually weighing from a hundred to a hundred and fifty lbs, were light enough so the people burying them picked them up with one hand and by a flip of the wrist threw them into the middle of the grave. A thousand were already in the grave when I was there.

I would like to tell you more but afraid to talk too plain, afraid you’d think I was awful. I can’t explain it at all. The things I have told have been the bright side of the camp. I could not tell the dark side in a written language, I’m afraid. If you would see it all on a screen you wouldn’t get the feeling I had. One thing, the smell wouldn’t be there.

One woman there said she saw a thousand electrocuted in front of her at a different camp. They made them dig their own graves and then electrocuted them and some of the prisoners would bury them. She saw her whole family killed that way except her baby. She protested too strongly when they went to kill him that way so two men tore the baby in half alive in front of her. Her punishment for resisting them was not to be killed but condemned to death by starvation and torture. They nearly beat her to death and sent her to this camp. For some that is hard [to grasp] but I know it to be true. The woman carries groves cut in her back by a whip one inch deep and better than a foot long. They have found hundreds of bodies torn to bits and examination shows it was done while the person was still alive. Several people told stories of this kind and was able to back them up.

The camp left an impression and a picture in my mind I’ll never forget. I’ve written a lot of stuff but all true. I wish I could see you and talk with you. Some things I could say better than writing. On the other hand maybe a week from now, I will feel better. Now, I’m still sick from all I’ve seen the last two weeks.

Franklin

MilitaryImages.net

The horrors my grandfather witnessed were not fully realized quickly: Hitler rose to power in 1933, but it took five years for the concentration camps to start admitting Jews en masse and another year after that for World War II to begin. Hateful and violent behaviors were fomented within the German population; by the time some of the worst laws were enacted against the minority population, Germans were already deeply radicalized by and favoring of Nazi policy.

The coming of war in 1939 brought with it many radical measures for the control of the population, its opinions, attitudes, and welfare. In fact, according to the ‘special war law’ of 17 August 1938, even a statement that might injure or destroy ‘the will of the German people or an allied people to assert themselves stalwartly against their enemies’ was declared criminal. There were literally hundreds of regulations of various kinds that could only be enforced if the ‘loyal citizen’ would inform. Great attention was to be paid to the home front in this war because of the widespread paranoia among leading Nazis, and especially Hitler, as to the causes of Germany’s defeat in 1918. In some instances, the population went beyond exposing those acts or attitudes formally or even informally forbidden; there were many cases… where the people were well in advance of what the regime actually expected.

The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy 1933–1945 — Robert Gellately

Those who opposed the actions of the government were quickly sent to the earliest concentration camps without due process. Many of those were placed under forced labor in the early years, which proved to be enough of a success that probably over 90% of Germans in some way found the actions of their fascist government favorable. For those approximately 10% in opposition, as the war became less favorable and the treatment of the men, women, and children in concentration camps impossible to deny, thousands of them were beheaded by guillotine to prevent any likelihood they could gather enough support to overthrow the government.

I have wondered at times what I would have done in the mid-1930s should I have lived in Germany. We all might imagine ourselves as the brave citizens who harbored fugitive Jews in our attics or basements, bravely lying to the face of one of the German officers sitting in our dining areas, but that is a luxury of time and distance. Would I be able to stand up against fascism? I assumed these thoughts were idle musings that I’d never have to face.

But this is 2025. Only a quarter of the American population elected Donald Trump (compared to the 37 percent who voted for Hitler), a fascist narcissist desperately seeking to become a dictatorial power in the federal government. Within his first 100 days in office, he and his cabinet has sent minorities to concentration camps; fomented xenophobia and racism; wiped government records from the internet; removed legitimate scientific projects to replace them with bogus pseudoscience that will endanger our children and poison our country; participated in the dismantling of social programs millions depend on; stolen sensitive data to potentially hand it over to foreign countries; and sent the US economy on a path toward at least a recession, if not depression. His Presidency brings chaos and pain.

The Holocaust Museum

Concentration Camps

What distinguishes a concentration camp from a prison (in the modern sense) is that it functions outside of a judicial system. The prisoners are not indicted or convicted of any crime by judicial process.

What would my grandfather think of this country now? He spent years in Europe fighting to free enslaved Jews, but now his nation is sending Venezuelans to concentration camps. He fought against a country that destroyed art and literature, and now his nation is censoring data and wiping out references to disfavored people groups. Trump is pitting the United States against the allied nations my grandfather would’ve served next to on the battlefield.

The United States of America is rushing through the same path Germany took to becoming the villain that nearly everyone in the world views with disdain. Instead of attempting to trample out fascism in this country, Trump and his cabinet are behaving as dictators and putting Nazi sympathizers in charge of dismantling the government.

We still have time to stop this, and I am encouraged to see the in-person and online protests against this awful process the country is undergoing. The world didn’t have the internet during World War II, which might serve to make the biggest difference in how this country handles its intense problems with racism and fascism. We desperately need to stop this now. We are still in the early years of the timeline toward what became Nazi Germany; with continued efforts this country might still retain some shreds of any honor it might have had in the eyes of its allies.

Perhaps those who supported the Nazi regime did so under duress in more circumstances than we may expect. Perhaps those who said nothing or even repeated the hateful rhetoric eventually learned to regret those actions. Those who betrayed their neighbors might have eventually recalled the words of Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, a German man who died in a concentration camp for his protests against the Nazi government. He spoke of his fellow dissidents who died before him, who saw the wrong in the German government and didn’t hesitate to stand up against it.

We will all of us, someday, have to make a pilgrimage to their graves, and stand before them, ashamed.

Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen

What kind of country do we all want? Trump supporters who are reading this and who may have even voted for him in this last election, is this what you wanted to happen? Can you see the trajectory on which your decisions have placed this country? Look at the timeline of events leading up to World War II; surely you see a connection between then and the United States today. Are you, my reader, wanting to be remembered as the neighbor who stayed silent? The citizen who collaborated? Is that your legacy?

My grandfather had one last bit to say to his mother in his letter.

The French people treat us as if we were angels from Heaven. My, when you see the awfulness the Germans have inflicted on them there is no wonder. Everybody from the baby on up want to kiss the American soldier — men, women, and children all alike. We pass through a town and mothers feel that if we look at their children all will be all right. They cover the highways with flowers, apples, pears, plums, and anything they think we’ll like. Old grandma sits in her wheelchair in the yard throwing kisses at us. Old men toddle out and clasp us in their arms and cry. One town went I went through, a little girl came running out and, jumping into my arms and, laughing and crying together, just showered my black face with kisses (her face was black when she got through).

Who would you want to be in that moment? Would my grandfather be proud of you? Would the French victims of the war shower you with gratitude?

What kind of person do you want to be?