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As many of you know, I was gone for several days on a trip to Georgia. While there I had the pleasure of meeting one of my dear vets, Russ Weiskircher, who is featured on my site.

Russ was so moved and so shaken by what he saw at Dachau in WWII, that he decided to become a vocal component, sharing what he saw with the world. He is currently a co-chairman of the Georgia Holocaust Commission and writes and speaks to groups including school children.

Here is an excerpt from his page:

...Our battalion was headed for Munich, rounding up German troops along the way. April 29, 1944 brought about the absolute damnable experience of the entire war. We were ordered to proceed to Dachau and to liberate and secure the concentration camp located there. We didn’t know what to expect.

The liberation of Dachau is one of the mostly hotly contested tales of the war, For some reason unknown to me and others, many units that were not even near the place, claim to have been there on April 29, 1945. Let me say here and now that the 45 th Division and a small element from the 42nd Division were the only true liberators. LTC Felix Sparks, now Brigadier General retired, and his Third Battalion of the 157 th Infantry was the liberator. Our I Company penetrated the walls and entered the camp. I was there with the Bn Hqs element. We discovered the boxcars loaded with corpses, the crematory, the labs, the barracks, and the compound with over 30,000 prisoners. They were dead and near dead and diseased and in many cases out of their minds. I won’t attempt to recall the details but I will at the conclusion of this account, list several websites where you can read eyewitness accounts including the detailed, brilliant comments of General Sparks.

This single experience changed my life. I would never have believed that man could be so brutal and inhumane. We didn’t linger long in Dachau, it was a rehabilitation task for the medics and the experts and it took months to screen the inmates. The immediate concern was food and medicine and relocation. Repatriation would take months, even years...

While in Georgia I was able to meet with the General, his wife Jane, a good friend Jena, who is also actively involved with the commission and Kitty, a friend whom I was introduced to by Russ about a year ago through email (she too belongs to the commission). My step-daughter and I met them for lunch then proceeded to Kennesaw University to view the exhibit.

It was a beautifully done exhibit and I'm so glad that I had the time to take the tour. While there we viewed a 28 minute film. There weren't many dry eyes in the room of approximately 65 people. The crowd consisted primarily of college students who where there on a field trip, but a young girl about 8 years old grabbed the hearts of all in the quiet room when the film showed a swaztika being blown to pieces high atop a building in Germany at the end of the war. As the dispicable icon crumbled to the ground, the young lady began to clap. It was quite a moment.

The exhibit also displayed art work done by local area students. Stunning, heart-warming, shocking, disturbing, sad, gut-wretching, haunting... These are just a few adjectives that came to mind. It was obvious that the story of the holocaust will live long in their hearts and won't be forgotten.

If you have a chance please read Russ' page and also take a moment to visit the Anne Frank page.

http://www.6thcorpscombatengineers.com/Rus...Weiskircher.htm

http://www.kennesaw.edu/annefrank/

If you've never taken the time to read the Diary of Anne Frank, then I strongly urge you to do so. I don't care if you are 12, or 26, or 86. READ IT. I read it the first time when I was in junior high, then again a few years back when Anne's father re-released the book with the words that he originally withheld from the public.

Anne's desire was to become a journalist and even at the tender age of 13, she was already blossoming into a very talented one. Sadly Anne's dream to become a published author did come to fruition, but at the cost of a life; her own.

I read the book in Jr. High also, but only recently saw the Acadamy Award winning movie. I would love to see the exhibit. One of many sad,sad, stories that need to be retold and remembered always.

Jim

Last summer a co-worker's son traveled to Germany w/the Guard. He visited the Dachau camp museum and brought back hundreds of photos of the town and musuem. Just looking at the photos is quite moving. So sad. I'll get them from my pc at work and try and post a few.

A dear friend of mine who writes to me often was in the English 11th Armored Division Infantry, he was a part of the unit who liberated the Belsen camp. Said it was just horrible to see.

Brooke

There was a featured article in our local paper. Tried to find it online in the Bay City Times, but it wasn't there, so I did a search on the Internet and found info on the same gentleman Brasse who was a photographer at Auschwitz.

Concentration camp ex-inmate opens up

ZYWIEC: For years afterward, photographer Wilhelm Brasse saw them in his dreams emaciated Jewish girls, herded naked in front of his camera at Auschwitz. Eventually, his dreams stopped. But he never took pictures again. "I didn't return to my profession, because those Jewish kids, and the naked Jewish girls, constantly flashed before my eyes," he said. "Even more so because I knew that later, after taking their pictures, they would just go to the gas." Even today, more than 60 years after it ended, there are still stories to be told about the Holocaust, and the grisly nuts and bolts of running a concentration camp. Brasse recently told his on Polish television. Now he is talking to The Associated Press over coffee and pork cutlets at a friend's restaurant in Zywiec, his hometown in southern Poland. He is cheerful, friendly and sharp-witted at 89.

But his voice occasionally wavers as he remembers. Brasse, who isn't Jewish, survived because of his photography job, which enabled him to get better conditions and to swap food for pictures with the guards. Some 1.5 million people, most of them Jewish, died at Auschwitz from gassing, shooting, disease, hunger or beatings. Brasse was sent to Auschwitz at 22 as a political prisoner for trying to sneak out of German-occupied Poland in the spring of 1940. Because he had worked before World War II in a photography studio in Katowice, in southern Poland, he was put to work in the camp's photography and identification department.

"I was given a bath, a new prisoner uniform in decent shape, and moved to another block," said Brasse. Because he was working with the SS, the Nazi's fanatical elite force, he was kept cleaner, "so as not to offend the SS men." As the only professional photographer in the office, he took the prisoners' pictures for camp files part of the Nazis' obsession with documenting what they were doing. "I must have taken 40,000 to 50,000 of those identity pictures," he says.

Sometimes the prisoners had been beaten too badly to get a clear photograph of their faces. "The picture wasn't taken and the prisoner was sent away and called back later, but sometimes it happened that there wasn't anybody to call back because they'd been able to murder him in the meantime," he said. Other prisoners eventually took over the ID photos and Brasse was given new tasks, including pictures of prisoner tattoos. As he remembered a prisoner from Gdansk named Zylinski, he fidgeted with his car keys on the table. "He had a gorgeous tattoo on his back; some artist must have done it for him, because paradise was done so beautifully. Adam and Eve, a tree of paradise, and Eve handing Adam an apple. It was really beautiful, and done in two colours, blue and red." "Some time later, maybe a month, word came from the crematorium, from a friend who worked at the crematorium, that he had something interesting to show. I saw it," he said, his voice catching.

"The skin was cut out from the back of the prisoner. They cut out the whole piece, and kept the piece of skin, and tanned it." It was done on the orders of SS camp doctors, Brasse said. Most new arrivals at Auschwitz went straight to the gas chambers, but those selected for work or experiments would be photographed at least until 1943, when the Nazis switched to tattooing ID numbers on inmates' arms. But Brasse's work wasn't over.

One day in 1943, his boss, an SS officer named Bernhard Walter, called him into his office. An immaculately uniformed SS officer was waiting. The stranger politely addressed Brasse as "sir." It was Dr Josef Mengele, the infamous camp doctor and practitioner of cruel medical experiments, he learned afterward. "He said that he was going to send some Jewish girls for pictures, and that I had to take pictures of them naked. One from the front, but the whole body; the second from behind; the third as a profile of the whole figure." Soon afterward, Brasse said, a group of some 15 Jewish girls were brought in. "The girls undressed, they were about 15 or 16 years old, and there were some around 25 or 26" He paused. "It was all so unpleasant." "They undressed and I said that they have to stand straight and I had to move the camera back to get the whole figure," he said. "I took the pictures just as Mengele had indicated." The doctor ordered pictures of other prisoners he was performing his "experiments" on Jewish twins, dwarfs, stunted people, people with noma, a disease common in the malnourished that can result in the loss of flesh. Mengele, who had written his dissertation on the formation of jawbones in supposedly non-Aryan people, was interested.

"I had to take close-ups. He said sometimes you will be able to see the whole bone of the jaw, and that I have to do close-ups of it." "I did the close-ups, in harsh light, and you could see to the bone," Brasse said. "Later, my boss called me in, and Dr Mengele expressed his happiness with the pictures I'd taken, that I'd taken them just as he had needed them to be done," Brasse said. Asked how he felt about taking the pictures, Brasse said, "it was an order, and prisoners didn't have the right to disagree. I couldn't say 'I won't do that.' I only listened to what I had to do and because I didn't harm anyone by what I was doing, I tried to address them politely. I explained that they didn't have to be afraid here, that nothing bad was going to happen to them here, nobody would yell at them." As the allies advanced on Berlin in late 1944 and early 1945, the Nazis scrambled to cover up their crimes. Boxes of Brasse's pictures were shipped out of the camp, Brasse said. He doesn't know where to.

As Russian troops closed in on Auschwitz in January 1945, Brasse's boss, Walter, worried about the photos still in the camp. He told the young Pole: "Ivan is coming. Burn everything. All the photographs, all the negatives, files, burn it all." But the negatives were fireproof. Walter swore and left. Brasse and another inmate doused them with water. Most of Brasse's photos disappeared, but some survived, although it is hard to say which were Brasse's, since camp photos as a rule didn't carry the photographer's name. However, in the TV documentary he told the story behind some pictures in the Auschwitz museum archives that he remembers taking. Mengele hid in Bavaria, then fled to South America, where he died in 1979. Jaroslaw Mensfelt, spokesman of the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum, says some 200,000 such pictures were taken, with name, nationality and profession attached.

About 40,000 of these pictures are preserved, some with the identification cards, and 2,000 of these are on display in the museum. Others are at Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial. Ahead of the Soviet advance, the Nazis evacuated Brasse and thousands of other prisoners under heavy guard to Austria. American troops freed him from the Ebensee camp months later. He weighed 88 pounds. He recovered in an American hospital, and went home to Poland and his family all of whom survived the war in July 1945. He wanted to work as a photographer, but couldn't. Eventually, he started a business making sausage casings. "I didn't have a camera, I didn't have anything," he said. "After everything, after Dr Mengele, I had an unpleasant feeling taking pictures." "When I started to take them, it always seemed to me that I saw those naked Jewish girls that I'd taken pictures of. That came to mind and I stopped taking photos." He still keeps a pre-war Kodak Retina camera at home. It sits unused. ---AP

This site also features an article on Brasse and also includes other WWII Links that may be of interest to some.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/secondworldwar/s...1394380,00.html

Here's a PBS link on the series - Auschwitz

http://www.pbs.org/auschwitz/40-45/

Heart breaking...all of it, no matter how many years pass, it still boggles the rational mind how some took pleasure in tormenting the helpless, thanks for posting this. It's nice to hear stories of "Tender Mercies" like this, where at least at some point the prisoners were treated kindly by the photographer.

Jim

A long lonely walk:

In 1945 I was first assigned to Buchenwald for a few days, then assigned to Weimar. the nearest city to Buchenwald. wirh little to do in May and June 45 I,d walk out to the camp Buchenwlad several times a week. THe locals were NOT interested in the place. It was about 6 kilometers one way. I would walk it alone. And it was the loneliest walk I made in Germany.

In 1972 I worked for the US Army in Germany and visited many places. Dachau was one of them. when our tour b us stopped at this camp it was another lonely place. None pof the locals were interested in the camp.

Later we made a tour of Amsterdam, when we asked the locals how to get to the Anne Frank house we were told it was no longer there! It was torn down.later some one did give us directions. Accept for the tourists It was another lonely place. Locals were NOT interested in the place!