A Liberator, But Never Free - (Letters from U. S. Army Doctor at Dachau)

New Republic ^ | May 17, 2015 | Steve Friess

[re_tail20]

THE SILENCE MUST HAVE FRIGHTENED EMILY WILSEY. In the seven months since her husband had gone to war, Captain David Wilsey, a 30-year-old anesthesiologist with the 116th Evacuation Hospital, had never gone more than a day or two without sending her a letter. Every step of the frigid, mud-soaked, and bloody Allied advance across France and Germany, he had written to her of his experiences. But now, with victory assured and the newspapers declaring the war in Europe all but over, the letters had stopped.

His last letter, dated May 1, 1945, was sent from “Somewhere Else Yet Again, Germany.” He had written about how excited he was that his unit would get the chance that night to see The Keys of the Kingdom, a movie starring Gregory Peck. He marveled over how fast the latest issue of the Elko Daily Courier, the daily paper in their town in Nevada, had reached him. “The advance party is out to reconnoiter the new site we will move to in a day or two,” he added, making his first reference to the Dachau concentration camp. Dachau opened in 1933 and was initially used to house political prisoners. It later became a training facility for the SS, the elite Nazi military force responsible for planning and executing the “Final Solution,” or the annihilation of the Jews. An estimated 41,500 prisoners were murdered there. Some went to the gas chambers, or were shot or beaten to death; others expired from exposure or starvation, or died subsequent to medical experiments conducted by SS doctors. Dachau was the inaugural Nazi concentration camp and served as a model for their massive killing system. “The war could end any hour yet we keep moving, racing, working just as if it weren’t over,” he told her,...

[PA Engineer]

This is actually a moral equivalence hit piece.

I agree. It is both revisionist and a deconstruction of history. Totalitarianists do these types of things to obfuscate the truth.

[dfwgator]

God forgive me if I say I saw it done without a single disturbed emotion BECAUSE THEY SO HAD-IT-COMING

He's absolutely right on that.

[dfwgator]

And God Bless Patton for not having these men prosecuted.

[VeniVidiVici]

I was stationed at Augsburg and Gablingen not too far from Dachau much, much later. Visited Dachau several times. Never thought I’d “meet” anyone who actually was near there in WWII!

Augsburg had a Messerschmitt factory. Gablingen was known as the airfield where Hess took off from to head to England.

[Intolerant in NJ]

When I was stationed on Okinawa twenty years after the end of WWII old-timers there would tell of some of the GI's during the war conducting "target practice" by shooting the children off of their mothers' backs where they were being carried - such atrocities happen -
They are not the policy of our military
They are remarkable because they are rare
Those who engage in such practices are usually punished and removed from service (a young lieutenant who shipped through our hospital had used a sword which his great-great grandfather had used in the Civil War and his father had carried in WWII to run through a prisoner in his care - he was treated as being mentally-ill and sent back to the states for disposition)
Lefties always think others should be perfect, unless it's one of their own, in which case anything goes, as we're seeing with the Obama corruption.....