Posted on 10/17/2020 4:37:21 PM PDT by lowbridge
World War II hero Jim Feezel from Alabama, who drove a tank through the front gate of Dachau in Nazi Germany to liberate prisoners at the infamous concentration camp, has died.
James Martin Feezel died on Thursday, Oct. 15, according to Roselawn Funeral Home in Decatur. He was 95.
In a video interview project by Gary Cosby Jr. with The Decatur Daily in 2015, on the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, Feezel recalled the moment his commanding officer told him to break through the gate at Dachau on April 29, 1945.
“We were facing the front gate at Dachau prison,” Feezel said. “He said, ‘Jim, put the tank through that gate.’ So, I have the dubious honor of doing that. And, immediately glancing over at the bodies stacked like cord wood, this young 19-year-old just about lost it.”
Feezel, a technical sergeant for the 23rd tank battalion of the 12th Armored Division, drove a Sherman tank during the war.
An emaciated inmate approached the tank after he drove into the camp, he said.
“Looked like a skeleton was walking towards me,” Feezel said. “He was finally too exhausted and he just sat down.”
Feezel emphasized that he was one of many soldiers who played a role in the defeat of Nazi Germany.
“I often reckon with the very fact that I was such a small pebble in a large stream of thousands and thousands of men who went to fight this war,” he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at al.com ...
Dear old gentleman. Rest in peace.
My great-uncle was in the Army in the Pacific theater. Now my daughter is in the Marine Corps in Okinawa.
In the eighties, I was stationed in Germany and went to Dachau. Glad I went that once, will never go there again.
I was stationed in Germany from 77-81. Made two visits each to Dachau and Flossenburg. I remember the sense of evil that enveloped me at those two places.
paralyzed by the smell
I went to Auschwitz and Birkenau last year. There’s still a weird smell and such an overwhelming strange feeling at both. It seems like evil is still lurking inside the camps.
Ping.
See, now I never knew about Flossenburg.
Messerschmidt plant in Augsburg too. It was still there when I left in 1983.
I’m sure there’s a spiritual evil that is still residing there.
And people can sense it.
There were others worse than Dachau for sure.
This was Edward R. Murrow’s description of Buchenwald...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8ffpIHnuaw
19 year olds today are burning our cities, erasing our history & celebrating perversion.
Bit of trivia - Dresden was the site of the first Western business to open in East Germany after the Wall fell.
Burger King moved a mobile unit to the train station and setup shop.
Can I verify that? Probably not. But stationed in Berlin at the time I remember the news like it was yesterday :)
Recommended book on Felix Sparks, retired as Brigadier General and later Colorado State Supreme Court Judge, is Alex Kershaw's "The Liberator". NB: My Dad was 45th HQ Staff and went through Dachau at that time but was only transiting on way to Munich to setup a 157th Command Post. He chose the German Beer Hall that was Hitler's HQ for the November 1923 failed revolt, a fitting reversal.
Yes, we bombed the heck out of Germany, but at least in the Western part, we helped to rebuild.
In the DDR, you could still see bombed out buildings everywhere years after the war.
I’m convinced that the concentration camp scene in Band Of Brothers was a mixture of what US Forces encountered when entering Germany. The scenes in the movie were Dachau, Buchenwald, etc., rolled into one and inserted into the movie.
This scene just wrecks me everytime I watch it.
Band of Brothers - Liberation of Camp
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8DReSzEtB0
That’s some history, my FRiend.
That episode of Band of Brothers was excellent.
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