CM: Okay, läuft.
IV: Heute ist der 25. oder der 26.?
CM: Ja, der 25.
IV: Es ist heute ah Samstag, der 25. April 19, 2015, wir sind in Weiden im Hotel Admira und führen jetzt ein Gespräch mit Mr. Vernon Schmidt, einem der Befreier von Flossenbürg.
CM: Und läuft.
IV: Well, let's.. You just look at me, not at the camera, just like we talk, if you're sitting in a restaurant or..
VS: Okay.
IV: ..in a bar.
So let's begin with the story before you get to Flossenbürg.
During the war ah how did you get to Europe and what was your way, the stations coming up to here?
VS: I, I left ah New York on the Queen Mary, which could make it across in six days and we docked in ah Glasgow, Scottland.
It was 15.000 of us on board and ah plus 500 ah red cross workers ah ladies.
And ah and we went by train to Southampton, England.
There we boarded a troop ship which was to take us over to Le Havre.
This was in {clearing the throat} ah I landed here in the last day of ah January 1945.
And they, ah we boarded the troop ship and, but because of Le Havre this, they ah harbor was so destroyed by sunken ships that we had to repel of the side unto in, in ah,
on ah ropes down into a Higgins boat which had about 50 people and then they would carry us and we beached on the shore like they did in Normandy.
Except we weren't under any fire, we were okay.
So then we went from there into a reception center ah at which later became camp Lucky Strike.
And there we were in a big.., assembled near the railroad station.
And they fed us and we were entertained by Glenn Millers Band at the time.
And after they fed us we mounted up on ah box cars and from there we had a three day journey from Le Havre to Metz.
Today you could drive it probably in a few hours, but it took us three days, because of the broken tracks and the priorities and so forth.
And it was cold and snow and ah the box cars were, we were just crowded in there like cattle you might say.
And we went by, by train up to Metz.
In Metz we received our rifles and ammunition and went out on the firing range to get our weapons ready.
And then they trucked us, up into, through Belgium into ah Luxembourg and then into the first border town between Belgium and Germany,
which was a little town called Habscheid where, on the Siegfried line.
And from there {clearing the throat} three of us were dropped off from a truck and told to go sit in that church over there which was all bombed out.
Practically I brought a picture of the church with me {laughing}.
And sat in the church, he said:
"Some time when it gets dark, someone will come and get you."
And ah when it got dark they did come, there was three of us, they let us out at night and we went into a bunker.
And there, there we met my squad of the ah E Company of 90th Infantry Division and then met a sergeant, who said:
"Make yourself at home, we jump off at six o'clock."
I really didn't know what that meant, but I found out the next morning.
So that's how I was introduced to combat the very next day.
That was two weeks from England or excuse me, two weeks from New York till that day, I was on the front lines fighting in the, mostly in the pillboxes.
To flush the pillboxes out and to push the Germans eastward.
So it was pretty slow going, we had snow, we had hail, we had rain and the bunkers there were no heat, no, no light and wet concrete from, so they were cold.
And ah so was the ground where we slept for many nights, right on the cold ground.
Some nights we didn't even received the blankets.
They couldn't find us in the woods.
So it, it was cold.
And ah the three of us (???), ah we were under a direct fire from a German 88 and ah my two buddies upside in the church with me just ten days prior were both killed
with several others, several wounded and it was for a kid, just barely 19, I was it, it, it wasn't too, too, too exciting.
I mean, I was pretty naive yet, I've been raised very close family and so a lot of things happened in a hurry that I wasn't really accustomed to, but ah..
I had a Mum and Dad at home who were praying for me everyday.
My brother had been meanwhile captured and wounded over here by the Germans in France and was in the Stalag already, but I knew nothing about it, he knew nothing about me.
So we had no communication whatsoever until he was liberated in April and then sent home and then we communicated so, but that was my brother.
And ah being an infantryman ah we had a many days of..., really tough going, really tough going.
IV: So and then later on ah what happened, if you go on...
VS: Well ah as you know, we really didn't move in miles, we move, {laughing} we moved in yards, especially in those first few weeks.
Then as we came across, our goal was to reach the Rhein river and of course we had to cross the Moselle again and ah I crossed the Moselle on a little wooden raft
with a little upward motor pushed us across on the 14th day of March.
And we met up in the steep hills on the other side, a very tough SS Division that was determined to stop us from reaching the Rhein river.
So we had three days of battle there. Ah fortunate for us we were able to bring armor with us the next day which the Germans did not have at that time.
So we kind of had a, {clearing the throat} had an advantage over them, but ah the SS would not surrender, so we really had to just almost anihilate them. And in three days they were just, just cut to shreds, the place was named "machine gun hill", because they just would not surrender. Even their general who had been knighted by general Göring,
came up to check and see why they weren't making progress and one of our men actually snipered and killed him.
{coughing} Excuse me, so it was, it was tough going.
IV: Take your time, take your time.
VS: We found out, {coughing} we met some, some German historians there who took us down to the, to the German cemetery and I walked amongst the headstones there
and it were, all the deaths were either the 14th or 15th or 16th of March.
And many of them were 18, 19, 21 year old, kids and most of them were all SS.
And ah years later books began to come out telling history and so forth and of these people they were the same ones two month prior that wounded and captured my brother.
So ah I kind of felt maybe my unit got some revenge on what they did to him, but ah, so if there was a pleasant or happy ending at that particular battle, it was that ah my revenge for my brother had become a part of that battle there.
But we were back and they actually showed us the very same, the pillbox, ah excuse me, the fox holes are still there and very recognizable and,
and ah so we've been there in 2012 and also last year and met the same people again.
Very fine German engineers or just fine people that took us and have studied that what's it, showed us how, then verified that the archives of the 90th Division bare out exactly what they found, so.
And when we met, we met one civilian there who was nine years old at the time of the battle, but they had evacuated them up in a hide-out in a mountain, in a cave,
so they could save the civilian population and ah later came back down there to, to live.
Now we met him this last year over there, just a fine gentleman, gave me several pieces of a, a tank that was destroyed.
One of our tanks that was destroyed right where he lived and gave me pieces of the tank, pieces of the, the tort and so forth and, and some spent ammunition.
So {clearing the throat} been, it's been interesting to come back and relive this history.
Ah we crossed, the next issue after crossing the Moselle was to take the city of Mainz and the 90th Division was committed to take that city and ah {clearing the throat}
we entered Mainz through ah, through an apple orchard and were immediately pinned down by small arms fire.
And fortunately again for us ah the apple orchard had deep (???) which we were able to lay in the ferrel like this and actually we can hear the, the snapping of the weapons right above our, our heads.
So being able to lay in there, we were actually able to escape the fire.
{coughing} And ah then we, as we got to the first buildings we were asked to all stand up and, and marching fire where, we fired our M1's like from the hip like this as we walked into the first buildings there.
And ah then we were caught in an artillery barrage.
The Germans were firing over us and Americans were firing over this way.
We're caught right in the middle.
And there again it's kind of like the phrase being caught between a rock and a hard place, you just didn't know which, what,
but later again there was a fellow carrying a radio, a big radio on his back and a big, long ten footer antenna and he obviously was talking to the Air Force or the Air Corps that time
and ah four P47's were able to come in and strafe just close enough to us where we could see the pilots in the aircraft so they were
one right behind the other came in and strafed in the, in the, in the village there in Mainz and were able to really soften things up for us.
But Hitler had given a command to the, to the people in charge there:
"You fight to the last men and to the last bullet."
But when one airplane can come down with 8.50 calibers, you kind of destroy a man's confidence in what somebody said:
"Fight to the last man or the last bullet."
So we, we, the area was softened up for us and saved (???), perhaps one of those P47's they have safed my life,
because ah couple of Germans were aiming at me from another building and my buddy alongside to me had a B.A.R. and I said:
"Mike those two guys are gonna get us."
I said: "They gonna go down stairs, come across the cellar, come up and get us."
So Mike walked over to the window, in the second storey building there, and leaned his B.A.R., sure enough they both came out
and Mike cleaned out with his B.A.R., turned around with a big grin on his face to me.
He said: "Smiddy, they ain't coming up."
But from then on, we began taking quite a number of prisoners.
That was the capture of Mainz.
Two days later we crossed the Rhein river and were.., on ponton bridges.
And then we were, we were strafed by the Luftwaffe, but ah again those poor guys in those Luftwaffe that was kind of a suicide mission for them.
But they were trying to knock out the bridge, so we couldn't get our armor across.
But ah fortunately for us {clearing the throat} they didn't hit anybody.
I'm sure the guy was scared in his (???), even just to come down, because, we had 50, quad 50 halftracks all up and down the river there.
And ah it was just a suicide mission for them.
We knocked out planes all day long.
Then they came at night.
{clearing the throat} And dropped parachute flares so that they could see the bridge, tried to bomb the bridge.
Again those 50 calibers, four of them in a halftrack like this, they just, all night long ah with those magnesium flares.
We were about a mile away.
We could read a newspaper, so bright like this light.
And ah the Luftwaffe was just about destroyed by then and they had lack of fuel.
And most of their key pilots had either been injured or killed.
So a lot of those kids, I'm sure, I took a, a fighter pilot prisoner, just shortly after that, just a young kid.
And ah, but then we, we also {clearing the throat} discovered the gold, that was burried {clearing the throat}, excuse me, up in Merkers,
by up by Weimar and ah the 90th Division discovered that, so we were involved there.
{clearing the throat} From there we came down through Hof, had quite a, a, a battle exchange there in, in the town of Hof.
And then the next move was down here to, to ah Grafenwöhr, to the big camp there Grafenwöhr.
IV: How many days you need for this, this trip?
VS: That, pardon?
IV: How many days, you need for this from Rhein getting up to Grafenwöhr?
VS: Okay, we, we cross on the, on the, on the 24th of March and April 5th, we were up in Fulda and, and Merkers and Weimar and that would be
and we left there about the 7th or 8th, no the 8th, ah President Roosevelt was, died the 12th.
We were up there when he died around the 12th of, of April up near Merkers.
{clearing the throat} Then we worked our ways down, I think you call it Thüringen, Thüringen, the area.
We worked our way to ah, ah Ludwigsstadt, ah can't remember that.
And then to, down to Bayreuth and, and then Hof and then down here on the border on the 18th of April {clearing the throat} the 90th Division was the first Division to cut the German country in half by entering Czechoslovakia.
It was ah again, my unit was involved in that 358 Regiment, went in there and then came back out couple of days later, but our object there was to cut it in half.
And into kind of, I guess feel out that the ah how much resistance we still had, you know and from there then we pulled back and moved our way, all away right along the border.
And so that was the 18th, then we were near ah Plauen and Bärnau, I think.
And, and then, ah the 23rd, then we were here at ah Flossenbürg and C Company of 358 went in, I was with E Company, so I was outside the camp.
And we were, my unit was pretty much involved with the, with the, the, the liberation and the rescue of many from Flossenbürg, who were on the death march.
And ah all the way from, well they were, they had emptied out on the 16th, they emptied out the camp of Flossenbürg on the 16th, we came on the 23rd, one, one week later.
So many of them were not too far from here, ah those who just could not, you know, physically walk that fast.
And ah so from here the 90th was scattered from here clear down to about Cham and ah most of them were liberated by, I think around the 26th of, of April.
And ah I personally saw many on the death march who either had been shot or died and they just on the edge of the road,
there they just would dig a little trench and kind of roll them in, cover them up with dirt and leaves and so forth and
we would maybe see a leg sticking out or an arm sticking out or something like this.
Terrible things to see for a little kid, 19 years old.
IV: Ah getting close to this camp, did you know what ah was expecting you?
Did you know anything about camps, it, that camps would be, exist?
How the situation could be?
VS: We, we knew nothing, I, I think only the night before did we know, that there was a camp.
And and and all we were ordered was to move into this area and I, the, the night, some of our people stayed in Floß.
And were told that there some, either civilian or somebody must have told that there is a camp nearby
cause the 90th or I believe the Third Army that I was a part of, was not aware of that.
And and I, I just yesterday or the, ya, yesterday we met several people there who were involved in the strafing by American planes on those days.
Like between the, on the emptying out, they like 16th, 17th, 18th emptying out of here, was they were (???) putting on, on the buck, on the trains to take them to Dachau.
And they were strafed by Americans.
So I am pretty confident that we did not have the intelligence that they, those were inmates from a, from a concentration camp.
It, it, it with our technology today it is hard to regress back and realize how little we had as far as technology.
We probably had more propaganda {laughing} than we had technology.
And so, I at the night before, I'm told through my history study, that we were alerted that there was a camp near by.
And as you know Buchenwald had been liberated on the 11th of April and so this was about two weeks, two weeks later.
And my brother was ah near Bad Orb and that was April 2nd, so all this was starting to take place and and we began, I think the intelligence began to realize: "Where are all these people?" You know.
So it's, it's again ah it's kind of sad that we were not aware, because our, our goal was to, was to liberate, not to conquer.
And many of these people suffered at the hands of the Gestapo and the SS ah died a terrible death as you know.
Ah I have met probably six or seven maybe who were on the death march that I met in, in ah my, in California.
And and ah in fact one there lived right near by, we were interviewed by one of the TV stations that're in town.
Ah he was 21 years old, weight 62 pounds, so you know, they were walking skeletons.
And, and had we come maybe one or two weeks earlier, we might have saved many, many more of those people.
But ah and we were riding tanks almost every day to keep, keep us moving, because the resistance was getting less and less.
We were bottling up the Germans tighter and tighter and tighter.
They had less and less fuel, so they couldn't move and and so we were just outmaneuvering them on a day to day basis.
So we rode, we rode tanks quite a bit to move us more rapidly down here.
And ah is, I, I think, what we found here, one of my personal friends who walked in the gate, I just talked to him Monday, celebrating his 95th birthday.
We talked about being here today.
And he said: "Well, Vern," he says, "emotionally, I couldn't handle it nor am I physically able today."
But he says: "You know, if we could have come there sooner, we might have helped many more people to survive."
So we kind of feel a little, maybe a little remorse, but ah the people felt, I think, that we were their salvation. I talked with one this morning who grabbed me and said:
"Without you guys I wouldn't be standing here or my daughter would not even been born."
So that's comforting to know that we, we, we didn't come to conquer, we came to liberate these people.
So, but ah what we saw here, I think was an eye opener ah. A neighbouring camp ah Ohrdruf, I'm not sure just how close.
But one of my buddies went into that camp and ah General Eisenhower, that was on the, I think probably maybe just a few days before, before ah Flossenbürg.
And that opened his eyes.
He said: "There must be more of this."
But ah as you talk to the civilians around here, they claim they knew, very few knew anything about it.
But it's strange that they weren't able to smell the smoke of, of burning bodies, you know.
Cause I know people from Dachau smelled it, but ah.
IV: Well, let's talk a little bit ah about your first impressions getting here.
So on the first day you came here to Flossenbürg, ah you have still some pictures in your mind, what you saw getting to the camp?
VS: Well as, as I mentioned I never came into the camp on, on that particular day, I came here later.
But I was in, in a, another company, we were in the woods right nearby.
And coming back ah this camp did not ah the, my first time here was in '93, to come back to Flossenbürg.
And the camp had changed drastically from what it looked like as a, during the, during the time of the incarceration of those people.
You know, all the, the barracks were up the sides of the, of the slanted hill, which now is, it was all apartment buildings on that one side.
And of course the gate and stuff there had been removed.
And and so ah to many of us it didn't look the same.
And and each time we've come now, we've seen changes ah which ah I feel have, have really been, this camp has done something for not only you local people,
but educated people I think worldwide of, of what happened, how it happened and how it must never happen again.
This is, it's like an educational facility.
You come here and you can leave and you feel like you've seen a restoration from a pile of ashes to a new life.
Ah you don't see that at Dachau.
Ah we've been to Dachau three times.
And ah you just kind of come away feeling ah kind of depressed.
But you leave here feeling, these people have, have turned a 180 degrees around to make a place ah of an educational, to reconstruct.
And, and to build ah hope and life and back into this, into the people who come.
Even the, the people who were in here, that we've met last night and this morning, they see, they, I think they see the, the, the warmth and the compassion.
And what this camp has done for the locals and for people who, like us, who come.
We see a dedication that they know what liberation is more than the word "conquer."
I mean, they don't see us as an enemy, they see us as a compassionate group that came here.
And so ah each time I see a new change and some things for that happen, just from last year.
We were here in August, August of last year.
So we see some changes that Jörg told of us were coming.
And I think they've just done a remarkable, a remarkable job in, in making this place, ah especially to those survivors who, who have a horror, a horror memory
of seeing their, their friends and their relatives, their brothers, their fathers, their whatever ah just starved to death or shot in cold blood.
And and now they come back and see ah the restoration, the compassion, I, I think it's been to us, I always feel good, when I, when I leave here.
This is my fourth time, I believe, to come back to Flossenbürg.
And ah I think any of our, of our own, my people from the 90th, I've talked to many of them and we were here in, in ah 2008
with a, a little Hitler Youth kid that we liberated just south of here.
And ah he was from Austria.
He, he moved to Australia to get away from this, served during Vietnam and wrote his memoirs.
I helped him.
He came back here in 2008 to meet us.
And we came to Flossenbürg together.
And he has memories of coming through here as, nine years old, with his mother seeing this, cause Eisenhower said:
"You go to, you, you troops go to every village and take these people, put them in the trucks and walk them through here and see what your people did, cause they were told Hitler was their salvation.
But look what he did to these people, to human beings like you and I."
And, and Brunos mother came on the truck and there's a little brother, seven years old, the mother walking them through there and seeing all the atrocities and seeing them,
the bodies and, and the, they're decomposed and the, just the horror of what happened here.
And she turned to a, a, a American lady, probably with UNRRA and said:
"Why are you making me take these two little boys through this terrible looking place?"
And she said: "Mam, they will always remember and they remember what they saw, cause some day somebody will say that never happened.
But they saw it.
They will know with their own eyes what they saw."
But, she didn't like it, cause the young little kids, they have an innocent mind, didn't want them to see that.
So ah and I think by, by doing that, Eisenhower was convinced that if it's shown enough people what actually happened in these camps,
he can reconstruct something where and, and today I think you'll find most of these people.
They realized that was a horrific mistake or an atrocity or tragedy, whatever you wanna call it.
But you got people that are like, like Jörg Skriebeleit who comes from a family that was in the party and, but he says:
"My eyes were opened."
So you could see, Flossenbürg has done a great job in, in re-educating in ah we just come away feeling, that we've seen restoration instead of tragedy.
IV: Well, let's go back a little bit to the facts.
After getting to Flossenbürg, there were, there came 20, nearly 20 more days until the war was finished.
What happened the last weeks during the war?
You went, you went on from here, further on or?
VS: We went from here, we went right along the border, we had sporadic SS fighting all the way down.
We went as far as south as Cham.
We went into Fürth, we went into Waldmünchen, which are right on the very, you call them the "Grenze", the border.
And ah then we, we from Waldmünchen we went down to Cham and then we came back up and ah right near Fürth we, we went in,
ah I think May the 1st, of May the 1st or May the 2nd into, into Czechoslovakia.
And again the object was to take Pilsen.
Again Eisenhower had given kind of restrictions to General Patton in, cause the third army was basically the one involved in this area.
And ah they knew, that there was both collaborators on both sides.
They knew the Russians were coming.
And ah our object was to get as far, General Patton wanted to get us clear into Prag,
but he got as far as Pilsen and started out of Pilsen and was stopped again by Eisenhower.
But again I think, I think Patton, General Patton probably had more of a knowledge of what he was seeing and ah was reporting back to Eisenhower.
But Eisenhower was in charge and he remembered the Potsdam agreement with Stalin.
So he knew, he couldn't just ah violate too much, but his object was to, he and he, he actually was able to capture I guess we today we call them German VIP's who the Russian were going to excecute.
And there was some 50 of them and he got them right out of Pilsen.
One of them became the great-grandfather in law of General Patton's granddaughter, Helen Patton, who was actually invited to come here to this event.
But we will be meeting her next week there in, in Czechoslovakia.
So again, General Patton I think knew more than and kept moving the troops along.
Ah we got probably as, I didn't quite get into Pilsen, but we got into Klatovy and ah Domažlice, Zdemyslice, that were little villages that were.
Ah we met, we met the on the 7th day of, of May the radio crackled down to us that, that the Germans had given official surrender to the Americans.
Ah not to the Russians, but to the Americans at that part in time.
So the Russians're still moving and they told us to hold in, in place.
So we stopped, I, I would say probably on the 7th and then on the, on the 8th of May ah we met, we met the Russians in the next village over.
And and there was a lot of ah, ah celebration togehter, a lot of Vodka drinking and all this kind of stuff.
Ah I didn't participate in that personally, so but I, but I did meet several Russians, I met a Russian aviator who, who they were flying ah two guys in a airplane, one was flying at, in this low over the woods.
Another had a loudspeaker and was hollering down in the woods, cause Germans were still hiding.
German soldiers were hiding and they, they were trying to bring them out into the open where we could, either the the Russians or the Americans, could capture them.
And they landed a plane near by and this ah Russian, these two guys came up in and we shook hands and, and ah I, I had a German P38
and I took my P38, let him see my souvenir.
And he looked, he took it and looked it over and then handed it back to me.
And I saw, he had one, so I reached for his.
He said {sound of clapping hands} he wouldn't let me, let me touch his.
So I knew right away, that guy was suspicious of us Americans.
But I, we were open to them.
But ah, we said straight away, but ah and... Of course you can, you, you know that the Czechoslovakian were under Russian domination till I think 1989.
And you can see it today in their infrastructure.
This is just they, the Russians pil..., pilfered and took everything they could take home with them.
Took ah plumbing stuff of the walls and (???) and stuff like that ah were {laughing} they came as conquerors, we, we came as liberators.
And this was a difference in our philosophy.
But ah the war ended then, ah we stayed in Czechoslovakia ah probably about ten days at the most and then they took us out through Pilsen
and the first time I saw streets line with American flags on every side and it was a thrilling sight for us to see all these American flags.
And and the Czech people were just ah overwhelming.
They made pastries for us right away and just treated us like, like ah VIP's.
We were just treated great.
But and and we wound up in, in the, right on the border in Waidhaus, which is right on the border.
We stayed in there ah, a several weeks, till they could get ah, till the Regiment could get quarters started and the headquarters became in Weiden.
And ours the Second Battalion of 358, which I was part of, we settled the entire Battalion, about 2.000 men in ah Vohenstrauß,
and ah we had to, you know, empty out buildings to hold enough people and get beds and so forth and so.
While we were in Waidhaus many of us went to the border and Russians were there and you could, already you could see the animosity between the two.
We were free and happy and you know.
They were different.
So ah but then our job then was to patrol the border and also put German prisoners of war to work on this death march and begin to pick up the bodies.
And our job was to make sure that, that they were out in the field doing it properly.
They had ah like a four wheel carts with, horse drawn.
And they would have ah wooden caskets, ah very crude, ah where they were made?
Probably around here some place, some laborer made the.
And they would go out into the roads and find these, these bodies and pick, pick them up and again our job was, to make sure that they were handled like human beings, you know.
And put into these boxes and then documented.
And they were taken to the little town called Pleystein.
And, and they, in the middle of the street they opened up a grave, probably about 20 feet wide, probably about 75 feet long
and they laid the caskets in there, one beside the other.
And they remained there till, I'm not sure just whether this was in the late 80ies or the early 90ies.
Ah they, they exhumed them and put the bones in small boxes and they were buried here in Flossenbürg.
And Jörg showed us them, they have all been re-documented.
So they know who everyone is, they in there, the building has all the documentation.
So again I see the compassion who these people were.
They were probably, most of them Jewish or maybe German sympathizers or whoever they were, but they were humans, just like me, just like you.
And they gave them a, a, a, a very dignified burial there in Pleystein, United States Army and the military government that was set up.
This was in July of 45.
And ah many years later ah my wife and I stayed overnight there in Pleystein.
And I asked for someone to speak to me in English and I mentioned this graveyard ah cemetery or this burial plot.
And I said: "Is there anybody around here that would do remember that?"
And ah she said: "Yes."
She called a gentleman over there and she said, she spoke English, he didn't.
And she said: "This gentleman helped dig that grave."
And they all dug with shovels.
That's a lot of digging.
{laughing} A lot of hard digging. But this man actually helped dig that gravesite for these people to be buried in.
So again I was able to meet first hand someone who actually says:
"I'm telling the truth.
They were buried there."
But when we came here in 2008 Jörg shared with us, he says:
"We have them all buried here."
And he took us and showed us where they were buried.
So again ah we've been so impressed with what Flossenbürg has, has done as a organization and ah I'm sure that the,
it sounds like the German government has fallen right inline with them here and saw, that what these people were doing, was, was a, a very admirable effort and a project.
So ah whenever we come back to Flossenbürg it's ah we had a little part in these people being alive today and having a family.
So ah I, I felt very honored as I, called my.., singled me out last night as probably, I guess I was the only World War II veteran of the 90th here last night,
but ah I had just a little part in, in ah, but I remained here in Germany ah for 19 months and ah served in the occupational and the, the 90th as a Division
ah went home to America in, in the late 45s and I joined a small Cavalry Reconn, Reconnaissance Cavalry Reconn that we had worked side by side,
I had ridden their armored cars and tanks during the war in that combat time.
So I served at the unit that was very close to me also and ah so we've had a, a lot of good camaraderie ah I left here in, in ah July 1946 ah feeling, we've done a job.
And of course as you know the, the Americans remained here ah, the Marshall Plan got the German people on their feet
and today I don't think we couldn't find finer allies and friends and camaraderie we, within the German people.
At the end we've been like a team.
And I think we've kept the pressure on that other side.
So I, I think we've been ah has been a great team effort between us ah I, I, I feel that maybe I had a small part in part of that happening.
And ah I'm, I'm affiliated with both organizations.
We'll have a reunion in Texas in, in August.
We'll have another one with my other outfit in October in Pennsylvania.
So we, we stay in, in contact and though, though us guys we're getting smaller in number, because of our age, but ah I have no regrets.
Ah, I, I feel that I'm a, I'm here and alive today and, and survived by the grace of God.
And my parents who stayed on their knees and prayed for my brother and I along with many others.
And I, I, I came from a small little church in a rural country, 50 of us fellows had our names on the wall on the church and, and the people there in the, and the perish, prayed daily for them.
And every single one of them came back.
Not all of them came back in one piece, like my brother was wounded, many were wounded, captured, but every single one of them came back alive.
So we're grateful for what happened.
And, and, and ah my brother's be 91 in a few months.
Ah suffered terrible in, in the concentration, in a Stalag under the prisoner-of-war group.
But at no animosity, you know, ah our captors were out there just like we were, forced to do a job.
We just think we, we were more compassionate and ah I think our background was to come and to liberate people from ah, a regime that was out to..
Today we probably would be either speaking German or Japanese had we not done what we did in the time of World War II, so.
Ah, I had a little part in that.
But this, yeah..
IV: So one more last question, that just some information.. Getting back to the United States ah you tell us a little bit, you stood in the army there?
VS: No.
IV: Being a military..
VS: I ah I flew home, not flew home, {laughing} I wanted to fly home, went home on a ship from, out of Bremerhaven and I landed in New York and then they took us by troop train to California, separated us.
I got separated in early the first week of August and ah meanwhile I, I had a girlfriend that I left behind.
I gave her an engagement ring the night I left to go overseas.
And 19 months and a few days I was home and we decided to at, when I left, I said:
"When I get home, we'll get married."
So, we were both 20 years old, cause I was, I was 18 years old, when I left to come oversea.
So ah I tell people: "We didn't have a job.
We didn't have a home.
We didn't have a car.
But we had each other and that's all we needed."
Cause our faith was in, in God that he would somehow work everything out.
And we've been blessed, there is one of my sons right here.
I've a daughter and another son.
We've been blessed with children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.
My wife of 68 years, was here last year and just, she just passed away last month.
So I miss her terribly, she is in a better place.
Ah and I'll see her some day.
But, but we've been blessed with, with family.
I got four grandchildren, six great-grandchildren and a host of family and friends and so we've been, we've been blessed in, in ah the song "God Bless America".
America has blessed me, God has blessed us.
And, and I'm grateful for it.
He's made it possible for me to come over here.
This is my sixth visit back here to, to Germany into the area where I fought, we've stayed in houses where we were in combat.
And some books have been written to some, about my story and so forth that.
But, but all of that has been, because God has blessed all my family and made it possible for us to make these journeys and ah, it's just a thrill to come here
and, and meet people that ah are gratetful that they're alive, because of something that we did, 70 years ago this month, you know.
So it's been a, it's been a great, been a great honour for, and and humbling for me to come back and see that graciousness of these people.
I'm the, I'm just a little disappointed that I could not bring my wife again with me here.
But ah God has his timing for each and one of us.
So, but I've been blessed.
IV: Thank you for sharing your story, your feelings.
VS: Mike thank you!
I appreciate being asked to, I ah everybody is just so, yeah, you were there last night, right?
IV: Yeah.
VS: And I couldn't believe, I told Chris, there is probably 75 maybe 100 people there and according to Boris over 400 people there, could not believe.
And and {laughing} all of these have some connection to Flossenbürg, you know, grandchildren, daughters, sons and, and living ones that were here.
It's just a, just amazing ah to see these people still vibrant and, and several there last night who either were in there, who were bedridden, couldn't even walk,
skeletons and then those on the death march who remember the white star either on a jeep or, or on, on a tank and, and they said:
"Our liberators are here."
You know, what this does to you?
{laughing} You feel like a million bucks, you know.
It's just a, I marvel at it, so, it's been good for us.
IV: Thank you, we have...