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My name is Larry Peckler. I was born May 25, 1924, in Chicago, Illinois. I lived in Chicago, Muskegon, Michigan, Knoxville, Tennessee, moved to Cleveland, Ohio where I met my wife in the tenth grade—and we would have celebrated our 64th anniversary in March, she passed away five months ago. My education was at Western Reserve University in Cleveland. I got my degree and some graduate work there on the GI Bill. I was married at the age of 19, while I was in the service. My military career is something over three years. I was drafted and took some basic training into the Air Corps—at that time the Air Corps was a part of the Army, it was the Army Air Corp—I took basic training in Florida, I was sent to Stillwater, Oklahoma, Oklahoma A&M College for some training in the Air Corps Operations and Administration and got assigned to the Columbia South Carolina B25 training base. After a while I got transferred to the infantry and then went to Texas—Camp Howze Texas, "Lousy Howze it was called—for seven weeks of infantry basic, and then went overseas. At that time I was a Corporal and ended up as a Squad Leader in a heavy weapons company. I ended up as a Staff Sergeant.

My military was interesting. We took a convoy, landed in Le Havre, France, and then we were put into box cars and moved up to Roermond, Holland, Holland which was a replacement depot for the 9th Army under General Simpson. I was there for a couple of weeks and I got reassigned to a unit and spent some time going through Germany, the Ruhr, Essen, Munster, places like that. I was there for the Battle of the Bulge which was where I started to lose my hearing. I get my hearing aids from the Veterans Administration, thank God. The Battle of the Bulge was not fun, obviously. People in the states, I think, don't realize what really went on there. We took a lot of German prisoners, and eventually sent them to prisoner of war camps behind the lines.

I saw some concentration camps. I liberated Landsberg. When the war ended I got transferred to the 103rd Division to Linz, Austria. We ran the displaced persons and prisoners of war camps in the American zone of Austria. Austria was divided into four zones: American, British, French and Russian. The zone we were in was headquartered in Linz, which is where Adolf Hitler came from, by the way. And the first thing we did when we went in there we changed the name of the public square from Adolf Hitler Platz, to Linz Platz. The operation I was in was part of—we ran the displaced persons and prisoner of war camps in the American zone of Austria. We ran camps all through the area.

One of the interesting things as kind of a side light, the German's had built a big Herman Goering Steel Works in Linz, and they built a big, modern apartment project to house the workers, mostly German technicians. Best housing in Linz. When we took over we kicked the Germans out of that apartment project and we put in Jewish survivors from the concentration camps since they were the ones who deserved it, and we used the German prisoners of war, under armed guard, as janitors and gardeners and everything else. Ironic justice, I think. Outside of Linz was Mauthausen concentration camp which was basically a large quarry. The slave laborers, the concentration camp survivors, had to carry loads of granite and marble and stone from the bottom of the quarry up 280 some steps to the top on their backs. When they couldn't work any more and they were just too weak, the Germans just threw them over the edge down into the quarry. When we got there the bottom of the quarry was just filled with bodies. That was one of the bad things we saw. But I saw other concentration camps.

The first one we saw we were in a motorized convoy going up a road, and up ahead about quarter of a mile there was a large number of one-story barracks type buildings, and what looked like cord wood stacked next to these buildings. As we got there we realized it wasn't cord wood but these were bodies of the concentration camp people who had died, and they just stacked them up like cord wood. People here just did not know what went on, you know? And that was just two of the camps that I saw there. Thousands, the Germans massacred 12 million people, 6 million of them were Jews. I took a special interest, being Jewish, I was very interested in what was happening there, obviously. It was not easy, I will tell you.