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4-Liberation Experiences

What was your involvement with liberation.

Personally, I was never in any of the camps. I know, I heard later, that we got very close to some camps in Alsace-Lorraine. But we weren't there, we didn't liberate them. Later, in Bavaria, units from my division liberated six concentration camps in one town, in the town of Landsberg. Landsberg, by the way, has a prison where Hitler was imprisoned in 1923 for one year after he tried to - it was an abortive try for power, at that time. They tried him and imprisoned him. In that prison he wrote his famous, or infamous book, Mein Kampf. That was in Landsberg. My division found six concentration camps in and around Landsberg and they liberated them. I wasn't personally in there.

But I still remember seeing just thousands of former prisoners - concentration camp prisoners. As we drove up the road into the Bavarian Alps, I saw long columns of men in striped clothing come back down going the other way. They had just been liberated. I still remember how they were walking. They were staggering, they were holding onto each other. They looked like skeletons.

Many years later I met one of them, he became a professor at Sonoma State University.

What were your emotions at that time when you saw the concentration camp prisoners?

I was shocked, obviously. Shocked to see their condition. They could hardly walk. Three or four of them were holding onto each other and steadying each other so that they could walk on down the hill. It was a pitiful sight to see.

Did this make you angry, did it make you want to go kill?

Of course. Of course I'd be angry. But by that time Germany was pretty well finished. This was in the last month of the war. They were pretty well finished. I was glad that they were.

After the war was over, and as I told you, we were just sitting with occupation troops in Austria. We had a little time on our hands, so a group of us took a truck and we drove to Berchtesgarten, to Hitler's mountain hide-out. It was an estate, actually. It was an overwhelming feeling for me to be in the place where Hitler lived. His estate had about 20 buildings in it. Every one of these buildings had a direct hit. The Royal Air Force made one raid on his estate, and pinpoint bombing, hit every one of those buildings, including his own building. I stood in his living room, which had a big picture window, a beautiful view. Of course the window was blown out.

From there we drove up to his mountain hideout, his Eagle's Nest they called it. On top of the mountain. It's a five-mile road that you have to go up. Up there there's sort of a hunting lodge, at the very top of the mountain. Usually people took an elevator for the last three hundred feet, but power was out - no electricity - so we had to climb up the mountains like mountain goats.

That's when I was impressed with the democratic nature of our army because a brigadier general was climbing right next to me. Both of us had to climb up there like mountain goats. I was only a corporal, you see. But generals too had to climb.

In that lodge at the top of the mountain, the view is magnificent. You see all these mountains of the Alps. The biggest room is a semi-circular room with picture windows all around. It was overwhelming for me to stand in that spot too, because I could just imagine, how some of these European statesmen and politicians who had to meet with Hitler, how they must have felt. Because they were invited to come up to that Eagles Nest, and be subjected to Hitler screaming at them. I could image the lonely feeling, that here they were at the top of the mountain, nothing around them except Nazi soldiers, and here have this maniac scream at them. That was his way of negotiating with leaders of other countries

What did you do when the war was over?

As I said we were in Austria for a couple months and then I came back to the United States and then I was supposed to go and be shipped to the Pacific for the continuing war against Japan. But the first thing after coming back here was we all got a thirty-day furlough. I was on my front porch in Kansas City, Missouri when the war against Japan ended. Thank God I didn't have to go there. I was in Camp Campbell, Kentucky for awhile. Then there was a request that came from the Bay Area here for five thousand soldiers from our division to come to Oakland to work in the Christmas post office to handle the Christmas mail from the boys in the Pacific. I was among those five thousand soldiers who came to Oakland. When we got here we found out that the army, with it's ususal efficiency, had hired five thousand citizens to do the same job. There was nothing we could do. Eventually we were shipped all over the West Coast to different places. I sort of luckily ended up on the Presidio of San Francisco. Here I was an artillery man, and they put me into military police on the post. I did this job as an MP for one month and then I was discharged. I was discharged right here on the Presidio. From there I hitchhiked my way home to Kansas City. But I came back out here again two months later and started going to school at the University of California in Berkeley. I graduated from there in ‘47 in business administration. Then I went to law school at Hastings College of Law here in San Francisco. I graduated from there in 1950. Became a member of the bar in January ‘51. My first job as a lawyer was on the staff of the Chief Justice of California as a research attorney. I worked there for the Chief Justice for about a year and then went to work for a private firm with whom I was about seven or eight years. I opened up my own office. That is what I have been doing ever since. That’s a thumbnail sketch of my career after the war.

During liberation, did you encounter any famous people?

No, not really. I know my division liberated a number of quite famous or high-placed people, but those were other units of my division. They liberated two prime ministers of France, they liberated the Polish general, the nephew of the king of England and others.

I had a sort of funny experience. When we were in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, which is a town in the Bavarian Alps—where, by the way, the winter Olympics used to be, I think it was 1936 during the Nazi period—anyway, there I heard that an uncle of Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, one of three most powerful German people--he was the head of the all the concentration camps-- that he had an uncle that lived there.

I got together with a few other soldiers and we took a jeep and went to the man's house. I asked him, “Are you related to any of the Nazi leaders?” “Mmm mmm mmm mmm.” I said, “How about Heinrich Himmler?” “Oh yes, yes, but I haven’t seen him in years.” Which might well be true. Who knows? I decided, let’s take him back to our unit. We made him sit on the top of our jeep. We drove through town and back to my unit. There I reported to the lieutenant who was in charge at a particular time that I caught Himmler's uncle. Of course, he was an old man. I did not think it was of any importance and we let him go, let him walk home this time.

As part of my story, after the war, I met my wife Gloria in Kansas City, Missouri in 1948. She had just come to this country in 1947, after going through the Holocaust. But she will tell you that story herself. We met in the summer of 1948, while I was going to law school here in San Francisco. After school was out, I hitchhiked my way to Kansas City to be with my family for the summer.

While I was there, I met with two friends of mine who also had come home from college. It was a Saturday night, and we had nothing to do really. One of the guys suggested that he heard about a birthday party going on in a private home. “Why don’t we go crash it?” It sounded like a good idea, so we crashed the party. It was a very dull party because all the boys were lined up in one side of the room and all the girls were lined up on another side of the room. Music was playing and nothing happened. But this gave me enough time and leisure to survey the field. I picked out the prettiest girl and asked her to dance. That was Gloria, my wife.

But the problem was that I could not dance very well because I sprained my ankle back on the way to Kansas City so I was just hobbling around. I had to explain that to her because I was not dancing very well. I showed her my bandaged ankle and then we continued hobbling around and I had a good time. My two friends were bored to tears and they left. I stayed there and took Gloria home eventually. That’s how our relationship began.

Then of course I had to come back to San Francisco. But Gloria moved to Los Angeles to the aunt with whom she was living, so the distance wasn't so great. After a few months we became engaged. In ‘49 we were married. We had two children, two sons. Our older son is a doctor, our youngest son is a speech pathologist, and between them they gave a whole baseball team of grandchildren, nine grandchildren who ranged in age all the way from age 25 all the way down to almost 2. They are wonderful kids. As Gloria is fond of saying, “Hitler, eat your heart out."