Jimmy Gentry was only nineteen years old when, as a member of General George Patton's 3rd Army, he was one of the first liberators of the Dachau concentration camp on April 29, 1945.
This was known as the “Hour of the Avenger”. There were 26 concentration camps liberated within 2 days during the closing days of World War II. The American soldiers discovered that the heavy use of Dachau's execution wall and camp crematorium have been replaced by a large gas chamber and four incinerators disguised as a shower room. In their frenzy of horror, anger and guilt, the soldiers liberated the prisoners and killed the German SS soldiers. From 1933 to 1945, 206,206 prisoners were registered at Dachau. Many of the inhabitants were never officially “registered”. The total number of dead will NEVER be known. Jewish civilians had been assigned by the Gestapo to the camp for Sonderbehandlung ("Special Treatment," a Nazi euphemism which signified "killing"), and many, many Jews died in evacuation marches and death marches. Their deaths were never registered.
“Off in the distance I saw boxcars lined up with hundreds of dead bodies inside. They looked starved and tortured,” remembers Jimmy Gentry. “I asked another soldier, ‘Who are these people?” He said, ‘They are Jews.’”
American infantryman Jimmy Gentry had seen combat at the Battle of the Bulge, but it paled in comparison to what he saw that day. “No one told us what we would find. No one explained what our mission was. We saw a wall and that was the entrance to a prison camp like I have never seen.” The camp was Dachau.
They were told, “Get the guards and get out.” Jimmy recalls his horror, “I couldn’t move, and though I knew what I had to do, I was numb at the same time.” He knew that soldiers died in war, “but non-soldiers? Just people? Religious people? I can’t understand it. Not then, and not now.”
When Jimmy returned home, he was determined never to speak about it again: “I kept thinking if I didn’t talk about it, it would go away.” But it didn’t, and in 1985 Jimmy met a Nashville Holocaust Survivor who convinced him to share his experiences with others. “Talking about it so many years later made such an impact on me,” says Jimmy, who wrote a book called An American Life in 2002. “It was all too much. I was a young boy, a simple foot soldier moving from one day to the next. I just wanted to get away from that place, away from smelling death.”
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OBJECTIVES:
- Identify the major causes of the Holocaust.
- Compare the life of a Jew to a Nazi.
- Define what a Nazi was and what their purpose was during W.W.II.
- Identify how their lives have been influenced by the Holocaust.
- Understand the experience of Jews in Germany from reading Number the Stars.
- Learn and practice techniques used by researchers to construct histories of individuals
- Examine primary source documents in an effort to determine the fate of individuals during the Holocaust and use secondary source information to fill in the broader historical context of these personal stories
ACTIVITIES:
Visas For Life
Go to http://www.rongreene.com/2Sugphoto7.html
1) Read this story about a Japanese diplomat who risked his career to save Jews from certain death.
- Restate the story in your own words.
- What was unique about Chiune Sugihara and why does the author of this introduction believe that he was willing to take risks to save others?
2) View the Photographic exhibit which links from the main page. Be sure to read the captions. They include quotations from some of the people that he saved.
- How many visas did he issue?
- How many lives did he directly save?
- If you count the number of people alive today who are related to those he saved how many people did he save as a whole?
3) What would YOU do?
Have you ever been in a situation where somebody around you said something about another person and you felt it was wrong, but you didn't want to say anything because you wanted to be friends with the person/group?
Most of the people in Nazi occupied Europe millions of people go to their death either because the thought it was the right thing to do or because they were afraid to go against the Nazis.
Now that you have read some of these stories what would you have done had you been a non-Jew in Nazi occupied Europe.
Write a reflective essay explaining your reasons and motivation. Try to draw on examples from your own life to support your claims.
National Standards
Social Sciences:
NSS-WH.5-12.8
Language Arts:
NL-ENG.K-12.1
NL-ENG.K-12.2
NL-ENG.K-12.6
NL-ENG.K-12.7
NL-ENG.K-12.8
NL-ENG.K-12.9
- History of Human Civilization: 7a. Understand the development and role of religion in early civilization. They will be able to discuss how religion established a code of conduct for the people and influences it had in different societies.
- Government/Civics: 1a. Acquire critical thinking and analytical skills; that is, they will use visual and mathematical data presented in various forms to assist in interpreting historical events. Students will chronologically organize significant events and people who form the foundation of early history.
- Geography: 4a. Understand that geography enables people to comprehend the relationships between people, places, and environments over time.
- Economics: 2b. Understand there are many influences on economic systems all over the world and the importance of their functions.
