Jimmy Gentry

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  The American soldiers discovered that the heavy use of Dachau's execution wall and camp crematorium have been replaced by a large gas chamber and four incinerators disguised as a shower room.  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.”

Jimmy Gentry was one of nine children who grew up in a working-class Williamson county family during the Depression. Franklin, Tennessee was a small, intimate community surrounded by fields and woods, and by unspoiled streams during the days of his boyhood. After the death of his father, he became an expert hunter, trapper, and fisherman in order to provide for his struggling family. Jimmy Gentry was a noted high school athlete, and at the age of 18 he went to war to help defend his nation. He was awarded two Bronze Stars for his actions during the invasion of Germany, and he was among the first Allied troops to enter Dachau, the infamous Nazi death camp.

He returned to Franklin and became one of Williamson County's most widely-known citizens, serving as a teacher and a coach for over half a century. His book, An American Life,  chronicles a time that has all but disappeared--both in Franklin and in small-town America. It gives one soldier's account of surviving war and encountering horror, and tells what became of Williamson County over the years that followed the return of that soldier. An American Life is a book about Jimmy Gentry, about Franklin, and about America. Jimmy Gentry lives three miles west of Franklin, Tennessee, near his three children and five grandchildren, on their Hwy. 96 farm, Pleasant View. He operates his summer camp, draws, paints, and is a continuing presence in the lives of his many friends and admirers.

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This page is last modified on January 21, 2008