The Chesterfield County Citizen

As I watch these “protestors” on college campuses shout out how they are “Hamas”, I not only want to grab a bat and beat the ever-loving crap out of them, but I think back to my father’s generation and how they spent the best years of their lives.

Many American soldiers always wondered why they were spending their teens and twenties fighting a war in Europe.  Oh, they knew how the Germans had beaten the combined strength of the English and French armies and taken control of the western part of Europe.  But as my father once explained to me, the Germans had not attacked America, unlike what had happened when Japan attacked us.  Fighting Japan is not a problem, but why fight Germany?

Over time, most came to understand what the Germans had done to the civilian populations in Europe and found it repulsive. They understood why the Germans had to be defeated, but the true meaning of why they were there was only understood a few months before the end of the war.

When the army commanded by General George Patton came to the Ohrdruf concentration camp, a sub-camp of Buchenwald, what they found made even the most battle-hardened combat veteran sick:

On April 12, 1945, Gen. Eisenhower, accompanied by Gen. George Patton and Omar Bradley, walked through Ohrdruf completely unprepared. Up until this point, Eisenhower had been unaware of the horrors being committed by the Germans and the nature of the Holocaust.

Eisenhower, after seeing and learning what occurred at these camps, forced local Germans to work burying the dead and tending to those who were barely alive.  Further, he commanded news outlets to report on what they found.  Finally, he had soldiers under his command who were not in combat at the time to tour the camps and report to their fellow soldiers what they saw.  This information affected the morale of the American soldiers in the war, unlike anything else.

In my opinion, this quote by Dwight Eisenhower summed up the whole war:

“Get it all on record now—get the films, get the witnesses—because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened.”

It is time for the world to remember just what happened over 76 years ago, look at what is happening today, and say loud and clear, NEVER AGAIN!