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GIs Remember - Julius Goldstein - Dachau

Julius Goldstein enlisted in the Army early in World War II and became Chief Air Traffic Controller of the 7th Army. He saw duty in North Africa, Italy, France and Germany during two years overseas.

In early May 1945, he visited the Dachau Concentration Camp and recorded his reactions in letters to his wife, Amy:

"I saw the most horrible, nauseating, barbaric, fiendish sight-I saw the Dachau camp.

Fifty boxcars were on a siding next to the camp, loaded with dead bodies — men with just skin and bone-none could have weighed more than 50 pounds. The men had been loaded in sealed box cars 40 days ago ... no food and no water.

Inside the camp there were a hundred or more boxcars that had been emptied-the bodies were stacked next to the cremating ovens- thousands of bodies, all just skin and bones. The clothes from the bodies had been carefully removed, and were in piles, each pile would more than fill an eight-room house.

I saw the cremating ovens, and the bodies being burned in them-the stench was horrible....

After the visit to Dachau, I broke out into a rash.... I knew what to expect, but somehow you have to see it with your own eyes to feel the full impact of the most despicable crime of all times."

GIs RememberNational Museum of American Jewish Military History