Waco History Podcast

As the war in Europe was winding down in the spring of 1945, exhausted troops probably thought they were immune to being shocked. But knowledge of the atrocities committed in Nazi concentration camps was on the horizon. Nothing could have prepared them for that. Hank Josephs of Corpus Christi served in Intelligence & Reconnaissance during the war and recalls checking out reports of a concentration camp near the town of Dachau in late April of '45: "We got there, and the first thing we saw was a sign over the entrance which says, Work Will Make You Free, ‘Arbeit Macht Frei.' We went through the gate, and we shot a few Germans. They were escaping. I looked at the—at the prisoners in their striped garb, so filthy and decimated. One of them moved. And I went over to him, and he said, ‘Bist a Yid?' Are you Jewish? I said, ‘Ich bin a Yid.' I am Jewish. And then I told him, ‘Alles geet. Alles geet.' I speak a little Yiddish. ‘Alles geet. Alles geet.' All is good. All is good. And I opened my C ration and fed him a l