So Great a Heritage

The Texans were confident they had seen the worst until they faced the blackest depth of human evil. In their sweep southeast toward Austria, the 36th encountered their first concentration camps. The Nazis had tucked several death camps in the southeastern corner of Germany near Dachau, Hurlach and Lansberg. Forty years later, in a conversation with his son-in-law, Cecil spoke more candidly about the discovery of these death camps. He described the day his unit moved into the area. With no clue as to what was behind the intense fortifications they were approaching, the stench caused many hardened soldiers to lose their last consumed rations. As the horror built with each step into the compound, those with stronger stomachs lost theirs as well. Cecil mentioned a pile of shoes in his notes. The scene prompted waves of images recounting innocent lives that should be walking, jumping and dancing in those shoes. The pile lay there virtually unchanged since the day they were ripped from the feet of the doomed prisoners. The bodies did not fare as well. In each concentration camp, the piles of discarded humans were in different stages of decay. The Texans were the unfortunate ones to authenticate the unbelievable rumors of atrocities. Taking photographs of the stripped bodies, barely more than skeletons, seemed one more indignity to heap upon the stripped lives so cruelly devoured by Nazi hatred. History is grateful, however, that Sgt. Turner and other soldiers knew the importance of establishing a record of such monstrous crimes. Only when his children became adults would Cecil take the shoe box from the closet and show them the graphic images. Today, at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the flag of the 36th Division, along with 34 others, is flown in honor of the concentration camp liberators.
Colonel Lockhart records in his book:
The advancing Americans were appalled at the stench of bodies, the roadside litter of dead, and the walking dead who were little more than skin stretched over bones. There was clear evidence that the SS guards, before being forced to flee, had machine-gunned their victims. In some camps, (liberated) prisoners went on the rampage, looting nearby villages, finding SS guards disguised in prison uniforms and literally tearing them to pieces upon such discovery. It became our job to restrain them. It was not a pleasant job.16


May 7, 1945
Dear Mom and Dad,
Somewhere in Austria
It’s about time for breakfast but here’s a short note to say hello. I mailed another gun today and I think you will get a kick out of it because you probably never saw one like it. That makes three I have sent.
News has just come that the war is supposed to be over. I sure hope it’s true. Maybe I will be home by Xmas or maybe for my birthday- who knows?
I know some of you would like to know what I think of the Germans. The truth is I have not made up my mind whether all the people should be shot or just part of them. Personally, I hold the entire German nation as guilty of throwing the entire World into War and confusion. There may be some good people in Germany. I rather think that maybe there are but one can’t tell who they are. They are all guilty of not stopping the Nazis, instead we are over here thousands of miles from home to do away with Nazism. The French say never trust the Germans at all.
Now that the War is about over I think we will try to have a little more recreation. Maybe go fishing now and then, etc. etc.
It looks like I stand a pretty good chance of living through this war now. How do you use a fork?
Love,
Cecil

In the remaining letters, a noticeable change in attitude toward the Germans is not surprising after Sgt. Turner witnessed the Holocaust. When any man is faced with such evil, a glimpse into the depths of depravity must affect his perspective on criminals and appropriate justice. For the rest of his occupational duty, as Cecil dealt with the Germans, from former Nazis to civilians, he could not help but see the images of corpses and piles of shoes. There was no inner struggle for him to box up some guns left by the Nazis and send them home to America. If he could, he would have sent them all just to get them out of German hands. Evidently, the Army felt the same way and let the soldiers use the mail to partly dispose of the rising stockpile.
Cecil, like many other T-Patchers, began to believe he might be among the survivors of this ordeal. This brought a different kind of strain as expressed by one soldier, “ those last few days, while easy as far as the fighting was concerned, were about the toughest on us. Each day you felt that if I make it today, I might end up making it. Before that, you felt that if I don’t get it today, I’ll get it tomorrow.”17