Eyewitness to
the Holocaust and World War II
Voices & Stories of an Era
Soldiers
Albert Zimmerman
Dachau Concentration Camp
Al Zimmerman of Pittsburgh was still in high school when Pearl Harbor was bombed, and he still remembers people screaming about what had happened and listening to the radio for more information. He had an older brother stationed at Hickam Field in Hawaii, and unlike today it took several weeks for the family to hear via a letter that he was ok.
After graduation Al went to the draft board where he was assigned to the Army. He originally wanted to be a flyer, but he found out he was colorblind and disqualified as an aviator and several other duties. While serving stateside he missed two calls to go overseas, but eventually he was sent to the battlefield as part of a machine gun squad with the 42nd “Rainbow” Division, nicknamed by Major Douglas MacArthur because its men were pulled from diverse National Guard units across the United States.
In April 1945, the 42nd Division liberated the Dachau concentration camp.
Fritz Ottenheimer
In My Own Words
Patriotic Duty
Without Conscience
Fritz Ottenheimer was born in Kontanz, Germany. He was able to escape Germany along with his family and come to the United States before the darkest days of the Holocaust. Speaking of the atrocities that the world–and especially Jews–suffered at the hands of Nazi Germany during World War II, Ottenheimer says, “It won’t hurt for people in the future to hear some of these things.”
After coming to America, Mr. Oppenheimer enlisted in the United States Army. He served in Germany as a translator because he was fluent in the German language.
In these video shorts from the TSVP Community Oral History archives, Fritz ponders the almost inconceivable occurrence that millions of German people could have stood by and allowed the Nazis to carry out the Holocaust.
In My Own Words
Joe Capone
That Happened
In 1945, Joseph Capone’s outfit was the first to discover Dora-Mittelbau, one of thirty slave labor subcamps near the town of Nordhausen. Its inmates worked to build secret underground factories for the production of V-2 missiles. By 1944, nearly 12,000 slave laborers were confined underground in dangerous, unsanitary conditions. As they died or became too ill to work, the inmates were removed to Dora-Mittlebau and surrounding subcamps. It is believed that Dora-Mittlebau had one of the highest mortality rates of any concentration camp. In this audio short, listen as Mr. Capone gives witness to this horror.
Tony Sercel
It Made Us Awful Angry
Anthony J. Sercel of Aliquippa, Pennsylvania served with the Army’s 82 Airborne Division (504th Regiment, 3rd Battalion, I Company) in Europe during WWII. Unlike other units of the Division that prepared for and participated in the Normandy invasion, Mr. Sercel’s 504th Regiment was held back to fight in the Italian campaign–Anzio, Naples, Foggia, Rome.
It was here that the 504th got its nickname from the diary of a killed German officer: “American parachutists…devils in baggy pants…are less than 100 meters from my outpost line. I can’t sleep at night; they pop up from nowhere and we never know when or how they will strike next. Seems like the black-hearted devils are everywhere…”
In April 1944, the 504th returned to England. While the rest of the 82nd participated in the June Normandy invasion , the 504th waited until September, when it then became the first of Allied troops to land in the Netherlands (Operation Market Garden); it would be the largest airborne operation in history.
Guy Prestia
In My Own Words
Listen to Guy talk about Dachau: ~00:46:45 minute mark
During WWII, Guy Prestia of Ellwood City, Pennsylvania was among the first Army troops to reach Europe through North Africa, Sicily, Salerno, and Anzio. From June 1943 through Allied Occupation, Guy served with the 45th Infantry Division, a unit formed out of the Oklahoma Army National Guard from the American Southwest. Official military records state that the 45th endured 511 days of combat and more than 63,000 casualties. By war’s end it was a tough, seasoned outfit. But it wasn’t always that way. “We really didn’t know what we were doing at first,” Guy admits. Mistakes were made. There were tragic friendly fire accidents in the fog of war, literally. One night early on during the invasion of Sicily, Guy’s unit heard planes overhead and someone started shooting into the mist and clouds above. “We were new in combat. We didn’t know,” Guy says. “We all fired up in the air.” The next morning the men discovered that they were shooting at paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division. Results were obvious. After pushing through France and Germany, the men of the 45th were among the first to liberate Dachau. Despite their battle hardness, they were unprepared for such inhumanity. It was terrible, almost beyond belief. Many soldiers, through the tears and vomit, now understood the importance of their service. And that smell . . . “It never leaves you,” Guy laments, thinking of those who perished.