Posted on 10/17/2020 4:37:21 PM PDT by lowbridge
World War II hero Jim Feezel from Alabama, who drove a tank through the front gate of Dachau in Nazi Germany to liberate prisoners at the infamous concentration camp, has died.
James Martin Feezel died on Thursday, Oct. 15, according to Roselawn Funeral Home in Decatur. He was 95.
In a video interview project by Gary Cosby Jr. with The Decatur Daily in 2015, on the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, Feezel recalled the moment his commanding officer told him to break through the gate at Dachau on April 29, 1945.
“We were facing the front gate at Dachau prison,” Feezel said. “He said, ‘Jim, put the tank through that gate.’ So, I have the dubious honor of doing that. And, immediately glancing over at the bodies stacked like cord wood, this young 19-year-old just about lost it.”
Feezel, a technical sergeant for the 23rd tank battalion of the 12th Armored Division, drove a Sherman tank during the war.
An emaciated inmate approached the tank after he drove into the camp, he said.
“Looked like a skeleton was walking towards me,” Feezel said. “He was finally too exhausted and he just sat down.”
Feezel emphasized that he was one of many soldiers who played a role in the defeat of Nazi Germany.
“I often reckon with the very fact that I was such a small pebble in a large stream of thousands and thousands of men who went to fight this war,” he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at al.com ...
Just another in a very long line of American heroes.
True dat.
Stationed near Munich in the early ‘80s, Dachau was high on my list to visit. One really can’t fathom the carnage that took place or the horrific conditions experienced by those sent there unless you see it firsthand.
And he will be welcome by thousands as he enters the pearly gates. I can’t even imagine the horror he felt when he saw that stack of bodies.
The worst part is that “Never again” is slowly becoming “Here we go again”
Take Dachau and multiply it by a hundred, that was Auschwitz.
And you ask why I shed no tears about what happened to Dresden?
Because of soldiers like him my problem when i was 19 was trying to get served.
Dachau was just about the only place justice was served against rank and file SS.
I know that the NKVD used Buchenwald after the war.
It is always the Left that sets up concentration camps where people are sent to work and die.
Rest in peace, Sir.
We have a close friend who was a 15 year old girl who lived in Dresden during WWII. She had no input into what happened to the people in concentration camps. Neither did the American servicemen who were prisoners being held in Dresden and were made to dig bodies out of the rubble.
After the war our friend married an American serviceman. What she told us was horrific.
My wife's father was a tanker in WWII in the 3rd Armored Division. He was horrified by what he saw first hand at the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp in Nordhausen, Germany. He said that he felt paralyzed by the smell and what he saw, and the people walking around who looked like they were already dead.
Dresden falls in the jurisdiction of fhayek rule #3. You have no right to bitch about the consequences of a war that you start.
RIP.
G.I.s horrified by what they saw in Dachau gunned down 30 to 50 SS guards. Stateside newspapers bleated, “we’re just as bad as the Nazis!!!”
Those soldiers were brought up on charges by the chain of command, but Gen. George Patton who now commanded that area of occupation, personally dismissed every charge. He had seen Dachau too.
Patton force marched German civilians past the stacks of bodies and then made them bury the dead. Many Germans committed suicide, thinking they were next.
Goebbels wanted “Totaler Krieg”, and he got it!
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