Friday, August 15, 2008
Hoyt's War
James Hoyt had nightmares.
Buchenwald wasn't a mass extermination camp with gas chambers. It was a high-security SS prison. Horrific medical experiments were conducted there. Inmates were starved & worked to death, shot, hung, tortured. Women were brought to Buchenwald to serve as SS prostitutes. The brutal original camp commandant was so corrupt that he was later arrested by the Nazis, tried, & executed at Buchenwald days before the camp was liberated. His wife is known as "The Witch of Buchenwald."
Elie Wiesel, then a teenager, was at Buchenwald when the war ended. His father had died there a few months earlier. German theologian & anti-Nazi resister Dietrich Bonhoeffer passed through Buchenwald on his way to another camp, where he was executed on April 9, hung with piano wire from a meathook.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
DES MOINES, Iowa - James Hoyt, one of four U.S. soldiers who discovered the Buchenwald concentration camp as World War II neared its end, has died.Private First Class Hoyt had fought in the terrible Battle of the Bulge. By April, as a seasoned soldier, he was chasing disintegrating German resistance with Patton's Third Army & probably thinking he'd been through the worst of it. Then he arrived at Buchenwald on April 11, 1945.
Hoyt's wife, Doris, said he died Monday in his sleep at home in rural Oxford. He was 83. The cause of death was not immediately determined.
Hoyt served in the Army's 6th Armored Division during World War II, earning a Bronze Star. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge, the bloodiest battle fought by American troops in World War II.
Buchenwald, one of the largest concentration camps established by Nazi Germany, was liberated in April 1945. It is estimated that 56,000 prisoners lost their lives at Buchenwald between 1937 and 1945.
Buchenwald wasn't a mass extermination camp with gas chambers. It was a high-security SS prison. Horrific medical experiments were conducted there. Inmates were starved & worked to death, shot, hung, tortured. Women were brought to Buchenwald to serve as SS prostitutes. The brutal original camp commandant was so corrupt that he was later arrested by the Nazis, tried, & executed at Buchenwald days before the camp was liberated. His wife is known as "The Witch of Buchenwald."
Elie Wiesel, then a teenager, was at Buchenwald when the war ended. His father had died there a few months earlier. German theologian & anti-Nazi resister Dietrich Bonhoeffer passed through Buchenwald on his way to another camp, where he was executed on April 9, hung with piano wire from a meathook.
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