Texas Reads>> archiveGlenn Dromgoole

11.11.2018  Texas soldiers helped liberate concentration camps

More than 300 Texans were among the troops who helped liberate the Nazi concentration camps at the end of World War II, and they’re listed in a remarkable book, The Texas Liberators: Veteran Narratives from World War II (Texas Tech University Press, $29.95 hardcover).

It seems appropriate, on this Veterans Day, to appreciate the service of these men who observed first-hand the unfathomable cruelty, starvation, filth, stench, disease, depravity and death in the prison camps.

Twenty-one of the Texans related their personal experiences to Baylor University oral historians a few years ago. Excerpts from their interviews make up the bulk of the book, edited by Aliza S. Wong with contemporary photographs of some of the liberators by Mark Umstot.

The book was produced as part of the effort by the Texas Holocaust and Genocide Commission to “help ensure that educators in Texas have the guidance and resources necessary to teach children the lessons of the Holocaust and other contemporary genocides.” The THGC, established by the Texas Legislature in 2009, provided a copy of the book to each of the 3,709 public and private high schools in Texas. Read more about THGC on its website, thgc.texas.gov.

Ray Buchanan, pictured on the book’s cover, said: “I’ve never seen such a sight in my life… dead people in carloads, and (others) walking around there with no flesh, just bones… thousands and thousands of them. Just made me sick. The smell was awful. I just couldn’t stand it.”

Another Texan, Ben Love, reflected on the horrors he witnessed: “You just can’t imagine how man, civilized man … how they could have inflicted that cruelty here in this century on people who had never harmed them, innocent people.”

Hall of Fame: Thirty-one Texas Rangers have been inducted into the Texas Rangers Hall of Fame in Waco. Historian Darren L. Ivey is producing an encyclopedic three-volume set chronicling the lives of the iconic lawmen.

The first volume came out last year from the University of North Texas Press, and now UNT Press has released The Ranger Ideal: Texas Rangers in the Hall of Fame, Volume 2, which weighs in at a hefty 816 pages, including nearly 300 pages of end notes, bibliographical references, and index ($45 hardcover).

This volume includes thirty- to fifty-page profiles of John B. Jones, Leander McNelly, John B. Armstrong, James B. Gillett, Jesse L. Hall, George W. Baylor, Bryan Marsh, Ira Aten, James A. Brooks, William J. McDonald, John R. Hughes and John H. Rogers, all of whom served between 1874 and 1930.

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Glenn Dromgoole’s most recent book is The Book Guy. Contact him at g.dromgoole@suddenlink.net.

>> Read his past Texas Reads columns in Lone Star Literary Life here.