FEATURED VETERAN
Ed Ichiyama, 522nd Field Artillery Battalion
One of WWII's Greatest Ironies: Japanese American Soldiers Liberate Holocaust Survivors
Thrust into the belly of a war that threatened to consume all of Europe, the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion (of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team) definitely endured its share of grisly World War II campaigns. Toward the war's end, among those who had survived was Hawaii-born Pfc. Edward Ichiyama, a C ("Charlie") Battery forward observer and Purple Heart recipient for wounds received while liberating the Lost Battalion.
But the war had saved its most gruesome offering for last, revealed not in the midst of battle but in the relative quiet of a German countryside.
It was late April 1945, in the war's closing stages. The 522nd had pursued the Nazis into Germany's interior when, unexpectedly, a macabre scene began to unfold.
"All of a sudden, we came across hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of so-called prisoners," Ichiyama said in his Hanashi Oral History Program interview, "in their black-and-white prison garb – shaved heads, sunken eyes, hollow cheeks. Bare skeletons, roaming aimlessly around the countryside."
On the snow-covered ground, people had collapsed like so many fallen trees. "Gee, what is this?" Ichiyama wondered.
Without knowing it, the soldiers had entered Dachau, site of the first of many Nazi concentration camps for Jewish as well as political prisoners and others who supplied slave labor in sustaining the German war machine. Though not an extermination camp, it is believed that hundreds died of malnutrition and disease in Dachau's many camps.
"We saw several guys shred either a dead horse or a dead cow and just eating the raw flesh," Ichiyama said.
But having no knowledge of these camps, the 522nd soldiers jumped out of their vehicles and approached these bare shadows. They learned that many were Lithuanian Jews on a death march out of Dachau. As the Allies closed in, the German guards had abandoned their charges.
Some soldiers report that direct orders prohibited offering any solace to these ex-prisoners – no food, water, or medicine.
"But we did that anyway," said Ichiyama. "A compassionate individual everywhere and anywhere would have done it. You see somebody suffering like that, what are you going to do, just see them suffer?"
Ichiyama was among those who explored what was likely one of the Dachau sub-camps, by then deserted. He does not have the words to describe what he discovered.
"The stench was so terrible. After one or two minutes, the stench of feces, urine, the acrid smoke of burning flesh – indescribable, unbelievable. I couldn't stand it much longer, so I went out, retching."
Those who probed further discovered huge ovens, still warm, and several 50-gallon drums filled with ashes. Whether these were human ashes, Ichiyama said one "can only surmise."
Then near a railroad siding soldiers came upon what appeared to be a neatly stacked pile of cordwood. But upon closer scrutiny, it was not wood at all, but human corpses, stacked one on top of the other.
"You think to yourself, how can a human being be so inhumane to another human being," Ichiyama said.
The Dachau experience remains one of the greatest ironies of WWII for Ichiyama. Here were members of a persecuted minority, Japanese Americans – many with families interned in the United States -- reaching out to members of another persecuted minority, the Jewish people of Europe.
"And what were our crimes? One for being Jewish and one for being Japanese," he said. "That's our only crime."
Ichiyama finds it "very, very unfortunate" that there are people today who claim the Holocaust never occurred. But he doesn't try to argue with detractors. Instead, he gives a simple and direct reply.
"Of course it is very, very difficult for one to reconcile the atrocities associated with Dachau with that of the German republic. But I can say personally that it happened, because I was there. I was a witness."
