Baylor’s Institute for Oral History is collecting the stories of soldiers who liberated the Nazi concentration camps.

Jack Reynolds was among the first Allied soldiers to see the liberated prisoners at the
Nazi death camp near Nordhausen.

“They were just barely alive. And the smell was the smell of death,” Reynolds said. “What I saw was all these dead people laid outdoors, there on the ground. And it looked like acres of them."

As a young Army Chaplain, Wilson Canafax saw concentration camp Buchenwald firsthand.

“We didn’t know much about concentration camps, or death camps. And neither did the German people,” Canafax said.

The stories these men tell are part of project underway at Baylor’s Institute for Oral History.

Dr. Stephen Sloan is the Director.

“What we do is build collections that explore events in a more complex way by trying to understand how individuals experienced those events,” Sloan said. “Even the death they saw on the battlefield couldn’t prepare them for their experience once they got to these camps.”

Hank Josephs was one of the liberators at Dachau. After killing the German guards, the soldiers tended to the still-living prisoners.

“I looked at the prisoners in their striped garb, so filthy and decimated,” Josephs said. “I opened my c-rations and fed him a little soup. Made a little soup for him and he died two hours later in my arms.”

Sloan said often, the former soldiers haven’t even taken time to share their stories.

“I’m always surprised coming in as an interviewer what they’ll tell me that the family may have never heard or that they’ve never shared with someone else,” he said.
This project ensures the horror witnessed by these men will never be forgotten.

“And so these testimonies are important for all of us collectively, that these men are stepping out to the point that they can share what their experience was, and make sure it gets documented and preserved,” Sloan said.

The two-year oral history project is paid for in part by the Texas Holocaust and Genocide Commission.

Once complete, the exhibit will be shown in libraries and museums around the state.