Chapter 22

Far to the north, near midnight on the cold, rainy night of March 12, the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion crossed the Saar River and entered Nazi Germany. Attached now to the 63rd Infantry Division in General Patch’s Seventh Army, the Nisei artillerymen met no opposition. By 11:30 the next morning, they had dug in on German soil for the first time and begun firing on targets to the east.

From the moment he entered Germany, Kats was perplexed by what he saw. A few years earlier, this would have seemed a lovely place, the Germany he had read about since childhood. A land of fairy tales, with castles on hilltops, tidy villages, and whitewashed cottages.

But in March 1945, it was hard to see any loveliness in the German countryside. It wasn’t just the buildings crumpled by Allied bombing, the burned-out wreckage of German tanks and half-tracks strewn alongside the roadways, the black pillars of smoke rising from the remains of factories and railroad depots.

It was more a general sense that something dreadful lay in the land’s immediate past or immediate future—he couldn’t be sure which. Kats could see it in the eyes of the civilians they passed, standing in barn doors, peering out from behind shutters as the Nisei rumbled through villages in their trucks.

He had seen war-shocked civilians in Italy and France, but this was different. The faces he saw seemed to suggest that something beyond even the horrors of war, something profoundly dark, lay just over the horizon ahead of them.

Kats and his crew fell into a regular routine, setting up and firing their guns for a few hours then moving on. When their scouts found pockets of German resistance, the 522nd pounded them into submission before tanks and infantry filled in behind to mop up. By mid-April they were pursuing a German army in full collapse.

Whenever they had a break, Kats and his buddy Flint Yonashiro foraged for food, scouring the countryside for chickens and vegetables to supplement their K-rations—as they had done in Italy and France.

On one occasion, they returned with more than twenty squawking chickens stuffed into sacks and served up a barbecue for all the men in their unit. But the biggest prize was when they stumbled across an abandoned warehouse stacked to the rafters with enormous wheels of Dutch cheese, crates of canned Portuguese sardines, cases of schnapps and cognac, and boxes of cigars.

There were even some brand-new accordions still in their boxes.

Whenever they had some downtime, the men feasted on their bounty, passing around bottles of schnapps, slicing up wedges of cheese, and making hilarious attempts to play Hawaiian music on the accordions.

But the breaks were few and far between, and a cold reality was always just around the next bend in the road. And that reality was increasingly difficult to grasp.

Kats struggled to process all that he was seeing. A whole town reduced to rubble by Allied bombing. The bodies of German soldiers dangling from lampposts, hanged by their Nazi officers for desertion or cowardice. Dead horses sprawled in front of artillery pieces, as if this were a nineteenth-century war.

Then, on April 29, US troops approached the Dachau concentration camp in southern Bavaria, where tens of thousands of Jews, Poles, Russians, and other groups oppressed by the Nazis were incarcerated, treated brutally, and used as slave labor. Outside the camp, they found thirty-nine boxcars filled with 2,310 corpses. The bodies of men, women, children, and babies were all heaped together in a macabre tangle of limbs. The stench was overwhelming.

Inside the camp, thousands of starving prisoners in striped uniforms—victims of the Nazis’ relentless racist agenda of destroying Jews and other ethnic minorities—gathered. As their numbers increased, they pushed at the gate, threatening to overwhelm and stampede their liberators.

An SS officer, Untersturmführer Heinrich Wicker, came forward to negotiate the surrender of the camp. The Americans weren’t interested in negotiating anything. They marched Wicker to the train full of corpses and demanded answers.

As they moved deeper into the camp, the GIs’ anger mounted. Piles of naked dead bodies stacked up outside a building like firewood. A mountain of shoes—many of them children’s shoes. Some kind of interrogation room, its concrete walls splattered with blood.

Gaunt, hollow-eyed people rushed up to the GIs, cheering, embracing them, dropping to their knees and embracing their legs. Others, too weak to walk, crawled out of the barracks on hands and knees. Some stayed inside, lying in their own filth on wooden bunks, more dead than alive. They stared at the GIs with eyes behind which no one now lived.

In Dachau’s empty coal yard, a few GIs—by now in a cold and furious rage—lined up Nazi prison guards against a wall and shot them, killing several dozen, perhaps more, before a senior officer found them and put a stop to it.

In other parts of the camp, prisoners took matters into their own hands, beating an unknown number of guards to death. Untersturmführer Wicker was never again seen alive.

There is no firm evidence that any of the 522nd participated in the initial liberation of the main camp at Dachau, but by late afternoon at least a few Nisei soldiers had entered the camp.

Toshio Nishizawa recalled driving through the open gates and being shocked by what he saw. Josef Erbs, an eighteen-year-old Romanian Jew, remembered lying sprawled on the ground when a Japanese American soldier bent over, picked him up, and carried him to an aid station. It was the first time Erbs had seen an Asian person of any sort. He took note of the shoulder patch on the man’s uniform: blue, with a white hand holding a torch—the insignia of the 442nd RCT.

What the Nisei soldiers saw at Dachau was just one part of a network of Nazi concentration camps. Some were slave-labor camps like Dachau. Others, like Auschwitz-Birkenau, were devoted to the systematic murder of millions of Jews, Poles, Romani, disabled people, LGBTQ people, and anybody else that the Nazis labeled as undesirable. The next day, April 30, Adolf Hitler died by suicide in a bunker in Berlin.

That same morning, the main column of the 522nd moved south again, breaking down gates and liberating prisoners from some of the subcamps surrounding Dachau. On the road, they came across scores more bodies splayed out in muddy fields, ditches, and pinewoods.

The corpses were dressed in the same thin, striped uniforms as the prisoners at Dachau, and many of them had gunshot wounds to the backs of their heads—victims of a forced march out of the camp and execution when they couldn’t keep up.

On May 2, Kats and George Oiye, along with some other Nisei artillerymen, found scattered lumps in the snow. When they brushed the snow from the lumps, they found what they feared they would: more bodies.

Then, nearby, they noticed a boy crouching in the snow.

Solly Ganor, a Lithuanian Jew, one of those thousands marched out of Dachau days before, had awoken that morning covered by snow and surrounded by bodies. Now he watched warily as men in uniforms approached him.

It must be his turn to be shot.

He resigned himself to his fate and waited for the bullet.

Then he realized the men were speaking English. He looked up and saw Asian men smiling down at him. This did not make sense to him. He wondered if he were dead and these were angels. One of the angels hovering above him said, “You are free, boy.”

Ganor grappled for the English word. “Who?” he finally croaked out.

“Hey! He speaks English.”

“Americans,” one of the men said. “Japanese Americans.”[63]

One of the angels handed him a chocolate bar. Ganor took it but set it aside. He would not eat the chocolate. That would be like eating a treasure. “You would not eat the Mona Lisa,”[64] he would later say.