Dachau Liberators Bear Witness to Death Camp Horror, Rescue

Nearly 49 years after they established a lifelong friendship on a ghastly walk through hell on Earth, three old soldiers meet in Pacoima each month and relive the experience they shared at age 19.

The Rev. Melvin Darden of Pasadena, the Rev. Jerome Fisher of Compton and Don Duplechein of Pacoima arrived at the Nazis’ Dachau death camp with about 30 other troops of the 567th Ambulance Company on April 30, 1945, six hours after U. S. troops liberated the camp and nearly 20,000 survivors.

The field ambulance unit, led by Jewish officers and attached to the U. S. 7th Army, was made up mainly of African American troops.

And while a debate has raged over which U. S. Army unit arrived at Dachau first, Duplechein and his friends want history to recognize and accurately reflect the part they played in evacuating the prisoners who were scheduled to join tens of thousands of other people exterminated there during the war.

Since that day, with memories and sometimes nightmares, the trio have kept the experience alive in the hope that someday their African American ambulance unit will receive recognition.

“They’ve given recognition to everyone but the black soldier, and it’s something you learn to live with every day,” said Fisher. “It’s very hurting.”

Recognition finally came in May when the soldiers gave interviews, together and separately, for an oral history project undertaken by the Orange County office of the Anti-Defamation League.

“We decided because the survivors are getting older and older, and pretty soon there won’t be people around to tell the story, it’s important to document it on videotape,” said Jonathan Bernstein, regional director of the human rights organization.

“We also have our fair share of people in Orange County who deny that this ever took place,” he added, referring to historical revisionists and neo-Nazis who contend that the Holocaust was a hoax.

Their interviews are part of 600 hours of taped sessions with soldiers and survivors that have become part of the archives at the Holocaust Museum at the Smithsonian Institution and in the stacks at UC Irvine, Bernstein said.

The interviews are a victory of sorts for Duplechein, who tried for several years to generate interest in the unit’s story. He contacted producers for talk show hosts Oprah Winfrey, Geraldo Rivera and Phil Donahue, to no avail, before he was contacted by the ADL, he said.

Nothing, he said, can remove from their minds the horrors of the morning in 1945 when they entered snow-covered Dachau.

Their company got the word to move about midnight on April 29 from their camp near Salzburg, Austria. “It was snowing and very cold,” Duplechein said. “The big, wooden gates to Dachau were wide open when we got there.”

They saw the bodies of dead German troops half-covered by snow and only after entering the camp saw the survivors.

“We knew something was terribly wrong here,” Duplechein said. “I was the first one to walk into the camp. Lt. Rosenthal was behind me. . . . The first thing I saw was people hanging along the fence making gestures to us that they wanted food and water.”

Dachau, with its crematories, gas chambers, heaped corpses and walking dead, came as a complete surprise to the men, many of whom had never heard of death camps, both Duplechein and Darden recalled.

Fisher “stumbled” across the crematories, he said, when he sighted bodies stacked five feet high outside the door of a building.

“If you live to be 1,000 years old, you will never see that many dead bodies,” said Duplechein.

The gas chambers were housed in a beautiful building, he recalled. “It looked like a beautiful shower when you walked into it, but once you went in, that was it--they were pulling you out and stacking your body on top of the rest of them.”

Duplechein looked inside boxcars--about 39 of them, he remembers--filled with dead bodies.

Darden remembered people dying in his arms as the U. S. troops carried them to waiting ambulances that ran 21 hours every day for eight weeks, taking the survivors to field hospitals.

Darden, born in Fayetteville, a tiny town in southern Texas, said his experiences before the war were limited to “black folks and Mexicans.” At 19, he didn’t understand the differences between Germans and European Jews, who looked so much alike to him. Weren’t they the same people? he thought.

After the war, the soldiers went separate ways, but circumstances and religion reunited them.

Fisher, who had moved to Long Beach, was in San Francisco in 1953, searching for a church where he and his brother were to give a gospel performance, when he stopped to ask directions--and there was Darden. They met in mid-street, hugging and crying.

Duplechein and Fisher were reunited at a revival in West Los Angeles in the 1960s. Then, 12 years ago, at a revival in Pacoima, Darden, visiting from his Seattle church, looked up Duplechein’s name in the phone book. Today, he pastors New Morning Star Baptist Church in Pasadena. And knows Duplechein’s and Fisher’s phone numbers by heart.

These days the men gather at each other’s homes once a month, sometimes more, to enjoy each other’s company, recall the days of their youth, and how that youth ended one day in a godforsaken group of snow-covered huts 12 miles outside Munich.

“We talk almost everyday. We do things together,” Fisher said.

“We’re close enough to argue and bicker among ourselves sometimes. We’re like brothers, just about the only brothers we know.”