Victor W. Holocaust testimony
Abstract
Videotape testimony of Victor W., who was born in New York and entered the United States Army in 1936. He recalls serving in Panama and Jamaica, then in Patton's army in Casablanca, Tunisia, and Sicily after Pearl Harbor; returning to the United States in summer 1944 for training under the Judge Advocate's office to assist with war crime trials; return to Europe in September; assignment to war crime investigations in Paris; transfer to Nuremberg; orders to accompany the unit liberating Flossenbu?rg; entering the camp when fighting had abated; shock at the prisoners' condition despite his training; the unbearable stench; learning most prisoners had been evacuated; rounding up guards; orders to follow the death march; smelling rotting corpses; finding recently dug shallow graves; compelling local residents, who claimed ignorance of the death march, to properly rebury the bodies; interrogating prisoners in Nuremberg, including Jochen Peiper; transfer to the defense team at the Dachau trials; encounters with Claus Schilling, who performed medical experiments on humans, and Martin Weiss, a Dachau Kommandant; orders to release a perpetrator of a massacre who was deemed necessary for postwar construction; and other perpetrators who were released due to postwar political considerations
Extent and Medium
2 videocassettes
Conditions Governing Access
This testimony is open with permission.
Conditions Governing Reproduction
Copyright has been transferred to the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. Use of this testimony requires permission of the Fortunoff Video Archive.
Rules and Conventions
Describing Archives: A Content Standard
Process Info
compiled by Staff of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies
People
- Schilling, Claus, -- 1871-
- Weiss, Martin Gottfried, -- 1905-1946.
- Peiper, Jochen.
- W., Victor, -- 1917-
Corporate Bodies
- FlossenbuĚrg (Concentration camp)
Subjects
- Video tapes.
- Men.
- War crime trials -- Germany.
- World War, 1939-1945 -- Participation, American.
- Dachau trial, Dachau, Germany, 1946.
- Nuremberg War Crime Trials, Nuremberg, Germany, 1946-1949.
- World War, 1939-1945 -- Personal narratives, Jewish.
- Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) -- Personal narratives.
- World War, 1939-1945 -- Participation, Jewish.
- World War, 1939-1945 -- Personal narratives, American.
- Liberator.
- Death marches.
Genre
- Oral histories. -- aat