Welcome to Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in this edition is US Army Private first Class Hilbert Margol. He served on a one hundred five millimeter Howards her team in B Company, three hundred ninety second Field Artillery Battalion in the forty second Infantry Division in World War Two. He was also among the liberators of Dachau concentration Camp in late April nineteen forty five. Hilbert Margol was born
on February twenty second, nineteen twenty four. He shared his birthday with his slightly younger twin brother, Howard, and both of them shared a birthday with our first President. Margol says the boys were frequently reminded of that for a very specific reason.
Well, she always told us every year on our birthday for many years, since we were born on George Washington's birthday. We could never tell a lie, and we tried to honor her statement.
Margol was just a few months shy of his eighteenth birthday when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December seventh, nineteen forty one.
Well, we were seniors in high school. That was December seventh, nineteen forty one. We graduated high school a little over a month later, January of forty two, And what I remember about that attack, of course, was the announcement and then President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's statement be a radio to the entire country what had happened, and the US was now at war with Japan.
The attack on Pearl Harbor brought the US into World War II. A few days later, the country would also be at war with Italy and Germany. But the Margol family, which is Jewish, had already been paying close attention to the worsening situation in Europe out of concern for family living in Lithuania.
Our father had his youngest sister with her husband and two or three young children living in Lithuania. He tried talking her into relocating to the United States. He would sponsor her and her husband and children, but she felt at that time Lithuania was safe and they just wanted to stay there. They used to correspond back and forth with letters, and finally, when the letters stopped coming from her, he knew something that was not right, but never really knew what happened.
Decades later they finally found out what happened. Margle's brother, Howard, became a professor and took students to Lithuania. On one of those visits, he found an elderly man who remembered what happened to Jewish families.
He told that before the Germans ever arrived in Lithuania, there was a group called the Lithuanian Bandits. They were Nazi sympathizers. They rounded up all the Jews in the town took them out in the woods. First, they took the young babies by their ankles, swung them around and hit their heads against trees in the woods while their parents and other children in the same family had to stand there and watch. And then they turned around, had them dig a trench, and they ended up shooting them
all and just burying them in that trench. And that's when he got the real story and he learned, and we know all those years, even today, the Lithuanian government has never wanted the world to know that some of their own citizens killed a lot of Jewish families before the German army ever even came into Lithuania, and to a certain extent, a lot of something similar to that happened in Poland. The government just more or less suppressed the information.
After graduating high school in January nineteen forty two, Margol and his brother joined the Army. They entered the ROTC program and began training on one hundred five millimeter howitzers while stationed in Florida. However, they agreed to switch to the Army reserves when told it might allow them to go to college before heading to war, and they did go to multiple schools before the Army decided they needed to send a lot more young men to win the war.
Margo eventually returned to working with one hundred five millimeter howitzers, but he had to fight to get back there after The Army and n initially had other plans for him.
And of course when I got to the forty second Infantry Division, for about the first two maybe three months, they put me in the infantry until finally they saw my mo and realized I belonged in the artillery. So then they after they qualified me on a M one rifle which was infantry and I got the sharpshoot of metal and the instructor told me the reason why I was so good because I never held a gun before in my life. I didn't have any bad habits he
had to try and break. So it got back to the artillery.
The howitzer units were very effective in the war. In fact, Margol says Germans later told him how surprised they were by the speed of the US artillery. So what made American artillery so devastating?
We had tremendous training. We could do everything in our sleep. We were so highly trained by the time we shipped over there was second We could do whatever we had to do without really thinking a lot. What are the components, Well, we didn't carry them one rifles. We carried carbine rifles smaller, same thirty calibers but smaller, lighter, smaller and wouldn't shoot as far. And UH learned how to be uh uh handled them one o fives each. We had four one
oh five million horses in our gun battery. Howard was a gunner on number two. I was a gunner on number three, and uh we had a sorry. Each gun had a sergeant, a corporal, and then the gunner was third in command. And each howard had contained a total of ten men sergeant, corporal, gunner, truck driver and the balance for ammunition preparers. And that was a setup, and we were so highly trained. Once we got the first fire missions. After a few fire missions, we knew what
the commands were going to follow. So they were preparing the ammunition even before we got the information because they knew what was coming next.
After pulling them out of college, the army had also split up Margol and his brother Howard into different units in different parts of the country, and after repeated attempts to serve together failed, it took some higher authorities to make it happen.
Three times, he put in a request for transfer to my outfit in Oklahoma, get back in the artillery, which we were highly trained for as gunners. So after the third time nothing happened, he went to his captain, what's the status of my transfer requests? The captain told him, my job is to train you, not transfer you. So with that information he wrote a letter to our mother telling her the situation. She wrote a letter to President Roosevelt saying that she wanted us to serve together, and
we wanted to serve back together. Two weeks later, she got a letter from the White House signed by the President's aide some general that as a two star mother, her request would be granted, didn't say whether I'm going to him or he's coming to me. Two weeks later she got another letter from the War Department basically saying
the same thing. We still didn't know. Fortunately, she got the third letter from the one hundred and fourth Division headquarters saying Howard was going to be transferred to my outfit at oklahom Oh. That was time for celebration.
In late nineteen forty four, the Army quickly prepared the forty second Infantry Division and two others to get to Europe to fight in the Battle of the Bulge. Not all of the division made it over in time, including Margol, but those that did suffered through intense fighting on the last couple of days at the Bulge. After a couple of weeks to regroup, the full forty second Division, including Margol, saw its first action in January nineteen forty five in southern France.
Well, we still thought we were in training in the French countryside north of Marseille. They told us it's close to midnight one night to dig in our howarzers. So we dug the howarzers in. They told us who put our camouflage nets over the guns? We thought well, it's a sale part of the training until early, very early, the first light next morning shall start flying over our heads. Said, well, this must be the real thing, and we realized we were at the time in a village called Wingans or Motor,
the village of WinGen, France, on the Motor River. We would dug in on one side of the river. The Germans. On the other side of the river was what the locals called a mountain. We called it a very high hill. The Germans were dug in on the other side of
that very high hill. Took us about three days to learn, due to the difference in the sound, which shells flying over our heads were from the Germans going towards targets behind us, and which shells from the one fifty five milimeter howartzes and the two hundred and forty milimeter howartzes behind them were firing towards targets behind the German lines on the other side of the river. You could tell by the difference in the sound, you learn which shells were going coming from where.
And one of the first things Margol learned in combat was that he was never very far from the howitzers.
We had sleeping bags so at nightfall we had to get in our sleeping bags, and throughout combat we never were more than a few feet or a few yards away from the howitzer because we had to get ready for fire missions morning, noon, night. We could get fire missions at any time because we were in direct support of the two twenty second Infantry guys right in front of us. We never put our howartzers inside any city,
town or village. We were always on the outskirts because the infantry guys were in the city towns or villages and whatever was holding them up from advancing, that was the targets that we were firing at.
That's Hilbert Margol. He's a US Army veteran of World War Two. In just a moment, the forty second Infantry Division keeps pushing east and eventually helps to liberate Docou Concentration Camp. I'm Greg Corumbus and this is Veterans Chronicles.
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This is Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in this edition is Hilbert Margol. He's a US Army veteran of World War Two, serving as a one hundred and five millimeter howitzer gunner in the forty second Infantry Division. After that first combat in southern France, the forty second Division kept pushing east. Margol tells us what the aftermath of that fighting looked like. As the division moved along and eventually moved all the way to the Rhine.
I guess we were in that position for maybe a couple of weeks, and then we were ordered to pull out and head north. That's when we went through different towns, villages, and as each one was captured. Then we would ride through the village of town city and see various damages bombed out areas we never knew which rubble was from our firing or from aerial bombing or tanks, and then we would move forward. As the infantry moved to the next village of town, we followed right behind them, but
at some point went to the Hurtkan Forest. I remember we had a couple of snow days there in the forest, and then from there we moved forward, crossed over the Rhine River into Germany, and that would have been late March, I think late March the twenty fourth, nineteen forty five.
Margo also explains how the artillery guys were placed in one of the safest possible positions during combat, and he shares some more about where the forty second Infantry division went as it advanced into Germany.
Well, we were very lucky because I'd say we were always on the outskirts behind the infantry, so we never saw any German tanks except those that were knocked out
on the side of the road. We saw a number of a lot of German soldiers deceased, some Allied soldiers, also American soldiers deceased, a lot of dead horses because when the German army ran out a fuel, they grabbed whatever horses they could find, hooked them up to pull their vehicles, and they're howarzers, any tank guns, whatever they had, and we moved on different Wurtzburg Schweinfurt was another experience,
then Nuremberg. After Nuremberg, we actually took over a German air base in a suburb of Nuremberg called firth if U r THH and then from there the next military objective was Munich.
But it was late April nineteen forty five when Margol and the rest of the forty second Division made their way through Germany and were overcome by a powerful and unusual smell that they then investigated.
And early Sunday morning, April twenty ninth, nineteen forty five. We were riding on a two lane country road towards Munich, and I remember seeing road signs. At one point, the largest sign said dach Haw, meaning the village city of Dachau, Germany. Below that was smaller arrow signs in both directions, and one was pointing in the direction of Munich, and it had Munchren on it, which in Germany Munich number of kilometers. We converted it to miles and realized we were eight
nine miles north of Munich, Germany. A short time later we got orders to pull over on the right side of the road. The smallest cleared area in the wooded area where our four hours is were the closest together they had ever been. Everybody smelled a very strong holder, and we had a number of fire missions towards Munich. One of our jeep drivers came by and sat on the woods on the left side of the road. There must be a chemical factory creating this very strong older.
My brother Howard came over to me. He said, no, he don't think it's a chemical factory. What it reminds him of when we were youngsters, our mother would go to a meat market and buy a freshly killed chicken, take it home, hold it over the gas flame of the stove in the kitchen to burn off any remaining pin feathers from the chicken. He said, in so doing it would burn some of the skin and the fat of the chicken. He said, that's what the older reminds
him of. I asked my gum, Sergeant Tom Rogers' permission for Howard and I if we could go over through the woods find the source of what causing this very small odor. He said, okay, go ahead, don't stay long because we don't know. We just had a lull and fire missions. We don't know how long we're going to be there. So Howard and I took off went through the woods. It took us about ten minutes to get through the woods. Some people asked, well, how could you
go that quick? And I said, well, the differences between woods in this country and over there was people that lived around the woods, probably almost daily would go into the woods looking for twigs, branches, limbs to take home to use his firewood. So the floor of the woods was clear, so you could go pretty quick, different from this country.
That's Hilbert Margol, He's a US Army veteran of World War Two and helped to liberate Docou concentration Camp. Much more on that straight ahead. I'm Greg Corumbus, and this is Veterans' Chronicles. This is Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in this edition is Hilbert Margol. He's a US Army veteran of World War Two, serving as a one hundred and five millimeter howitzer gunner in the forty
second Infantry Division. A moment ago, you heard how a strange and overpowering smell struck the division as it made its way to Munich. We now pick up that story as Margol investigates the source of the smell and tells us what he discovered.
The first thing we saw was a wide open area and we saw a lot of railroad box cars. We crawled over between two box cars in the middle of the train. First thing box car on our right. About four or five of the box cars, the sliding doors were wide open, and the first one on our right was unique because it was the only one that had a deceased prisoner's legs hanging out of the box car. We had a little Brownie box camera. We had liberated
a couple of weeks earlier. The only film we had was what was inside the camera, so we hadn't taken any pictures yet. We didn't know how many films we had, but we took that picture because that was unique, different from the other box cars. I used that picture and presentations, which I do quite often. Anyhow, we looked at some of the other box cars. Every one of them was just filled jam filled with seized prisoners. We later learned
this train was called the death train. Twenty days earlier, it left Buchenwald concentration Camp with about twenty five hundred Jewish prisoners. Took them twenty days to get from there to where they ended up the day before we arrived, because sometimes they had to stop to get cold. Sometimes they had to stop for the trucks to be repaired so they could move forward. We got there and then we noticed there was a two story building close by. We saw some other soldiers go through a gate in
the middle of that building, so we followed them. The gate had the words on it our bite mach free in German, which meant work makes you free. So we just followed the other soldiers through the gate. We looked around it was a wide open area, which we left learned was the area that five point thirty every morning, thirty two thousand prisoners had to fall off a roll call every early every morning. We didn't see any of the prisoners because they were told the day before that
the SS general in charge. Because next to the concentration camp was a much larger German Army SS training camp that controlled the concentration camp. So we looked around and in various places we saw stacks of bodies, naked bodies stacked like cordwood here there. We didn't understand what we were seeing because we didn't know what happened, Why were they doing that, what were they It was like a
Hollywood movie set. We later learned after the war that the Germans had run out of Without cold, they could not operate the ovens, so that's why these stacks of bodies were there, because they couldn't cremate them.
Margo also shared plenty of other memories about what he saw, heard, smelled, and experienced as the nazis unspeakable treatment of their prisoners became clear.
No, because they were all in the barracks, we never saw i am. We learned later that of the thirty two thousand prisoners, and some of the barracks were strictly Jewish prisoners, others were Russian prisoners, Russian soldiers that were prisoners, and people from other parts of Europe, gypsies, whatever they
call them, romas. And I've read all kinds of stories about what happened before we got there, and the one book that I two books that I paid attention to because I know they're factual based on the authors and contents. And the Germans for each barracks, they appointed a prisoner in charge of the barracks because they didn't want to deal with the prisoners on a twenty four hour basis,
so they appoored them. Like prison system in this country used to have trustees to be in charge of a certain number of prisoners, the Germans did the same thing. I'm trying to think of what they called them. I'll think of it in a minute. They were the ones in charge of the prisoners, and they were prisoners, and they were much tougher on the prisoners than the German soldiers were because they wanted to show the German soldiers that they were helping them, so they really were tough
on the prisoners. And doing so, they got better treatment, they got better food, or doing that. I've read stories that when our units came in to dock How concentration camp, some of the prisoners came out of the barracks. Of course, we were there early Sunday morning, April twenty ninth, nineteen forty five. The official surrender took place at two point thirty that afternoon. By that time we were on our
way to Munich. These stories claimed that some of the prisoners took the rifles from the infantry guys to kill German soldiers. Not true because inside the prisoner camp there were no German soldiers. There were these trustees. That's who they killed. They were prisoners, but they didn't like them. The other prisoners didn't like them at all, and that's who they killed. When the forty fifth came in, they came into the German Army camp SS training camp, which
was much larger and next door the trains. The first three or four cars of that train railroad cars were open cars filled with dead bodies. And the first forty fifth Division soldiers that saw all these dead bodies, a lot of them were wearing these pajama type striped uniforms, and they rounded up. There was about fifty German young soldiers Wehrmacht. They rounded them up, and they ran and set them up like a firing squad, and they fired and they killed all but three of them. Three survived.
And when General Patton heard about that, he ordered all pictures to be destroyed, which they were not. We have pictures of that. I have pictures that that I acquired, and that's what happened.
As we mentioned earlier, Margol is Jewish, and the reality of the Holocaust has impacted him deeply ever since that day at Dachau, but he says at the time he and other troops were mostly unaware of who the concentration camp prisoners were or why they were there.
We didn't understand what the camp was all about. We didn't understand what we were seeing these railroad cars with all these dead bodies stacked inside. Because we also learned after the war that the rail cars that left Buchenwald they packed these prisoners in like sardines wintertime. They put a porcelain pot in each rail car is the bathroom. They gave him a loaf of black bread tatus and that was it. Locked the doors and sent the train on their way. We learned all this after the war.
We didn't know any of that when we went in because the concentration camps were not military objectives period.
But while he says the rank and file troops did not know anything about the Holocaust until they saw it with their own eyes, he also says our military and political leaders were very much aware of it and took immediate steps to make sure the world would always be aware of it.
Oh, they knew, sure, Washington knew, political leaders knew, our command headquarters knew. They knew about it. But there was not a military objective. As each camp was liberated, I think, starting with Bougenball, General Eisenhower ordered all commanding officers within forty miles of fifty miles of each camp was liberated. He wanted them to spare every soldier they could to go there and be a witness to what they witnessed, because even every one of them, and certainly at dark,
howe all the dead bodies. When the first medical units came in, they totally ignored the dead bodies. It was too late to save them. They worked on the ones that were near death. High percentage of those thirty two thousand prisoners were very ill with Typhus life's born disease. The Germans had nothing to kill the lice. All they did each prisoner came in, they shaved all their hair off one time and that was it.
After the war, Hilbert Margol and his brother Howard spent about nine months on occupation duty. Margol describes his first assignment while awa.
My brother and I served for nine months after the war near Salisburg, Austria, and they had different details. We were both pfc's private first class and it gave us different details. The first detail we had we stayed in it. They put us sleeping quarters, living quarters within an whole monastery and that's where we lived. Near the monastery was a former Austrian Army stockade. They filled it up with
SS officers. There were prisoners. Early every morning we would ride in trucks with the prisoners up on the mountain side to chop down. The prisoners chopped down trees, then chopped the trees into smaller sized pieces of lumber wood, filled them into the trucks to take into Salzburg. First to give to the bakers to use his firewood for their ovens, to bake bread, and then some for the army for the stoves and cibilians that lasted.
Some weeks later, Margol and a couple of other soldiers were sent to Genoa, Italy to meet a US ship carrying grain. That grain was then poured into railroad cars normally reserved for carrying liquids. It passed through the Poe Valley and the Brenner Pass on the way back to Austria. He also remembers one incident of stopping by a farm and picking some ripe tomatoes that most certainly added some
flavor to his army rations. In twenty fifteen, seventy years after the liberation of Dacau, Margol returned for the anniversary events, and he remembers a brief interaction with then German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
So, when I was old, the speakers were coming out from the front, but it was stopping go because everybody else was trying to get out. Suddenly I looked to my right and there was chance for Angela Merkel of Germany standing right alongside me. I tapped her on her arm and thanked her for her remarks because she spoke in English. She saw a cap similar to this one thanked me for being a liberator.
Now, eighty years after the end of the war, Margol reflects on what he's most proud of from his service. He says, it's a great testament that his generation not only answered the call for military service, but were able to adapt to whatever the military, the enemy, or anyone else through at them.
We just knew it was our time. Ourselves and all of our fellow soldiers were all raised during the Great Depression. Most of us all came from poor families. We were used to hard times, so we were better prepared for combat than some of the wars that followed this country after us. We were used to being in tough situations. We didn't have a lot, so we were able to acclimate a lot better to combat.
Margo is also eager to tell his story of service whenever and wherever he can, and of course, a big reason for that is the profound impact the Holocaust had on him, the Jewish people, and the world. He says, there is a very specific reason why he wants as many people as possible to hear about the Holocaust.
When I got home, I got married children, never told my wife or children anything about my military service, and some years ago before the pandemic, I was interviewed similar to this for television. They also have a magazine, a monthly magazine. They asked me some of the same questions and they asked me for final thought, which they ended
up using to close the program. And the thought that came to mind that I said at the time that I hope and pray that the offspring of all the survivors outlive the offspring of the deniers that the Holocaust, whether it existed or not. And that's what they used to close that TV program.
That's US Army Private first Class Hilbert Margol. He served on a one hundred and five millimeter howitzer teen in B Company, three hundred and ninety second Field Artillery Battalion in the forty second Infantry Division. He was also among the liberators of Docout concentration Camp in late April nineteen forty five. I'm Greg Corumbus and this is Veteran's Chronicles. Hi, this is Greg Corumbus, and thanks for listening to Veterans Chronicles,
a presentation of the American Veterans Center. For more information, please visit American Veteranscenter dot org. You can also follow the American Veterans Center on Facebook and on Twitter We're at AVC update. Subscribe to the American Veterans Center YouTube channel for full oral histories and special features, and of course please subscribe to the Veterans Chronicles podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks again for listening, and please join us next time for Veterans Chronicles