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(DAN FERRIS | CONTRIBUTED PHOTOS) Shown at right is Lieutenant Colonel Donald E. Downard - Commanding Officer of the 2nd Battalion, 222nd Regiment.
When you sit down and start to research something, or someone to write about, the stuff you find may not be the stuff you wanted to find. This is going to be one of those articles. This story is not for the faint of heart. Please use caution when reading this.
The person I started my research on and to work out a short blurb about his life, has lead me to a place most all of you won’t know, or not have a lot of knowledge of Dachau, Germany.
Vice President JD Vance and his wife Usha Vance just visited Dachau, Germany, and laid a memorial wreath on graves at Dachau. Vance then stated that this will never happen again. I hope and pray that nothing like this is ever present again on this Earth. Just one of the grave sites held the ashes of over 10,000 people. One grave site, of which there were many, many more grave sites.
Believe it or not, there are still people in this world who still say the German concentration camps did not exist. There were 27 main camps. Dachau was the first one, and was opened in 1933, and was at first just for German citizens. At the end of the war, there were over a 1,000 satellite labor camps. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of prisoners. Some also disclaim that seven million or more people were not interned or gased to death in these camps.
There were hundreds of U.S. troops who were there when these atrocities were first uncovered at Dachau, when these people were first liberated and freed. The back stories would be more than enough to make you wonder who, and how could people treat other people this way. Having said all of that. Please do some reading and research of this time of our history and you will be very thankful that you live here, and you live now, and not 80 years or so ago during WWII in Germany.
Lieutenant Colonel Donald E. Downard - Commanding Officer -2nd Battalion, 222nd Regiment
The man I started this story on comes to us through a friend of mine. Cleve, a guy who makes all of my custom leather holsters and leather goods. He been in the leather trade for years and years. Cleve is half way between Graham and Loving on Hwy. 16 North at “Jake’s Station.” This is Cleve’s grandfather’s story.
The time is during WWII, and most of this story comes from around the April 29, 1943, or 82 years or so ago. Donald was born Feb. 11, 1914, in Harland, Kansas. He attended schools in Oklahoma and Arkansas. He the attended Collage in Mountain Home, Arkansas. He worked with the Civilian Conservation Corps before joining the Army. He spent over 18 years serving this country, before he was put out of the military because of a disability.
After the Army he spent brief tours working in the motion picture industry. He found out that he loved working for the veterans and worked for the Texas Veterans Affairs Commission and later for the Disabled American Veterans in San Diego, California. After he retired he moved back to Texas and did service work for veterans until his death in 1994. He was 80 years old.
He was active in his community as a volunteer fireman, at his church and with school youth groups. Don was married to Elenore Eichholz in 1967. They had four children and nine grandchildren. Don also had five children and seven grandchildren from a previous marriage. Wow, nine children and 16 grandchildren.
Donald was a combat veteran long before he was assigned to the “Rainbow.”
The Rainbow 42nd Infantry Division was formed during WWI and was made up of 26 different national guard units and the guard from the District of Columbia. Each unit had its own flags and when it was all combined, the unit had flags of every color of the rainbow. And from then on the 42nd was known as the Rainbow Division.
In December 1944, the Rainbow went into battle in the Alsace Area. It turned back the final German offensive (code name Nordwind). It then breached the Siegfried Line, then on across the Rhine River to and through Wurzburg, Schweinfurt, Furth, Donauworth and then stopped along the way to liberate the concentration camp at Dachau, all on its way to the capture of Munich. This is the part of this story I want to tell you about.
This story is from old soldiers, that now have children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Most all of these guys were 20 years old or less. The sights and sounds and smells of this camp is not repeatable for the average Joe today.
People were left to starve, and die, bodies piled on in the snow. Lumps of frozen, snow covered things you can’t imagine. Box car after box car piled up with bodies in the rail yards waiting to be incinerated. Thirty-nine box cars, with 50 to 60, or more, bodies in each.
The horrors of war. Dead bodies of men, women and children, laying along the rail road tracks, outside the barracks, over by the mass grave pits, and on this day, a total of 2,310 bodies placed out side in the snow. Fifty to 100 or so a day who died from starvation with thousands gased. It was said they gassed 3,000 at a time, and it took 30 minuets or so and they could go all day and night. I could go on, but I want to stop there.
Back to Downard. He had the enviable reputation as an attack-oriented leader. He was known as the guy who was constantly on the go and too busy to do routine stuff and paperwork. He left that kind of stuff to his staff.
This story is of all of the thousand of dead bodies he and his men found when they entered Dachau and the one poor soul who was still alive in the piles of bodies.
While they were checking boxcars, they saw a hand barley moving under a snow covered pile and pulled him out. Downard, with help, carried him to safety and to life. Being the type of man Donald was, he carried the poor soul to his Jeep, and then had his driver take them back to the medical folks. While driving the Jeep, its crew came under fire and the driver turned too quickly and flipped the Jeep on its side.
Don woke up in the medical tent alongside the poor soul that they had pulled out of the pile. Don survived with a concussion and some scrapes. The poor soul was no worse for the ride and went on to survive. Freedom.
“I thank God and all of his Angels-his Angels from the Rainbow Division.”
It is said that “The Poor Soul” is Dachau survivor, Gleb Rahr.
After his Liberation, Rahr went to study at the Hamburg University. He worked for a Russian publishing house in Frankfurt, Germany. He was a correspondent for that institution for four years in Tokyo, Japan. He was also a lecturer in Russian history and culture for the Far East Department of the University of Maryland. In 1975, he went to work for Radio Free Europe. He retired and still worked freelance for that station. He was born Oct. 3, 1922 in Moscow. Not much else was known.
On April 29, 1945, the forward moving Battalions of the Rainbow Division were marching towards Munich. So far they had survived four months of battle, and many a lost lives. The war was to be over very soon, then came the call to Dachau. Horrors beyond any human imagination. There were estimates of over 200,000 POW’s in just that camp. It is estimated that 32,000 died from starvation and murder inside the fence.
The numbers are untold of the death marches, death trains and the gas chambers outside of their fence. All of this in just 12 years.
How many from all of the other camps?
