Jim Feezel joined the US Army in 1944 and became a tech sergeant in the 12th Armored Division. He was given the assignment of driver, operating a Sherman tank for the division. One year into his service, on April 29, 1945, Jim’s division pulled up to the front gate of Dachau, the notorious Nazi concentration camp located in southern Germany. Jim’s commanding officer gave the order and Jim drove his tank right though the front gate of the camp, thus initiating its liberation. At the time, there were 30,000 prisoners inside. Jim recalled marveling with disbelief at the stacks of bodies piled up like firewood. He remembered a malnourished man staggering towards his tank and finally sitting down in the dirt, overcome by weakness.
After the war, Jim worked as an engineer for the Amoco Oil Company. In a newspaper interview in 2015, Jim reminisced: “I often reckon with the very fact that I was such a small pebble in a large stream of thousands and thousands of men who went to fight this war.”
Jim passed away on October 15, 2020 at the age of 95. He was haunted his entire life by what he saw in 1945.