Memories of Tegemsee

Hours before the Americans arrived, SS troops, members of the elite corps that helped carry out the enormous
crimes history remembers as the Holocaust, herded the prisoners into barns, set the barns on fire and
machine-gunned those who managed to claw their way out. The memory of burned and bullet-riddled corpses
and bloodied bodies hanging limp on barbed wire fences haunted my father the rest of his life. The Americans
were so revolted by what they saw, he later recalled, “we did not view Germans as people that day.”