Photo By Staff Sgt. Daniel Friedberg | FLOSSENBUERG, Germany – U.S. Army Reserve Soldiers from the 361st Civil Affairs...... read more read more
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Breaking from more than a dozen days of compacted annual Reserve readiness training during exercise Forward and Ready 20, U.S. Army Reserve Soldiers from the 361st Civil Affairs Brigade and 7th Mission Support Command boarded three busses to view the Flossenbuerg Concentration Camp Memorial located here August 4, 2020.
The Flossenbuerg site was a forced labor camp which operated from 1938 until its liberation by U.S. Army forces on April 23, 1945.
After arriving at the camp, the Troops, who are currently training at the United States Army Garrison Bavaria at Grafenwoehr, formed up to get a short history lesson from Col. Carlos Gorbea, the commanding officer of the 361st CAB.
Gorbea said he had close personal ties to Germany by marriage and that the history here meant much to him as a professional Soldier.
He also told his Soldiers that the history of the 20th century continues to be a tough thing for Germans to reconcile.
“This machinery of enslavement, the killing and destruction is not really something that you want to remember,” said Gorbea while pointing to the camp entrance and surrounding houses built after the war.
“Flossenbuerg was considered the forgotten concentration camp, said Gorbea. “A lot of places like this were just forgotten and never spoken of."
Gorbea explained that it took decades of persistent educational effort by dedicated historians and scholars to get the local population to even recognize and memorialize the camp.
Gorbea also said that the sacrifice of American Soldiers here 75 years ago helped stop the atrocities at Flossenbuerg during World War II and that the camp therefore was important U.S. Army history.
Gorbea then asked his Civil Affairs Soldiers to recall the Holocaust and what happened here if called on duty with a mission to develop structures of governance in support of U.S. Army strategy.
“You stand on the backs of giants,” said Gorbea.
Chaplain (Lt. Col.) Robert Crawford, the command Chaplain for the 7th MSC also told the group about Dietrich Boehnhoeffer and to consider his example of civil bravery while touring the camp.
The German born clergyman gave up his parish in Harlem, New York and returned to Germany as a clandestine operative during the war before being caught and hung at the camp’s stockade on April 9, 1945.
Donning face masks and spreading out into smaller groups to observe current COVID virus social distancing measures, the Troops entered the camp through its main gate house entrance to visit the museum displays at the former camp kitchen and roll call grounds.
The group learned that beatings, torture, forced labor, rape, starvation, prostitution, coercion and murder were committed daily in the camp which served as a source of raw materials and armaments for Germany during the war.
The Nazis especially targeted Jewish people, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Sinti, Roma and those politically active against its government within a large forced labor and extermination system that was responsible for the deaths of millions of victims.
American Military Service Members were among the approximately 100,000 detainees in the camp of which 30,000 were murdered.
The Soldiers then visited the Jewish memorial and adjacent chapel located next to the Cemetery of Honor before descending a path overlooked by granite guard towers leading to the “Valley of Death,” the Square of Nations, the Pyramid of Ashes and the site crematorium where the victim’s bodies were destroyed.
After the visit, the group gathered at the camp memorial offices which once housed the former German SS guard’s dining facility.
They discussed how institutionalized hatred destroys society and the responsibility to maintain individual moral vigilance, to defend humane democratic principles, and to recognize governmental erosion before it dissolves into sanctioned genocide.
Gorbea then thanked Flossenburg Concentration Camp Memorial historians Johannes Lauer and Dr. Matthias Rittner for their support for the visit by presenting them with a 361st CAB unit certificate of appreciation.
At the conclusion of the discussion, the Soldiers then boarded their busses, returned to their barracks on Grafenwoehr’s Camp Normandy and resumed their readiness training.
| Date Taken: | 08.04.2020 |
| Date Posted: | 08.05.2020 09:06 |
| Story ID: | 375300 |
| Location: | AMBERG, BY, DE |
| Web Views: | 274 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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