More than ever expected

It’s difficult to believe that we are starting the last day of our trip. We’ve covered a lot of territory and made many new friends. Standing in the places we’ve been reading about for several years now has brought new clarity to our study.  It has also made us understand how much more study we need to do 

Each day of our trip has brought new discoveries. Today we were taken to the delousing barn where I believe Dad took the only shower he had on the eighty-six day Death March. His clothes were baked in an oven to kill the lice and he was sprayed with DDT to kill any critters that may have survived the process. I remember him saying, “ had one shower in eighty-six days and that was without soap”. If my calculations are correct he had marched for approximately sixty-five days before this shower and delousing. The war was coming to an end at this time and the Germans were trying to lighten up on the prisoners as the tables were turning. 

Dad didn’t come to Stalag Luft 11-B, Fallingbostel on the train but many POWs did; it is also the tracks that went to Auschwitz, the killing concentration camp. There were work camps and killing camps, Auschwitz was the largest killing camp. 1.2 million people were exterminated at the camp and 1.1 million were Jews. I’m positive that the POWs were crammed into box cars in the same trains that carried box cars of Jews. Vic (Dad) was on the Death March when he got to Stalag Luft 11-B, Fallingbostel. He didn’t stay long because the camp was terribly overcrowded and ten men were dying each day from diseases. Their “man of confidence”, Francis Troy, who was also the top turret gunner on Vic’s plane, felt continuing the march, while bad, wasn’t as bad as exposure to the many maladies of staying in the confines of Fallingbostel. This was probably in the last week of March, 1945.  Vic’s group continued the march and were liberated on May 2, 1945. The British liberated Fallingbostel on April 16, 1945!

Vic and his buddies were told to get to the airfield at Celle, just a few miles from the barn they were liberated and from there, he said they went to Soligen, Germany, to Camp Lucky Strike in France, then to New York City on the Queen Mary It was the end of WWII for Vic, and the end of our re-creation of his Death March. He fooled ‘em. Jim

The number of kilometers we drove during the re-creation of our father’s Death March  2002 miles  

Mayors of the towns of Bad Fallingbostel and Oberke placing flowers at the memorial gates of Stalag Luft 11-B, sometimes simply called Fallingbostel

Mayor of Bad Fallingbostel 

Our sound man and cameraman/producer. David and Harold 

The Fallingbostel train station where POWs were taken to SL-11B and the Jews were taken on to the killing camp at Auschwitz.  There were work camps and killing camps, Auschwitz had one mission; kill. 1.2 million people were killed at Auschwitz; 1.1 were Jewish Germans. 

The cobblestone road that the prisoners on the Death March walked on to Fallingbostel. This portion of the cobblestone road has been saved as a memorial to the marchers. 

Ellen Weaver Hartman and me sitting on the remains of the steps to the administration building of Stalag Luft 11-B, Fallingbostel. Joe Weaver, Ellen’s father owned a service station on University Drive in Starkville. 

The de-lousing barn at SL 11-B. I believe my father, Vic, had his one and only shower here (without soap) on the eighty-six day Death March. 

The memorial and site of the mass grave of thirty-thousand Russian POWs that were killed during their imprisonment in German prison camps.  I’m certain that there are mass graves and no memorials to tens of thousands of German POWs that were killed as POWs in Russian prison camps. 

Kriegie Kids at the memorial gates of Stalag Luft 11-B, Fallingbostel.

Ellen Witt, me, Ellen Weaver Hartman, Laura Edge and Rich Ruben. Witt and Edge are sisters. 

Bad Fallingbostel train station.