Holocaust Remembrance Day And Liberating The Camps: Never Forget. Never Again.

Friday marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and people all around the world will pause and reflect on what happened to the Jewish people in the ghettos and concentration camps run by Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich — what caused it, who allowed it, and how we can prevent it from ever happening again.

While there are certainly many who were more greatly impacted by the Holocaust than I — Jewish survivors, the family members of those who perished in the camps, and the Allied soldiers who witnessed the atrocities firsthand — reflecting on the Holocaust always takes me back to grade school and the first time my father told me that my grandfather, an American tank mechanic with the 9th Armored Division, had seen it with his own eyes.

He couldn’t tell me much — only that PopPop (as we called him) had been at the Battle of the Bulge and the American seizure of the famed bridge at Remagen. PopPop, as many of his brothers-in-arms, never spoke about it. It wasn’t until he died in 1995, 50 years after the end of the war, that we were able to sort through his records and learn the truth of what he had done.

William Franklin Greenplate was a farm foreman in a small town in Delaware, a small man (just 5’5” and 130 pounds) with a less-than-high-school education. He listened to the whispers of war in Europe, like many others. In February 1941, he enlisted in US Army. The Army, possibly in part because of his small stature — and thus his ability to squeeze into the tight quarters inside a tank — assigned him to an armored division.

The training took several years and it was October 1944 when he finally set sail for Europe. D-Day was a huge success for the Allies. Operation Market Garden, however, was less successful. But in spite of that, Allied troops had liberated France, Belgium, and Holland — and troops were gathering in the Ardennes forest of Belgium and Luxembourg, preparing to drive the Nazis back into Germany.

PopPop and the 9th Armored Division were sent to that location, along with other green units, in order to wait for orders and supplies. Hitler, against the advice of his generals ordered his tank division toward Antwerp to take the port city at any cost. Between Hitler’s armies and their objective were PopPop’s division, most of the 106th Infantry Division (The Golden Lions), and the 101st Airborne Division in Bastogne.

The Battle of the Bulge was a terrible experience for the Americans trapped in it. Joachim Peiper, a Hitler Youth graduate, killed almost all of the American soldiers as they surrendered. Several companies from the 106th Infantry were captured, and some were taken prisoner or murdered. PopPop’s unit was overrun just outside of Bastogne, and they were ordered to execute a “fighting retreat” Run for the city. He was one of a few to make it to Bastogne alive — and by the time he got there, the Germans had the city completely surrounded.

He was then reassigned to Team SNAFU, which consisted of the stragglers that had made it to Bastogne. Many were suffering from what they called combat fatigue. It would be called PTSD. The Team SNAFU was a small, ragtag group whose job it was was to stop the Germans closing in on the city.

For six days they held the German army at bay — despite being outnumbered five-to-one – until General George S. Patton arrived with his Third Army, breaking the siege.

Photo/Virginia Kruta

PopPop was reassigned by the 9th Armored to Bastogne after Bastogne. “Phantom” Division was established and the gradual push into Germany began. The 9th Armored was among the first to cross over the Rhine River in March 1945. taking control Remagen’s famed Ludendorff Bridge.

On May 8, 1945 – the day Germany officially surrendered and ended the war in Europe — PopPop’s unit joined members of the 1st Infantry Division (The Big Red One) in throwing open the gates at Zwodau and Falkenau — two subcamps of the Flossenburg concentration camp that were located in what is now the Czech Republic. Only a few dozen prisoners remained alive at Falkenau — which had primarily housed Soviet prisoners of war — when American troops arrived. Zwodau still housed nearly 1,000 starving female prisoners — some Jewish, and some Roma.

The camps, which were located across Europe, were primarily used by the Nazi regime to house Jewish prisoners — many of whom were systematically forced from

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