FRANKLIN, Tenn. (WKRN) — On this day 80 years ago, thousands of German concentration camp survivors were liberated.
A Franklin veteran was one of the soldiers in the Army unit to save them. Now, his neighbors, family, and fellow veterans are honoring him.
“He loved everybody,” Allen Gentry, Jimmy Gentry’s son, said as he described his father. He never knew a stranger.”
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“You couldn’t help but know him,” William Buredtt Akin, a Vietnam War Veteran and Jimmy’s friend, added. “So we followed him and learned from him, whether it was on purpose or accidental.”
James, also known as Jimmy, was born in 1925.
He spent his early life hunting, trapping, and fishing in Franklin, Tennessee, before he was drafted as a foot soldier for the U.S. Army in World War II. During his service, his unit liberated the survivors at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany.
According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum , as of April 26, 1945, there were over 67,000 registered prisoners in Dachau and its subcamps. When soldiers like Gentry arrived on April 29, they liberated around 42,000 survivors and found 30 railroad cars filled with bodies.