Among those I’ve interviewed over the years, there’s one in particular that continues to resonate with me. His name was, or I surely hope so still is, Dan Doughtery. And I interviewed him in 2018 when the Fairfield, California, retired insurance man was 93 years old.
To many, Dougherty’s name doesn’t ring nearly as many bells as others of whom I spoke last week that I’ve interviewed because he didn’t make his mark playing or coaching a sport. But I discovered when I interviewed him through a series of emails that the depth and length of his life’s resume long before he even sold his first life insurance policy surely is so very difficult to top.
You see, Dougherty was a World War II veteran, one of Tom Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation.” As a 20-year-old, he was a member of the 45th Infantry Division, Company C, the first unit to enter the Nazi concentration camp just outside the small town of Dachau to liberate the over 30,000 still imprisoned there.
As for how I was able to secure the interview with someone who played such a prominent role in a humanitarian effort of such magnitude, well, that came about thanks to the far-reaching tentacles of the internet.
I should start the back story by telling you that Lady Jane and I visited Germany in 2018 and toured Dachau. Following that trip, I did what I so often do by sharing my travel experiences with my readers, actually devoting one column exclusively to the Dachau tour. It was, without question, the most unique tour I’ve ever taken. Despite the former camp being filled with so many that day — including several school groups of young people who ordinarily are so thrilled over a field trip that they chatter incessantly — there was a pervasive somberness throughout. We all followed our guides from the barracks where inmates were crammed in bunk beds inches apart to the administration buildings, on to the hospital where gruesome experiments were performed on inmates considered no more than lab rats and on again to the ghastly crematorium. At each stop, we strained to hear guides who spoke of the horrific history of the place in hushed reverent tones.
Doughtery picked up the column I did on Dachau online and emailed me to say that he was there on the day the camp was liberated and asked if I wanted to know of his World War II experiences. Of course, I jumped at the chance.
Through back-and-forth emails, I learned of Dougherty’s military achievements and valor that led up to liberation day at Dachau on that April 29th of 1945. He told me of his role as a BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle) gunner in Company K in France when his company helped liberate Strasbourg. He also told of his promotion to staff sergeant and the wounds he sustained on the 390-mile-long German line of defense known as the Siegfried Line. He told of his return from the hospital to go into combat again in Germany in the Battle of Nuremberg and of his crossing the Danube with Company C, and on to Munich and eventually to Dachau to do such great things.
Only after I badgered him by asking of his military acknowledgments did he admit he’d earned the Combat Infantry Badge, a Bronze Star, a Purple Heart, and, some 72 years later, in 2017, from France, the Legion of Honor, the highest award a civilian can be given.
On liberation day at the concentration camp, Dougherty, armed with his military-issue weapon and also two cameras used to snap numerous photos, gave me both the gruesome and the jubilant details of the historically momentous day. He spoke of the horrific sight the division encountered as it approached the camp from the southwest. There was a train on the tracks, one with 39 box cars filled with the corpses of former camp inmates, many still wearing the remnants of the striped pajamas they wore when they were forced to stand in freezing temperatures often for an hour or more in the morning during an accounting of the prisoners. There was a body count that had to be taken, and Dougherty recalled the exact number, 2,310 lives snuffed out.
Doughtery also told me of the stacks of dead bodies discovered within the confines, the result of the camp running out of fuel to run the crematorium toward the end of the war. He told me further of the inmates’ gaunt and malnourished, albeit joyous, faces.
By the end of the email interview, as I began to outline what I would write in two columns that ran on the first two Wednesdays in August of ‘18, it occurred to me that Dan Doughtery may very well have given me an interview that couldn’t be surpassed.
Indeed over my writing career, I think I’ve taken some lessons from most everyone I interviewed. But what Dan gave me was a lesson of such import, especially when he and the rest of Company C breached the front entry beneath the wrought-iron German phrase Arbeit Macht Frei — in English, “work sets you free” — the lie that hundreds of work-detail inmates walked under coming and going, and the same words that Lady Jane and I walked under some 78 years later.
John Grindrod is a regular columnist for The Lima News, a freelance writer and editor and the author of two books. Reach him at [email protected].
