I could have sketched for weeks in the Oorlags Military Museum in Overloon Netherlands and never run out of interesting subjects. I paused in an aisle full of military vehicles and looked d over my shoulder to see an average everyday scene of Americans firing artillery at the enemy.
The 75th Infantry had an artillery unit and 1st Lieutenant Arthur Thorspecken was well trained in how to use artillery. That wasn’t his job however, his job was boots on the ground using men to shut down enemy artillery installations and strongholds.
In the woods outside the Overloon Military Museum is a sign that says, “Stand still for a moment. Consider that the ground you stand on was once one of the most fiercely contested sectors of the Overloon Battlefield. Bitterly fought here in hand to hand combat, many young lives that survived the battlefields of Nettuno and Normandy found their end under these trees.
So what were they fighting for? Germans were persecuting people based on their race and ethnicity. The weak and infirm were euthanized. Mass extermination camps were designed and built to murder large groups of people. Auchwitz in Poland is the most well known, but there were many others such as Sobibor and Treblinka. Upon arrival a selection process would take place based on actors like age and physical condition. The weak elderly and children went straight to the gas chambers. A small group of able bodied men and women were assigned to work. Some had to assist with the gas chambers and crematoriums. As the Allied forces approached the Germans forced the prisoners to leave the camp on foot trying to get to a camp further from the front lines. Many people died from exhaustion, frostbite or they were shot. Only 5,000 Dutch Jews returned from the camps alive. I have had friends in America tell me it could never happen again. But once a leader convinces followers to persecutes others based on their race, then history has a nasty habit of repeating itself. Europeans have a very hard time believing what they are seeing happening in America right now.