Robert M. Walker |
| World War II, 1939-1946
Army
Assistant G-2, 80th Infantry Division; S-2, 317th Regiment, 80th Infantry Division
Pacific; Hawaii; Arizona; Kansas; Maryland; England; France; Germany; Czechoslovakia
Captain
Laredo, TX
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Robert Walker was in Pearl Harbor shortly after the Japanese attack and landed on
Normandy shortly after D-Day. What he didn't miss, however, was the discovery by
Allied troops of Buchenwald's concentration camp. The German guards had left only
minutes before his arrival, but he saw evidence of torture, corpses stacked in piles, and
the camp's crematorium going full blast, with workers still loading bodies. He fired his
pistol into the floor to get the workers' attention; almost sixty years later when he visited
the camp site, the hole in the floor was still there. The citizens of the nearby town of
Weimar claimed they knew about the camp, but Walker found them disingenuous. (Note:
The transcript for Walker's interview covers only the first half; the material about
Buchenwald is in the second half.)
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