Willy Herbst
US Army
from:Philadelphia, PA
Willy Herbst was born in Zaberfeld, Germany and trained as a baker in Heidelberg. In 1939 aged 18, he was among the Jewish men sent to the Paderborn concentration camp by the Nazis to perform forced labor. Willy collapsed while being marched to a quarry in late 1939. The Gestapo sent him to be treated for a hernia, but the surgery was experimental. A sympathetic nurse intervened and helped him escape. Instead of reporting back to camp, he managed to obtain U.S. immigration papers, fled Germany for the United States with his mother and a friend. Although other siblings had slipped away earlier, his sister and everyone on his father's side of the family were killed at Dachau.
Willy enlisted in the U.S. Army in January 1943 and served in France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. He entered Dachau within days of its liberation in April 1945. What he saw unnerved him. "Even though I had been in a concentration camp before, I never realized what might have been in store for me." he said later. His job was to supervise the unloading of a train with food for the survivors. He stayed there helping survivors and using his skill with dialects to expose camp guards who tried to claim they were not German and had not been involved in the atrocities.
Willy was honorably discharged in January 1946 with the rank of technician fifth grade. He was awarded the European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal with four Bronze Stars. After the war, he returned to Philadelphia and worked in the dry-cleaning business. He married Ruth Mintz and the pair devoted themselves to the Jewish War Veterans organization. Together establishing a scholarship fund and served in the organization's national offices. Willy also gave lectures to high school and college audiences about his experiences during the Holocaust.
