From the Desk of Jeff King

The liberator

Mary Galione could not escape the piercing gaze of the missionary. Sitting in the back pew of a crowded Johnsville, Pa., church, the 15-year-old squirmed as the man pointed and called to her, "Young lady, come up here please."

Mary stood and walked forward. "Was your father in the war?" asked the missionary from Guyana.

"Yes."

"God is going to use you greatly," he said.

A second missionary, also from Guyana, walked over and asked his partner, "Who is she?"

"Her father was the liberator."

"Whom did he liberate?" the second missionary asked.

"German concentration camps . . . her father's journey was behind it all, but he hasn't told anyone." He turned to Mary and said, "Your father walked. He took a journey and walked for miles. He hasn't told you yet, but he has a story to tell you and the Lord will use you greatly to touch nations."

Mary rushed home to share the missionaries' words with her father, John Galione. "These guys must be real because there is a war story I've been keeping to myself," he told his daughter, "and I do want to tell you someday."

"Tell me now!" Mary pleaded.

"No. It's not time yet."

It took John 30 years to fully tell his story to Mary, communicated through tears and an anguished heart. In April 1945 he had stumbled upon an unmarked tunnel in Germany's Harz Mountains. The discovery saved the lives of hundreds of European Jews and impacted the course of world history. Mary wrote a tell-all book about her father's war exploits, The Journey of Private Galione. It was released in 2004, five years after his death. Although the book has touched lives, including Holocaust survivors and their families, John remains a forgotten hero. No one named a school or dedicated a ball field after him. The military has never decorated him.

Galione's journey began with little fanfare. The Army private was resting with the U.S. 104th Infantry Division on the front lines near Lippstadt, Germany, when a foul odor drifted into camp. Galione was troubled but didn't know why. He expressed concern to a sergeant, who told him the smell might be linked to a rumored labor camp. Galione asked if he could search the area but was denied permission by the sergeant, who was wary of a German ambush. The 104th had fought bravely in Europe but with the war nearing an end many soldiers were tired of taking risks.

Galione wasn't one of them. About 9 p.m. on April 5 he slipped out of camp and headed for the nearest railroad tracks, hoping they would lead to the source of the odor. Galione's plan was to search all night, if necessary, and return before morning roll call. He left camp 18 hours after his sergeant refused him permission, a delay that would haunt him the rest of his life.

Galione disappeared into the darkness alone but he soon had company. After walking for several hours on a gimpy leg, wounded earlier in combat, someone or something came from behind and nudged him in the back. Galione turned but didn't see anyone. Then he felt two hands grab his elbows and push him forward. He was shoved just as he was thinking about quitting because of fatigue and hunger. "My legs were tired but something was making me walk, telling me to keep following the trains," he said. "Somehow it gave me the strength to keep going."

Five days later the tracks led Galione to the mouth of a tunnel. Hidden inside was the Nazi's top-secret V1 and V2 missile factory. Outside stood a cluster of buildings surrounded by a fence and locked gate. It was the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, which supplied slave labor to the underground Mittelwerk plant. More than 20,000 Dora laborers died manufacturing the world's first ballistic missiles in harsh, degrading conditions. Jewish and non-Jewish prisoners who were caught sabotaging missiles were tortured and hanged. The V weapons killed more people during production than in launched attacks against Allied targets. He didn't know it then, but Galione had beaten the advancing Russian Army to Germany's prized rocket technology.

As he approached the tunnel he inspected a train car stacked with corpses, which he learned later was bound for the Buchenwald crematorium. While searching for identification on the bodies his ammo clip fell and the noise alerted a German guard. Gunfire was exchanged briefly before the guard ran off. Bullets had whizzed past Galione as he scrambled for cover above the tunnel entrance. "I don't know how he missed me," he said.

Galione had survived other close calls. As a boy fell through ice while skating the frozen Delaware River in his shoes. As the murky, swift current swept him under the ice and toward certain death, Galione thought of his mother, who had already lost a son: "If I die under the ice she won't even know what happened to me. It will kill her." The next thing he remembers is lying on the river bank. He can't explain how he got there. "I looked around trying to find who might have rescued me but there was no one in sight for miles," he said.

During the war, he was one of only three men in his unit to survive a river crossing in Holland while under enemy fire. The weight of Galione's pack nearly drowned him. "I don't know how I made it across. I never learned how to swim," he said. "We had a strong feeling there was a divine reason we had been spared."

Having survived his skirmish with the German guard, Galione turned his attention to the emaciated Dora laborers who were staring at him from behind the fence. He was unable to break the lock with his rifle but returned later with two American soldiers he'd recruited from another company. In the pre-dawn darkness of April 11 the men smashed through the front gate with a Jeep and drove slowly into the compound, which was an open graveyard. Corpses were strewn everywhere.

A gaunt prisoner approached the Americans, pointed to the infirmary and said, "There are people in there." The driver pulled the Jeep close to the door, stepped inside and witnessed another horror scene: about a hundred living skeletons lying motionless in beds, barely breathing.

"We were so frightened we put the Jeep in reverse and drove backward real fast," Galione said. "We didn't know what was going on and we didn't want to end up like the people we saw. The German guards had abandoned the prisoners but we didn't know that. To be safe we wanted to bring more men."

Galione, who had walked more than 100 miles to reach the tunnel, took a three-hour Jeep ride back to the 104th. He told his sergeant he had located a labor camp with sick and dying prisoners. The next day Galione led an infantry division to liberate Dora. "I was so happy. The people were in such bad shape," he said. "I didn't think they had another day to live." Battle-hardened soldiers, encountering Holocaust victims for the first time, wept and vomited. Galione said the laborers "looked like the walking dead. They were skin and bones. The people were so happy to see us. They were tugging our clothes, feeling our uniforms between their fingers like they were gold."

Before Galione's men reached Dora, tanks from the Third Armored Division raced toward the camp to provide infantry cover. Galione had given directions but the tanks got lost, bypassed Dora and found another concentration camp, Nordhausen, by accident. It held more than 400 dying prisoners.

The Pentagon ordered the immediate search for other prison camps, motivated largely by the discovery of Nazi weapons. The Americans seized V2 missiles and parts, secret documents and more than 120 scientists, including Wernher von Braun, considered the greatest rocket engineer of the 20th century. The last weapons were removed from Mittelwerk hours before the Russians arrived, a coup that would tip the balance of post-war power to the United States.

Relocated in America, Von Braun and his German team helped develop advanced weaponry and the manned space program. Von Braun, a key figure in the Apollo moon program, was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Ford in 1977 and hailed as an American hero. Dora survivors were outraged. They witnessed the fruit of Von Braun's early rocket development: the torture and murder of thousands of Jewish and non-Jewish laborers. "Everything that is now in space had its origins here (Dora), not in America or Russia," said French Dora survivor Rene Steenbeke. "This is where science and death met."

Galione never pinpointed the source of the odor. Camp Dora was ruled out because it was too far from Lippstadt, where the 104th had paused to rest. Galione said he encountered the smell on other occasions near train cars.

Although the Army has never publicly credited Galione with the discovery, family members say the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob honored him in a richer way: Seven offspring – two children, four grandchildren and one great-grandchild – were born on the liberation dates of the concentration camps (Nordhausen, Buchenwald and Dachau) that had sent laborers to Dora. One daughter was born without vital signs but revived by a doctor. It was April 15, the anniversary of the liberation of Buchenwald and Nordhausen.

Galione believed God had spent a lifetime establishing a Holocaust memorial through the liberation-date births of his offspring. He wanted Jewish survivors to know that the Lord loved them and had sovereignly orchestrated their rescue. Mary calls the Third Armor's miscue – driving past Dora and stumbling upon Norhausen – a miracle. "That's where they (Nazis) had dumped people too weak to make missiles, leaving them to languish and die," she said. "God was trying to save the weakest first."

The book by Mary (Galione) Nahas includes an affidavit signed in 2000 by her father's sergeant, Leonard Puryear, crediting Galione with the discovery of Dora. Survivors have corroborated her father's testimony. Mary included some of their comments in her book to capture the struggle for survival inside the camp, including this desperate prayer by Yves Beon:

"Here believers and atheists meet in the same communion, begging God, even the devil, and all the genius that may come to the hearts of men to inject into the Americans the madness that will make them plunge forward enough for us. Don't lose any time guys, we're here and crying for help, and you should hear us well. You, Harry, even if you have an ache in your side, charge on in spite of it! And you, Joe, even if your tank runs out of gas, push it with every ounce of strength! Even if you're tired, keep on as if nothing happened, without stopping, so long as you arrive here!"

John Galione heard their cries well.

Addendum – As a young girl Mary could see the hand of God upon her father. "There was something about him but I couldn't put my finger on it," she said. "I noticed that everything Dad prayed for he was granted, and he seemed to have a direct line with an angel who always warned him of impending danger." One day she asked him in private, "I don't understand it. Whatever you pray for comes true. God listens to you. He respects you, but why?" John, who hadn't yet revealed his war secret to Mary, answered softly, "I saved people. A lot of people, and some of those people were God's people, the Jews." John began his prisoner search between April 4-5, the same time frame rabbis claim Moses split the Red Sea. Both men were unlikely candidates to lead a Jewish exodus – one from Egypt, the other from Nazi-occupied Europe.