From the Desk of Jeff King

The liberator

Mary Galione could not deflect 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 motioned with his fingers and called to her, "Young lady, come up here please."

Mary left her seat and nervously approached the altar. "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 added, "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 didn't know what a liberator was. When she returned home she asked her father what he did in World War II. He acknowledged playing a significant role as a U.S. Army private and promised to share his story one day. "Oh! Tell me now," Mary pleaded.

"No. It's not time yet."

John Galione had a secret. In April 1945 he stumbled upon an unmarked tunnel in Germany's Harz Mountains. His discovery saved the lives of hundreds of European Jews and impacted the course of world history.

It took 30 years for John to fully share his war experience with Mary. In 2004 she documented her father's testimony in the book, The Journey of Private Galione, 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. He was resting with the 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 his concern to a sergeant and was told the smell might be linked to a rumored labor camp. With a growing sense of urgency, Galione – whose sergeant denied him permission to scout the area – made a daring move. 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. His plan was to search all night, if necessary, and return before morning roll call. Galione 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 following the tracks for several hours he felt someone nudge him from behind. Thinking an Army buddy had decided to join him, Galione turned but saw no one. Then the force grabbed him by the elbows and pushed him forward. Galione marveled at the timing. He was shoved just as he was thinking of turning back 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. Next to the tunnel 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 European cities. 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 filled with corpses, which he learned later was bound for the Buchenwald crematorium. While searching for identification on the bodies, his ammo clip fell off 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.

It was not the first time he had survived a brush with death. As a boy he 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 here under the ice she won't even know what happened to me. It will kill her." The next thing he knew he was 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. "I looked to see if someone had left footprints so I could follow them but there was only one set of footprints in the snow and they were mine."

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."

That reason became clearer as 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 on the front gate with his rifle but returned later with American GIs he'd recruited from another unit. Before dawn on April 11 Galione and two men broke through the gate with a Jeep and drove slowly into the compound. In the shadows they could make out twisted, discolored corpses on the ground.

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 his infantry division. He told his sergeant he had located a labor camp with sick and dying prisoners. The sergeant hesitated to respond initially because of the threat of a German ambush, but relented and ordered Galione to radio other troops for assistance. "I was so happy," said Galione, who led an infantry division to liberate Dora the next day. "The people were in such bad shape. I don't think they had another day to live."

The Third Armored Division raced toward Dora to provide infantry cover but got lost and located another concentration camp, Nordhausen, by accident. It held more than 400 dying prisoners. When Galione's detachment entered nearby Dora, many 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."

The Pentagon ordered the immediate search for other prison camps, motivated largely by the discovery of Nazi weapons. At Mittelwerk 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 hours before the Russians arrived, a coup that would tip the balance of post-war power to the United States.

Relocated to the United States, 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 never officially 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 – bypassing Dora and discovering Nordhausen by accident – a miracle. "That's where they (Nazis) had dumped people too weak to make missiles, leaving them to languish and die," she said during a Messianic Vision radio interview with Sid Roth. "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 prayer from 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! You'll have all the time you want to sleep afterward!"

John Galione heard their cries well.

Addendum – Mary remembers as a young girl seeing 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 pulled her dad aside and asked, "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 with Mary, answered humbly, "I saved people. A lot of people, and some of those people were God's people, the Jews."