How a Little-Known Japanese American Battalion Freed Jews from a Nazi Death March

Yomiuri Shimbun

11-05-2025

Sandra Singh/For The Washington Post
Abba Noar, 97, one of the last survivors of the Dachau death march, at a hotel in Central Munich on May 1.
WAAKIRCHEN, Germany – Eighty years ago, Abba Naor was among several thousand Jews and other prisoners evacuated from Nazi concentration camps and forced to walk for days on the notorious Dachau death march – without food or water, often in freezing temperatures. Many perished on the way.
On the eighth night, as snow fell and covered the exhausted prisoners, their SS guards – fearing the fast-approaching Allies – vanished.
The following morning, American soldiers appeared. But when Naor looked up, the faces he saw were unlike any he had seen before. They were Japanese American soldiers, part of a storied military unit that faced down prejudice and suspicion to fight Adolf Hitler's armies in Europe. Some of them had family members imprisoned in internment camps in the western United States.
On May 2, Naor returned to a clearing here in a Bavarian forest, where he and some 2,700 others were liberated, to pay homage to the American GIs who aided him and his fellow survivors. A memorial plaque was unveiled to commemorate the actions of the soldiers, who were the sons of immigrants from Japan – second-generation Americans, or 'nisei.'
'They were angels for us,' said Naor, 97, who was born in Lithuania and now lives in Israel.
The tale of the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion, an all-nisei combat unit, is little known but highlights the diversity of Americans who fought against totalitarianism, and serves as a reminder of America's long commitment to the defense of Europe at a time when U.S. assurances no longer seem ironclad.
The 522nd was part of the famed 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the all-nisei unit that lived up to its motto 'Go For Broke,' taking heavy casualties in bloody battles in Italy and France. The 442nd remains the most decorated unit for its size and length of combat service in the history of the U.S. military.
Though some soldiers had been incarcerated in internment camps, they didn't flinch at the idea of risking their lives to defend freedom, said Rep. Mark Takano (California), the ranking Democrat on the House Veterans' Affairs Committee. It was part of what it meant to be an American, he said. Takano, whose parents and grandparents were interned, had three great-uncles who served in the 442nd. One died in battle in Italy.
'These men made it possible to have a better world,' he said.
'We were not the only ones that suffered'
On May 2, more than 150 people gathered at a site in Waakirchen, Germany, that marks the end of this particular death march. Some came from as far away as Israel and Britain to attend the blessing of a memorial plaque and historical panel dedicated to the 522nd.
The plaque bears the unit's crossed cannons emblem and that of the 442nd: an outstretched hand holding a torch.
'I can't get over the fact that it was 80 years ago on this very day, that my dad bore witness to these prisoners freezing in the snow,' said Tom Oiye, whose father, George Oiye, was a forward observer in the 522nd. The younger Oiye traveled from Anchorage to retrace his father's steps.
'He'd talked about his amazement at the inhumanity that he witnessed,' said Oiye, 69, as he stood before the memorial.
Some of these 'saviors,' as Naor called them, had been among more than 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry forcibly removed from their homes after the Pearl Harbor bombing on Dec. 7, 1941, to 'relocation' camps in the western United States because their loyalty to America was questioned.
It was remarkable, Naor said, 'that we [Jews] were not the only ones that suffered. There were other people that suffered because of their religion or how they look.'
That these men were in the U.S. Army at all reflects the prowess of the nisei soldiers, in particular a unit made up almost entirely of Japanese Americans who had been drafted in Hawaii before the Pearl Harbor attack. The 100th Infantry Battalion so impressed the War Department with its performance in combat training that in early 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt allowed the formation of the 442nd.
'They were telling me … I wasn't an American'
George Oiye was 19 when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. An ace rifleman and captain of his college ROTC's rifle team in Montana, he wanted to join the Army Air Corps. But his IV-C draft status had him classified as an 'alien,' making him ineligible for military service.
'This always bothered me, especially when they were telling me that I wasn't an American,' he recounted in an oral history.
But in February 1943, after the 442nd was activated, Oiye – whose sister and her family were in an internment camp in California – was finally allowed to enlist. At Camp Shelby, Mississippi, he was assigned to the 522nd as a forward observer, to move with the infantry and direct artillery fire. By the war's end, about 650 men had fought with the unit.
The 522nd arrived in Italy as part of the 442nd in June 1944. The unit fought with distinction in several pivotal battles, including in the storied rescue of the Lost Battalion in the Vosges Mountains of France.
In that battle, eight forward observers from C Battery, including George Oiye, found themselves pinned down by German machine-gun fire. After five days of continuous fighting, the soldiers found the Texas National Guard's 1st Battalion of the 141st Regiment, which had been surrounded by German soldiers for nearly a week. Miraculously, all eight artillerymen from the 522nd survived.
By January 1945, the Third Reich was on the verge of defeat. In March, while the rest of the 442nd went to Italy for the final Allied attack there, the 522nd entered Germany.
Like most of the soldiers, George Oiye knew nothing about the Nazi concentration camps and the horrors of the Holocaust.
'I didn't even know [Dachau] existed,' he told the Los Angeles Times in 1991.
George Oiye and the 522nd were not at Dachau on April 29, 1945, the day the U.S. Army liberated the camp at which at least 40,000 died. 'When we opened the gates of Dachau, it was only then that we truly understood what we had been fighting for,' Lockered 'Bud' Gahs, a 100-year-old veteran of the 42nd Infantry Division – one of three that liberated the camp – said at a recent commemoration ceremony at Dachau.
'We must never forget what happened here so that we never go down this dark path again.'
The 522nd on that day were 30 to 40 miles away, moving rapidly southeast chasing the retreating German army. They stopped at Lagerlechfeld, a Nazi airfield close to two Dachau subcamps.
By then, though, the camp had been evacuated, its prisoners already on the death march.
The following day, the 522nd entered the village of Mörlbach, about 20 miles south of Munich. In a little-known feat, the men liberated an unspecified number of French prisoners, according to a declassified unit field journal. They stayed one night and left the following afternoon.
William Wright, the son of the unit's executive officer, Col. William P. Wright Jr., recalled his father telling him before he died in 1990 that the French POWs were held at an old hotel, while the German soldiers 'just surrendered.'
Today, virtually no one in the hamlet of Mörlbach, with at most a few dozen homes, is aware of the incident. The owner of the town's only inn, Franz Abraham, said the American forces used the mansion in its postwar occupation.
Many in Waakirchen didn't know about the Holocaust, either, said Ludwig Leserer, who was 9 when the death march reached his village on May 2, 1945. As he accompanied his mother to the local cobbler one morning, they suddenly saw 'lots of people' in striped garments 'running out of the forest,' apparently toward a spring. He was scared and shocked, he said in an interview at his farmhouse in Waakirchen.
In one unforgettable scene, Leserer said he saw a soldier – now understood to have been an SS guard – ordering a prisoner to get up. When the man was too feeble to do so, the guard ordered his dog to attack.
'The dog bit the man in the face,' and he died in the snow, Leserer, now 89, recalled as he choked up and began to cry.
'It was really a traumatic time,' said Annemarie Höffler, 88, Leserer's companion. She was only 8 but still recalls hearing gunshots at night. Her father, a coal miner, went to see what was going on. He came back shaken, saying there were people lying dead in the snow.
On May 2, 1945, George Oiye and other members of the 522nd encountered a sight that would remain forever seared in their memories: several thousand haggard prisoners trudging through the forest.
'It was the most miserable weather you can imagine, sleet and rain and snow,' survivor Solly Ganor recalled in a 1997 oral history. 'Every night you slept … in the woods, or in the fields, and thousands were dying …. most of them were starved to death.'
Ganor called the march 'a grotesque attempt to do away with us.' The prisoners heard rumors, including that they were being taken to the Tyrol Mountains in the Austrian Alps, where the Germans would force them to build fortresses to resist the Allies, Ganor said.
A 522nd radio repairman, Clarence Matsumura, who was incarcerated with his family in Heart Mountain in Wyoming, recalled years later how 'in an open field, we found several hundred prisoners lying, in many cases unable to move. Some were shot, and some were dead from exposure.'
There were a number of forced marches from concentration camps across German-occupied Europe. Of about 7,000 prisoners who were driven south from Dachau at the end of April 1945, more than 1,000 died along the way, according to the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site.
'The guys were barefoot, and some of them didn't have any headwear, and all they had was just this striped bathrobe kind of thing, so we gave them bedroll type of blankets, and gloves, which were Army … wool gloves and socks,' George Oiye recounted in an oral history.
At one point, he and a buddy built a fire along the road to warm the survivors. A fellow soldier snapped a photo of them standing near the campfire as three liberated prisoners keep warm.
The men of the 522nd, authorized by division headquarters to pause their military mission to provide humanitarian aid, ferried the survivors to Waakirchen, where the battalion had set up a command post in a barn. There they administered medical aid and set up a kitchen. The survivors were housed in a school, the church, and later a displaced persons' camp.
The unit stayed only a few days before being pressed to move on – a period so brief and so unpublicized just as the war was ending that few knew about it.
Leserer and Höffler appeared surprised to learn that Asian American soldiers had been in their village.
Preserving the memories
Most 522nd veterans have died. One, now 100, lives in Hawaii. Their stories are captured in oral histories, or passed on to their descendants – often sketchy, sometimes contradictory, rarely documented.
One anecdote that has become part of the unit's lore is recounted in a diary entry and in separate oral histories. Battalion medic Ichiro Imamura wrote in his journal during the final days of the war of being with two scouts at a Dachau subcamp, though it is not clear which one. There they saw prisoners in 'striped prison suits and round caps … sprawled on the snow-covered ground, moving weakly,' he wrote.
The SS had taken off before the scouts reached the camp, he wrote, and one scout proceeded to 'shoot off the chain that held the prison gates shut.'
Two other unit members, including the battalion intelligence officer, said years later that the scout was Sgt. Shozo Kajioka from Hawaii. After first trying to shoot the lock off with his carbine, Kajioka used a .45 pistol, Pfc. Shigeru Nakamura also from Hawaii, said in 2007. The intelligence officer gave the prisoners what food he had, Nakamura recounted.
In a 2023 interview with The Post, Kajioka's son Arnold said his father told him that after the incident 'they were under a lot of pressure not to say anything because they might be penalized.'
The assertion that the men were, as Kajioka said, 'sworn to secrecy' appears more than once in the oral histories. It is likely a misinterpretation of guidance given to the men later on that they were on a military, not a humanitarian mission, said Wright, 87, whose father, the unit's executive officer, recounted the incident to him.
'You don't talk about' anything not related to the mission, he said. 'You don't put it in your military reports.
'They had very strict orders,' Wright said. 'Stay on mission – do not divert to care for sick or injured people.'
'All the Honor'
The May 2 commemoration was organized by a military history buff in Bavaria who was astonished to learn of the Japanese American soldiers' role in his region's history.
In his research into the U.S. military presence in World War II, Florian Vðeller, a 41-year-old German Army veteran and volunteer with the local chapter of the German War Graves Commission, repeatedly came across the photo of the campfire and Asian-looking soldiers. He inquired through Facebook groups, and someone told him, 'Oh, it was the niseis.' It was the first time he heard the term.
Over the past year or two, his desire grew to honor the 522nd's role in liberating the death march survivors.
'The history of the nisei in Germany is not represented,' Vðeller said in an interview. 'I wanted to change that.'
May 2, the day of the commemoration, was scorching hot. Herb Zlotogorski, whose father, Abraham, was a Polish Jew imprisoned in a Dachau subcamp, had traveled from Jerusalem to see where his father had been liberated.
As he approached the dedication site, he saw Tom Oiye. Upon learning who Oiye's father was, he embraced him.
'Kol hakavod,' he murmured in Hebrew.
'It means 'all the honor,' ' he told Oiye.
'The honor is not just to my dad,' Oiye responded. 'Not just to the 522nd. But to all those who couldn't be with us.'
Oiye said in an interview that when it came to the war, his father, normally an expressive man, 'remained quiet for roughly 50 years. I had no idea other than the photo albums showing pictures of the big guns that he was ever in military service.
'I knew he was in the war, but did not know to what extent.'
Oiye was moved nearly to tears when he saw the campfire photo reproduced on the historical panel at the monument site.
'I know how much the story meant to my dad,' he said. 'It becomes real when other people acknowledge it.'
Two days later at Dachau, where more than 1,700 people had gathered from around the world to commemorate the camp's liberation, the weather had turned. The rain and cold more closely approximated the conditions from decades earlier.
Naor spoke movingly of his childhood in Lithuania, where Jews were able to practice their religion, and 'we had a happy life.' Things changed under the Soviets and then the Germans, he said, and in July 1944 his family was deported to the Stutthof concentration camp in Poland. His mother and brother were taken to Auschwitz, where they were killed. He and his father were sent to a series of Dachau subcamps and became separated.
Then one day in late April 1945, the SS guards at the Kaufering subcamp announced the prisoners were being taken to Switzerland to be exchanged for German prisoners. It was a ruse, Naor said, and he and other captives were marched south toward the Alps.
Along the way, he said, some were so famished that having found a dead horse, 'they tried to tear the flesh from it with their bare hands, and some were shot by the guards.'
They spent the night in the forest. Snow continued to fall. And then, he told the audience, overnight 'the guards had disappeared.'
In the morning, a big truck arrived. 'We didn't know who these people were because we never had seen anyone like that before, and as we later learned, they were American soldiers of Japanese descent.'
After the remarks were over, Oiye found his way to the front of the tent, where Naor was standing with his grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
He took out his cellphone and told Naor he had something he wanted to show him.
It was the campfire photo of his father, his father's unit-mate and the three death march survivors.
Naor's eyes lit up.
'My liberators,' he said. The two men clasped hands warmly, collapsing 80 years of history in a moment.
'Thank you,' Naor said softly. 'Thank you.'
Then, he wiped a tear from his eye.