Nearly 100 Years Old, a WWII Veteran Refuses to Let the World Forget

Five days after graduating high school in 1944, Bill Kongable received his draft notice. He was 18 years old. Within months, he was in Germany, crossing the Rhine under heavy fire as part of the 89th Infantry Division.

Born in 1926 in the small town of Harmony in Osage County, Oklahoma, Gable came of age during a period of intense national mobilization. When Pearl Harbor was attacked in December 1941, he recalls, enlistment stations were flooded with volunteers. By the time he was inducted, the Allied invasion of Normandy had already shifted the course of the war.

The Rhine crossing was his first major engagement. Soldiers were killed around him. He kept his head down and survived. But what came next would stay with him for the rest of his life.

Gable's unit was among the first American forces to reach Ohrdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald and the first Nazi concentration camp liberated by the U.S. Army. At the gate, approximately 50 prisoners lay dead, each killed with a bullet to the head. The Nazis had evacuated thousands of surviving prisoners on a forced death march as Allied troops closed in, leaving only a handful of people alive.

On April 12, 1945, Generals Eisenhower, Bradley, and Patton visited the camp. Eisenhower ordered that everything be documented and photographed — in his own words, "so that no one in the future could claim the Holocaust had not happened".

For decades, Bill said little about what he had seen. The weight of it was too great. But as he grew older, his silence gave way to a sense of obligation. Genocide did not end with World War Two, he notes — mass killings have continued around the world, and Holocaust denial and misinformation remain widespread today.

"I realized I have to keep telling my story," Gable said. "It's my hope that future generations will learn their history and recognize the warning signs of genocide."

Now 100 years old, Bill Kongable is one of the last living witnesses to the atrocities of Nazi Germany.