Terry Jelsing spoke at the Americans and the Holocaust traveling exhibit in the Rugby Public Library, telling his father’s story on Thursday, Jan. 30. The exhibit will be featured until Saturday, Feb. 22. During its feature there will be speakers, workshops and participants invited to read several books which will be reviewed.

Deploying to France right after D-Day, Quentin Jelsing’s unit saw its bout of conflict with Nazi forces over Christmas as green G.I.s, as his son described them, using a term that notes their inexperience.

His father’s unit, the famed “Rainbow Division,” or the 42nd Infantry Division, didn’t have its full complement of support, such as artillery and tanks, as those troops were supporting the Battle of the Bulge, to the north.

His father’s unit was heading off the southern portion of a pincer movement by the German forces, who were intent on surrounding the Americans as part of the Nazi Operation Northwind. The Nazi attack originated in Hatton, France, according to Terry Jelsing, which is where his father found himself.

Submitted Photo An unnamed American soldier looks at the bodies of SS soldiers he had just executed during the liberation of the Dachau Concentration Camp. This became known as the Dachau Liberation Reprisals.

Around 40,000 soldiers died there in ferocious fanatical house to house fighting. About two thirds of the Rainbow Division’s forces were lost, Jelsing said.

“He saw a lot of action,” Jelsing said. His father was a communications specialist and would carry a spool of cable on his back, often running through essentially no-man’s-land to establish communication between outposts and forward troops.

“Almost half of his time in service was in direct combat,” Jelsing said. His father earned a bronze star for his actions.

After fighting their way through Europe, the 42nd Infantry Division found its way to Bavaria in southeast Germany.

While nearing the town of Dachau, a suburb of Munich, the American forces heard sustained machine gun fire.

Submitted Photo An American soldier stands on the road in this photo overlooking part of the Dachau Concentration Camp.

Jelsing said his father thought they were being attacked and they took cover. The machine gun fire was from German guns but the prisoners at the camp were the target, not the Americans. After realizing they weren’t the target, they investigated where the sound was coming from and were led to the Dachau Concentration Camp.

According to Jelsing, the SS soldiers wanted to stop their prisoners from telling their approaching rescuers what had happened there. To do so, they fired into train cars full of prisoners and did everything they could to exterminate their captives.

American forces took the Nazis prisoner. Some of those Nazis were subsequently shot by the Americans in reprisal, and more were handed over to their hostages, Jelsing said.

While searching the camp, Quentin Jelsing found a camera in the hands of an SS soldier’s corpse. He took the film out, wrapped it in foil and kept it for two years before getting it developed in the U.S.

Jelsing said, in a 2000 article by The Pierce County Tribune, that he was afraid to develop the film in Europe, as it was likely to have been confiscated. Though the concentration camps were kept secret from even many within the Nazi Party, according to Jelsing there was a large number of sympathizers of the Nazi regime. “They didn’t want the rest of the world to see what had happened there,” he said. In that film, his son said the SS soldier “had photographed the atrocities of the last days of the war at the camp.”