Donald R. Burgett (born April 5, 1925) is a writer and former paratrooper. He was among the Airborne troopers who landed in Normandy early in the morning of D-Day. He was a member of the 101st Airborne Division, ("The Screaming Eagles"), and the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment. Burgett served in 'A' Company, 1st Battalion, 506th PIR as both a rifleman and a machine-gunner.
Burgett parachuted into Holland as part of Operation Market-Garden[1] with the 1st Allied Airborne Army, fighting for 72 days behind enemy lines. With just a few weeks rest, he was sent into combat at the Battle of the Bulge, where the 101st, along with Combat Command B of the U.S. 10th Armored Division and the all African American 969th Field Artillery Battalion successfully held out against nine German armored divisions during the siege of Bastogne. He went on to fight through Operation Nordwind, on into Germany to the Ruhr Valley, the Rhineland, and Bavaria, where he helped capture Hitler's mountain retreat in southern Germany. While in action with the 101st, Burgett survived numerous battle wounds and had his M1 rifle shot out of his hands at least twice. He was one of only eleven men out of two hundred in his company to survive from D-Day Normandy all the way to the war's end.I'm going to try to repeat from memory some of the last things he said in the interview because they were so powerful.
He was talking about the end of the war. He and his group were moving through Germany and came to a place with a concentration camp. I didn't hear the name but he said it was near the Lecht river. He said that when he arrived there, he entered the building with the ovens and saw several Jews carrying other Jews into the ovens on metal stretchers. (I hope those were already dead, he didn't say.) He told them to stop. They said they could not. He asked why. They said, "They told us that if we don't do it, they will put us in there alive." Burgett said to them, "I am an American, and America says stop!" They talked amongst themselves for a moment and then said they would stop.
The next day he said that he saw four of them barely able to walk carrying one of those stretchers covered with a purple cloth toward the river. He asked them what they were doing. He pulled back the cloth and the stretcher was carrying yellow bars of soap that he compared to something called "Fels-Naptha". He asked them what they were doing with the soap. They said, "We're burying them. They're people." He said they told him the Nazis rendered people to make soap. He said they did much worse things as well but then he stopped talking as if it would be wrong to go on. I was grateful.
At this point he lost his composure a little and mumbled something about the second amendment. Then he said, "The people who want to take our guns away need to remember that it's only Americans like me with guns who stand between them and the ovens. I've seen the ovens."
Could it happen again? Who knows? It's hard to guess, although I sincerely doubt that the basics of human nature have changed much since 1940. You want to say no, but then similar things happen in Africa with regularity and the rest of the world looks the other way and whistles. I just hope that if it does get close to happening again, there are still Americans with guns ready to say, "I am an American and America says stop!"
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