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Last Name: ` LOCKHART	First Name Middle Initial: RICHARD T		Nick Name: 'DICK'
Street: 1176 S PLYMOUTH CT 2SW	City & State: CHICAGO, IL		E-Mail:
Zip: 60604	Phone:		Spouse:
Conflict: WWII	Service Branch: ARMY		Unit: 106 INF DIV
Theater: ETO	Where Captured: GERMANY		Date Captured: 1944
Camps Held In: Stalag 9B			How Long Interned: 0 days
liberated / repatriated: liberated	Date Liberated:		Age at Capture:
Medals Received: To come..
Military Job: Infantry		Company:
Occupation after War:

Military Bio:

Some of you know me as a professional lobbyist and indeed I have been one for thirty-two years. However, few know of my personal experience with the Holocaust in Germany during World War II. When the war came, I was eager to be in it, and in fact, enlisted and volunteered for infrantry. In due course I found myself a casualty during the Battle of The Bulge. I became a Prisoner Of War. I will not attempt to descibe those combat conditions in Decemeber of 1944, the Ardennes Snow March, four days and nights jammed into box cars with no food or water (and being bombed by your own Air Force in the process). Suffice it to say, I, along with several thousand other GI's, found myself entering the gates of Stalag IXB, Bad Orb, Germany, on December 26.
Stalag IXB was a very primitave camp, housing several thousand Russian, Serbian, and French soldiers. It was reserved for Privates and Privates- First Class only. In the American compound there were no American officers, except a Protestant, a Catholic Chaplain, and a Dentist. There were no medical facilities, no sanitary services, no heat, and not much grass soup. Men died every day.
You may wonder how the Nazis identified the Jewish GI's. The answer is that they volunteered such fact. Frankly, it is something that I never understood to this day. Was it done as an affirmation of their culture and religion? was it done out of naivete? Was it done out of a false sense that because they were American soldiers, ... that it would protect them? Afte forty-six years I still do not know. What I do know is that it happened. Demonstrating once again the enormous capacity of some to impose the cruelest of punishment on others, solely because of difference of race, religion, nationality, or culture.
Those Jewish GI's in Stalag IXB may have thought they would be exempt from the Nazi Holocaust. They were not, and their fate should never be forgotten.