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Gentry tells of Nazi atrocities
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Jimmy Gentry tells Rotarians that nothing prepared him for the horrors he saw in 1945 at a Nazi death camp. - photo by Duane Sherrill
It’s been almost 70 years, but the visions today are as vivid as they were on Aug. 29, 1945 for infantryman Jimmy Gentry, who lived for decades in denial of the horrors he saw that day when he helped liberate Dachau Concentration Camp.“On the other side of the fence were a sea of faces,” Gentry told members of McMinnville’s Noon Rotary Club when he spoke to them Thursday on behalf of the Tennessee Holocaust Commission. “I thought they were dead, but they were alive.”Gentry was part of the military force that liberated Dachau, a Nazi death camp inside Germany that was the scene of tens of thousands of murders, mainly of Jews during World War II.“The smell was horrible,” Gentry recalled as he approached the camp surrounded by 20-foot walls. “There were boxcars outside filled with thousands of human bodies.