It wasn’t all relaxed in Austria. Near Kaprun we heard there were some SS troops hiding up in the hill. When the SS troops got you they took no prisoners. So we didn’t either. We got up in the mountains. There was a cabin, and we found out from an elderly lady where the general was. He had been a commandant in a concentration camp and had some SS troops with him up on a hill—I don’t remember how many of them. Some of our sharpshooters took care of the troops. In deference to our men I won’t say who our shooters were. After a little firefight, we captured the general, still alive. We got him up behind a tree and brought him down to a plane where the cabin was. That’s where we shot him by firing squad. About five of us shot together—nobody knows exactly who killed him. That was the first time I saw the back of somebody’s head fly off. The war was technically over at this point, but I’m eighty-six years old as I tell this, so if they want to do something about it, they better hurry. It’s a true story, and rightly or wrongly, it happened. That’s the way war is. I’m sure there are other stories similar to this because we weren’t the only ones who found SS troops out in the hills. Having seen some of the people who came out of concentration camps, I had no compunction about executing a commandant of one of the camps. I can’t say I was one who actually liberated the camps, but I was there when we opened the gates. Some of these poor wretches running out were so emaciated they actually died from the excitement of being liberated. I saw it happen several times. These people in the camps—they were like walking skeletons. You could see all their bones. The gates opened and the people ran out yelling, “I’m free! I’m free!” And some of them died right there. I was horrified to see what the SS had done to these people.
~ Roy Gates
