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Goes with "Eleventh Armored Division" — a better copy of the photo I initially uploaded.

These two postcards are from a hotel called the Kölner Hof, in Frankfurt, Germany. They’re dated in the late 1800s, a period when Jewish people were moving into Frankfurt in large numbers, and the Kölner Hof’s owner was not a fan. Even if you can’t read German, you can tell from the Jewish caricatures on both cards — the men with the long, hooked noses being kicked out of (left) and asked to leave (right) the hotel—that the Kölner Hof didn’t welcome Jewish guests. If you can read German, you see that the postcards refer to Frankfurt as “New Jerusalem” and “Jerusalem on the Rhine,” and that they advertise the hotel as “The only Jew-Free hotel in Frankfurt.” The Kölner Hof hotel published many anti-Jewish advertisements, poster stamps and other marketing materials to the open arms of German society even in the 1930’s.

Excerpts from a scrapbook created by a Jewish American soldier named Alex Sesonske. His uncensored scrapbook, which includes everything from training camp photos to letters from his relatives to a poem his mom wrote, mocking his mustache, is one of the most complete accounts available of the GI experience during WWII. Though Sesonske doesn’t name the camp where these photos are taken, we can infer from his caption, “…taken at a Concentration Camp near Landsberg, Germany…” that they were of Kaufering, a subcamp of Dachau. He affixed them to his scrapbook in overlapping fashion, presumably to avoid shocking himself or anyone else with the gruesome images he’d saved.

Gregg's Father, Bernard Philipson and some of the men from the 8th Armored Division at the Arc de Triomphe, 1945.

Gregg’s father, Bernard Philipson (right), with his tank the “Blue Monday” serving with the 8th Armored Division.

On May 1, 1945, just one week before VE Day, The Stars and Stripes, the US Armed Forces’ daily newspaper, celebrates the US seizure of Dachau, along with the capture of Munich by the US Army, Soviet attacks on Berlin, and the promise of an impending offer of surrender from Heinrich Himmler.

Gregg’s father, Bernard Philipson, with his tank the “Blue Monday” serving with the 8th Armored Division.

[Same description/data as "Eleventh Armored Division"

The 11th Armored Division, nicknamed “Thunderbolt,” liberated Austria’s Mauthausen and Gusen concentration camps in May of 1945, freeing thousands of prisoners. This thirty-two page softcover book tells the story of the rescue — and it also sheds additional light on the unspeakable atrocities the troops witnessed in the camps.

Goes with "Rainbow Reveille, May 11, 1945"