Last Originial Liberator of Buchenwald is Gone!

On 11 August 2008 the last of 4 American liberators who first saw Buchenwald, and mail carrier for 30 years, James Hoyt (83) passed away in his hometown of Oxford, Iowa.

Born May 16, 1925, to a railroad worker and a schoolteacher, James Francis Hoyt Sr. returned to his Iowa hometown after the war and largely kept quiet about the atrocities he saw.

Hoyt, a Bronze Star recipient and veteran of the Battle of the Bulge, was the last of the four original liberators to die.

Hoyt had rarely spoken about that day in 1945, but he recently opened up to a journalist.

"There were thousands of bodies piled high. I saw hearts that had been taken from live people in medical experiments," Hoyt told author Stephen Bloom in a soon-to-be-published book called "The Oxford Project."

"They said a wife of one of the SS officers -- they called her the Bitch of Buchenwald -- saw a tattoo she liked on the arm of a prisoner, and had the skin made into a lampshade. I saw that."

Pete Geren, the secretary of the U.S. Army, said the sacrifice Hoyt made for his country so many years ago should never be forgotten.

"It's important that we don't allow ourselves to lose him," Geren told CNN by phone. "It's the memory of heroes like James Hoyt and the memories of what they've done that we must ensure that we keep alive and share with the current generation and future generations.

"Mr. Hoyt, as a young man, saw unspeakable horrors when he was one of the soldiers to discover the Buchenwald concentration camp, and those are experiences as a country and a world we can never forget.

"You think back on a young man 19 years old and to have the experience that he had," Geren said, his voice dissolving before ever finishing his thought.

As a private first class in the U.S. Army, Hoyt was just 19 when he and his three comrades -- Capt. Frederic Keffer, Tech. Sgt. Herbert Gottschalk and Sgt. Harry Ward -- found Buchenwald in a well-hidden wooded area of eastern Germany.

The nation asked a lot from the Greatest Generation. And they showed not only this nation but the world that the United States had the guts to fight and win at all costs. Many of the Greatest Generation just did what James Hoyt did. Come home, marry and raise a family. Just pick up their lives from where they left off. They seldom if ever talked about what they did or saw during the war, and it haunted many of them.

The military documents detailing Hoyt's involvement in the Buchenwald liberation were discovered in a box in an archive at the The Center for Military History this week after a CNN query.

It was fitting for the humble Iowan. Hoyt listed his greatest achievement not as a Buchenwald liberator, but as spelling bee champ of Johnson County in 1939, when he was in eighth grade. "I still remember the word I spelled correctly: 'archive,' " he said.

That is the simple, but humble thoughts of a man. Not what he did in the war, but winning a spelling bee while he was in school. Not many men these days would have still been proud of that.

James Hoyt was laid to rest on Thursday, 14 August 2008 at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Oxford. The Rev. Edmond Dunn officiated.

James Hoyt was a hero whether he admitted it or not. To him he had a job to do and did it. Just like the millions of other heroes of World War 2.