75 years ago a Sioux City soldier serving in the U.S. Army’s 84th Infantry Division was moving through Nazi Germany near the end of World War Two rounding up German prisoners near Hanover when they discovered the Ahlem concentration camp.
City Museum Curator Matt Anderson says that soldier, Vernon Tott, had a small camera with him and started taking photos of the starving Jewish prisoners found in the Holocaust Camp:
OC………what was going on there. :22
Tott came home and put the photos he had taken in a wooden box and did not look at them until 1997.
That’s when he read a notice in his army unit’s newsletter from Benjamin Sieradzki, an Ahlem survivor seeking the GI who had taken those photos during the camp’s liberation.
OC…..historic event. ;14
Tott contacted Sieradzki and that led to them finding 15 other camp survivors before Tott’s death on March 1, 2005 at the age of 80.
Vernon Tott was honored by the Holocaust Museum for his efforts and has his name inscribed on a wall there as a Liberator.
Selections from the Vernon Tott Collection will be exhibited through April 19th at the Public Museum downtown at 4th and Nebraska Streets.
