Clear Lake veteran Gerald “Gary” Schuldt joined the American Legion after returning from the war. Recently, the Clear Lake Legion honored the 93-year-old for 70 continuous years of membership, a milestone very few people are able to achieve.

 

Schuldt was drafted into World War II in 1943. After training at Fort Bliss, TX, he sailed on a ship to Europe, docking in England. 

 

He started out stationed in Brussels, Belgium, in the First United States Army, then was transferred to the Third Army and then again to the Seventh Army, serving under General George Patton and ending up in Heidelberg, Germany. 

 

General Patton moved his troops across Germany so quickly they almost starved to death. Supplies couldn’t keep up to them, and often they were stuck in the rain and snow.

 

Schuldt was involved in numerous campaigns throughout France and Belgium, but was lucky to only have one close call. During one battle a bomb hit the hood of his jeep and exploded right above him, just missing his head.

 

Throughout the war he rode mainly in jeeps and shot submachine guns and M1 rifles. One of his responsibilities was to clean German soldiers out of towns the Allies took over. He and a couple other soldiers would go door to door searching, often finding them hiding in attics. 

 

“We would catch them and bring them to the [POW] camps,” said Schuldt. “Towards the end of the war they wanted to be caught by us because they were scared of the Russians.”

 

At one town, bodies of German soldiers were ‘lined up like cordwood,’ and he watched a little old German woman come and start looking through the bodies. Not finding who she was looking for, she left. He saw similar scenes in towns across Germany.

 

As they moved across Germany, Schuldt saw a number of concentration camps. They were among the worst things he experienced during the war. His unit arrived at Dachau on April 30, 1945, the day after it had been liberated. They were the first to enter the camp.

 

Most of the fighting had subsided by the time they arrived. A few of the more stubborn German soldiers tried to hold their ground, but some started waving white flags.

 

“At Dachau, they had been trying to get rid of all the prisoners before the Americans came,” remembered Schuldt. “There were lots of dead people everywhere.”

 

“It’s something you never forget. Those poor people. I don’t know how they could even live; they couldn’t even stand up. People were malnourished, just bones with skin. You can’t even imagine.”

 

He tried to talk to the prisoners but they couldn’t understand each other. They were under orders not to share their food with them because they weren’t used to it.

 

“The hardest thing was first they [the soldiers] took everyone out of the gates, but then they had to bring them back in because they had nowhere else to go,” said Schuldt.

 

The soldiers went into town and forced the businessmen and residents to come out to the camp to clean it up and bury the dead.

 

“I felt pretty sorry for some of the German women,” said Schuldt. “They didn’t know what was going on.”

 

After the war Schuldt returned home and ran a car dealership with his dad for a number of years. He also spent 29 years as postmaster of Clear Lake.

 

“I didn’t talk too much about it [the war] afterwards,” said Schuldt. “It was pretty bad when I first got out. I’d be going down the road and start crying like a baby.”

 

A couple years ago Schuldt went on one of the Freedom Flights, also known as the Honor Flights, from St. Cloud to Washington D.C. to see the WWII memorial. Today he remains a proud veteran and Legion member.