DW P.

Producer and Film Director @ Ukraine Story | Documentary Filmmaker | Attorney | Journalist | Covering 2024-2026 Olympics, Politics, Russian Disinformation, Ukrainian Athletics

George Mason University – Antonin Scalia Law School 

Ukraine Story

United States 

DW Phillips is the executive producer of Kyiv of Mine. 

A Veterans Day Story – He liberated a concentration camp and was present at the Elbe River as thousands fled Russian rapes and vengeance killings. 

DW PHILLIPS

NOV 12

“Once I saw that, I will not ever have a good thing to say about a Russian” 

David Marshall, WWII Veteran.

Veterans Day – November 11, 2025

I never thought I would live to see this day. Not for a second.

Americans had been through too much, fought too hard, and spilled too much blood. We had looked into the face of evil and collectively said — Enough!

Whatever our political differences after World War II, they did not include our perspective as a nation on the Third Reich, the mass extermination of the Jewish people, or the evils of Russian imperialism.

No, I never imagined a day when Holocaust revisionism, hatred of Jews, and an orgiastic support for the Kremlin would be platformed before millions of Americans by popular voices.

But that dark day has come. Ironically, it has arrived in full bloom on the eve of the 250th year of American independence and the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II — just as the last of our “Greatest Generation” veterans are leaving this world for the next, their living voices never to be heard again.

Names like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Darryl Cooper, and Nick Fuentes are persuading millions of younger Americans that Jews are controlling and destroying America — a message disturbingly similar to the rhetoric of the post-WWI Munich völkisch scene and the 1923 emergence of Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer, all preliminary to the National Socialist takeover of Germany.

The message pandered in 2025 is that Lindbergh and the Nazi-sympathetic isolationists of the 1930s were right; that Hitler has been misunderstood; that the Holocaust is grossly exaggerated and was merely an unintended consequence of wartime logistics failures — German unpreparedness for large numbers of prisoners — rather than an attempt to wipe out the Jews; that Churchill was the real villain of World War II; and that America was manipulated into the war by the military-industrial complex of its day.

It’s a symphony of historical illiteracy and blackness of the heart. 

Thank God eyewitnesses are still alive — soldiers who once looked Nazism in the eye, walked into the horror of the concentration camps, and came face to face with the terrors of Russian invasion tactics including their mass rapes, tortures, and murders of civilians.

I spoke at length with one from that veteran league of extraordinary gentlemen this past weekend.

I think we should hear what he had to say.

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101 Year Old Vet Jumps from Original D-Day Plane

On Saturday, November 1, 2025, I had the privilege of serving as a flight partner to “Sir” David Marshall, a 101-year-old Jewish World War II veteran and concentration-camp liberator. 

We took to the skies with a team of jumpers aboard the Tico Belle—a C-47 that flew over Normandy on D-Day, June 6, 1944. 

Like so many Jewish immigrants, David’s family fled to America to escape Russian ethnic terror. We shared that in common. 

He also spoke Yiddish. Though I knew only a few phrases from my childhood, we exchanged favorite expressions before settling into a serious conversation about the four great horrors David witnessed firsthand as a 20-year-old during WWII: the Holocaust, the Nazis, the Russians, and the death of a best friend.

A Long Island New Yorker who served in the U.S. Army’s 84th Infantry Division (“Railsplitters”), David was a “mortar man” for Company M (334th Inf. Regt.). He fought in the Normandy campaign, in the Roer Valley, and in the Battle of the Bulge. He was present at the famous Elbe River crossing surrender and had disturbing contacts with the Russian army at that time.

At 101, he remains razor-sharp, remarkably agile, and absolutely nobody’s fool.

The day before our flight, this centenarian delighted everyone by participating in a flawless tandem jump out of the very same C-47. All this thanks to the amazing team at RCPT USA.

“I loved it. I didn’t want to jump in 1944, but I loved doing it in 2025,” he told us.

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Entering A Concentration Camp

Over the last twenty-five years, I have made a feature documentary and three television series on World War II. Along the way, I have interviewed hundreds of WWII veterans — and more than a few concentration camp liberators. In all those years, I have never known a witness to the Nazi death camps who could speak of the moment they arrived at the gates of Hell without struggling to form words.

David was no exception.

On April 10, 1945, David and the men of the 84th were chasing the retreating German army when they stumbled upon an unexpected find.

Before them stood a camp filled with living human skeletons behind a locked gate. The fragments of emaciated humanity were mostly naked, moving slowly, many in a near-catatonic state from abuse and starvation. They were moaning to be released. The stench of death was everywhere.

“Nothing prepared us for that moment,” he told me. “It was like walking into Hell.”

David and the 84th had discovered the Nazis’ Hannover-Ahlem concentration work camp for men. Located on the western edge of Hanover, Lower Saxony, it lay about 34 miles from the infamous Bergen-Belsen death camp, where 50,000 prisoners suffered horrifying deaths.

On April 15, 1945, five days after David and the Americans liberated Hannover-Ahlem, the British 11th Armoured Division arrived at Bergen-Belsen.

The story of Bergen-Belsen has haunted me since 2014, when I spent an afternoon with the head of the British Imperial War Museum for a remarkable film screening. 

I was one of about fifty people in attendance to watch a previously unreleased documentary from 1945, commissioned by the United States government and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, titled German Concentration Camps Factual Survey.

But by the fall of 1945, Washington decided to place the film under wraps, exiling it to a locked vault rather than release what was sure to incite further anger toward the German people. The surrender of the Third Reich had changed things. Americans were now the victors, and following the July 1945 Potsdam Conference, occupied part of Berlin. The focus was now on the Russians.

That’s why Hitchcock’s concentration camp film remained in obscurity until 2014 when it was released with limited screenings under the title Night Will Fall. 

Using remarkable archive footage and testimonies, Night Will Fall tells the story of the camps’ Liberation by the allies and their efforts to document the unbelievable scenes they encountered. It may be the most descriptive and horrifying of the trove of extant concentration camp footage compiled. Watch it and prepare not to sleep for weeks. 

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The Back Story on Concentration Camp Liberation

American soldiers in Europe like David were completely unprepared for what they would discover in concentrations camps. 

The first to be discover and liberated by Americans was Ohrdruf (a sub camp of Buchenwald) on April 4, 1945, six days before David liberated Hannover-Ahlem on April 10, 1945. But word was slow to spread. 

There were rumors of Nazi horrors, but the scope and reality of the Holocaust was unknown to David and the men of his regiment when they stumbled onto the living skeletons of Hannover-Ahlem on the 10th. 

Six days later, on April 12, 1945, Generals Dwight D. Eisenhower, George S. Patton, and Omar Bradley visited Ohrdruf, to witness the atrocities firsthand of Ohrdruf. Eyewitnesses and commanders (including Eisenhower) described profound shock. 

Ike could not have predicted an American future in 2025 in which members of his own Republican Party, individuals with vast media platforms reaching hundreds of millions, would diminish the reality of Nazi death camps. But he knew enough about human nature to order maximum documentation so no one could deny it.

David at the Concentration Camp

I want to better understand David’s experience liberating the camp.

What happened first?

“I will never forget what happened as we opened the door to the camp,” he pauses to find the right words.

“This guy, he was emaciated, tried to walk out of the camp. And he did.” 

“But as soon as he stepped out, he dropped dead in front of me. Just outside the gate.” 

“My buddy next to me watched and said: “At least he died a free man.”

“But I did not agree. It was a terrible end to this poor man’s life.”

“Were there any SS at the camp?” I ask. 

“No. Those bastards heard we were coming. They kept their prisoners locked up. Then they fled.”

“What would have happened if you had found them?”

“I never shot a man point blank. The thought is terrible to me. I take no pleasure in that. But I can tell you if there had been any Germans there, they would have been killed on the spot.”

Had you heard of concentration camps before liberating this one?

“No. None of us had.”

Did you know the prisoners were Jews?

“Of course.”

How did you know?

“I am a Jew. Do you think I can’t identify Jews?

Did you feed them?

“No, they told us not to or we would kill them.”

“Our instinct was to give them our rations….We left their care and food to the Army medical units.”

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Discovering Hell

The official record fills in details: There may have been 250 prisoners left at the time David arrived at the Hannover-Ahlem concentration camp. 

The extermination camps were run by Himmler’s SS-Totenkopfverbände, the camp-guard branch of the SS. These troops were carefully selected for racial purity and unquestioning obedience. 

Himmler addressed the SS, calling the extermination “a glorious page in our history that shall never be written.” He required soldiers remain “decent” in private life but “firm” in their commitment to the extermination. Mass execution was deemed an act of moral discipline – a hygienic duty rather than an ethical issue. Killing without hesitation was moral courage, not cruelty.

These SS guards at Hannover-Ahlem caught wind of the advancing Allied army on April 6, the same day that Ohrdruf was liberated. They determined to evacuate the camp, abandoning around 250 prisoners, and taking 600 “healthy” prisoners to relocate at the Bergen-Belsen death camp. Of the prisoners sent on this march, only 450 made it. The SS shot those unable to keep pace.

After walking through the camp, a doctor from the 335th Infantry Regiment of the 84th Division, wrote in a letter to his wife:

“You have to see it — and you are so stunned, you only say it was horrible. You can’t think of adjectives. We weren’t in the place two minutes before our eyes filled with tears.”

David put it this way: “We liberated the camp and then returned to chasing the Germans, but I have lived with that experience for all these years. How can I forget it.” 

The official army records indicate that the liberating troops from the 84th Infantry Division compelled the mayor and citizens who collaborated with the Nazis to provide food for the survivors. Within two days the Americans arranged transport of the worst cases to Heidehaus Municipal Hospital in Hanover, where they received medical treatment.

The US Army war crimes investigators reported that many of these survivors died soon after liberation from the accumulated abuse, mistreatment, and neglect they had suffered. They estimated that only 300 to 400 Jewish prisoners at Hannover-Ahlem survivedthe war.

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The Elbe River Crossing

David and the 84th infantry division reached the Elbe River on April 13, 1945, three days after the men liberated the concentration camp. 

Their advance was halted at this point as Allied command made the fateful decision to allow the Soviet Red Army to take Berlin and the eastern parts of Germany.

“Where did you end up in Germany?”

“We were supposed to go to Berlin, but we diddn’t. We ended up North of Berlin at the Elbe River way. 

“You couldn’t see the water. Do you know why?

Tell me.

“It was filled with German soldiers coming to surrender to us.”

They knew what would happen if the Russians got them?

Yes. 

Did they make it?

“Oh yes…They made it, but they came across to surrender to us.”

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One of the Great Humanitarian Moments in Military History

The halt thrust David into one of the most remarkable humanitarian moments in modern military history, as 1.5 million German soldiers and civilians faced life-or-death decisions to cross the river, including the damaged Tangermünde Bridge, where 100,000 people crossed in just four days, to reach American lines rather than face vengeance killings, mass rapes, medical neglect, and starvation at the hands of the Russians.

As Berlin was falling, there was a reason why Germans fled en masse to surrender to the Americans. They hoped the Americans would treat them with mercy, but they knew the Russians would murder them for sport.

It was a moment that highlighted one fundamental difference between the American and Russian worldviews: Americans believed in humanity — that all people were worthy of decency and respect because “they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.”

At the Elbe River, American soldiers followed the Geneva Convention, often going far beyond what was required. They gave the Germans chocolate, food, delousing, medical care, and hope for life after war. In contrast, Russian forces in Berlin and occupied Germany raped women en masse, often bayoneting or shooting victims when finished. They murdered men, women, and children without conscience, underscoring the difference between American values and Russian military ethics.

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Meeting the Russians

“Did you see the Russians,” I asked. 

“Later, yes.” 

“In our area we had nothing to do with them,” he says emphatically. “They stayed on their side. We stayed on ours.” 

On April 25, 1945, U.S. and Red Army troops met near Torgau on the Elbe. It was a significant event that effectively signaled the final collapse of Nazi Germany.

The idea of Americans celebrating with Russians was distasteful to David.

“The further south there was a lot of meetings with Americans and Russians, drinking and dancing.”

“I have pictures of that. I said (to the Americans). You son’s of bitches, you should have never done that.”

What did you think of the Russians?

“You can take them.” 

Did all of the Americans know how bad the Russians were? 

“Those of us up front knew. Because we saw evidence of it.”

Can you describe that to me?

“I’ll only tell you one thing.”

He pauses. Shakes his finger and describes a moment which forever cemented David’s perspective: four Russian soldiers brutally gang rape a young German girl, and then bayonet her to death through her privates.

“Once I saw that,” he paused, “I will NOT, ever have a good thing to say about a Russian.”

What David witnessed was a window into one of the largest recorded mass rape events. Between 1945 and 1946, Russian troops would rape between 1.4 and 2 million Germans, often murdering their victims. Tens of thousands of pregnancies resulted. Suicides. Generational horror at there hands of the Red Army. 

“And my parents came from there [Russia].” 

“Why did they come from there? You know that?”

Next, David and I discuss the horror that ensued in Russian occupied Berlin. 

“My feeling: if we had gone into Berlin, it would not have happened.”

“They [the Germans] would not have resisted the way they did. They would have surrendered peacefully to us.”

“It was a big mistake by Eisenhower, Churchill, [and] Roosevelt.”

Why do you think they did that?

“Politics—strictly politics.

“My feeling at the time was: Please, Germany, beat the s—t out of the Russians. Then we’ll take care of the Germans…we will have taken care of both of them at the same time. Germans take care of the Russians, and we take care of the Germans. Because at that point the Germans were not going to win—far from it—despite the fact that they had jet airplanes, rockets, and things we did not have. Please beat the Russians.”

Do you remember in the 1930s there was an isolationist movement? Some were even sympathetic to the Germans.

“Well, Lindbergh was… I did not like him.”

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Eighty Years Later

Fast forward from April, 1945 to 2025. 

Three things are still the same: 

First, David is still here. 

Second, Nazi and Russian apologists persist in the West. 

Third, the Russian military remains a criminal institution. 

It has been eighty years since the Elbe River crossing and there is a sting to Patton’s famous warning that we fight the Russians then or we fight them later. 

Image of civilians tortured and executed by Russians in Bucha, Ukraine

On February 24, 2022, a trained Marxist-Leninist, KGB operative, autocrat, and self-described heir to the Russian Army of 1945 launched a full-scale invasion of a sovereign nation.

His arguments for invasion parallel Hitler’s defense of aggression and the subjugation of the Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia:

• The defense of ethnic populations
• Righting historical wrongs
• The illegitimacy and inferiority of the national, cultural, and ethnic identity of the people to be invaded
• Space from the threat of Western nations
• The necessity of Lebensraum as protection against Western nations

In its modern incarnation, the expansionist Nazi ideology of Lebensraum (“living space”) is replaced with the expansionist Kremlin philosophy of Russkiy Mir (“the Russian world”).

Like the Nazis, Moscow argues that Russia has a civilizational, cultural, and historical right—and even an obligation—to “protect” and “reunify” all people who are ethnically Russian, Russian-speaking, or historically connected to the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union.

In the same month in 2022 that Russian bombs rained down on Babyn Yar—the Holocaust memorial site where more than 100,000 people were executed, making it one of the largest single-location mass shooting sites of the Holocaust—Russian soldiers entered the town of Bucha, committing mass atrocities against the civilian population.

I was not in Bucha, Ukraine, in March 2022, when the Russian Army mercilessly terrorized this peaceful town not far from Kyiv. I arrived later with my camera team to gather firsthand accounts of Russian “green corridor” traps that turned into slaughterhouses for parents and their children; testimonies of the rape of children in front of their families; and the execution of fathers and sons.

But a former U.S. Army officer who later became a member of my organization arrived in Bucha in 2022, within 48 hours of the Russian withdrawal.

Once again, an American — my friend — arrived to find the remains of civilians imprisoned, tortured, and murdered by a retreating army.

Like the concentration camp liberators of 1945, none of the men walking into Bucha that day were prepared for what they would find.

What he described to me—and what has been documented by others in exhaustive detail—was a mass rape, torture, and civilian execution campaign committed by “ordinary” Russians against civilians.

In fact, more than 9,000 documented war crimes were committed by Russians against children, women, the elderly, fathers and sons, and religious and community leaders in Bucha during the 33-day Russian occupation.

David’s concerns have been validated.

This is a good place to end our story of David — a humble Jewish New Yorker, descended from immigrants who fled persecution at the hands of the Russians to find freedom in the United States, only to be sent back to Europe to help save the world. There, he was confronted with the horrors of both the Germans and the Russians.

Now, in the twilight of his life, David speaks to a world with a short memory.

I think it’s worth listening to David.

He was there.

Many were there.

But only a handful of that great cloud of witnesses remain to look us in the eyes and remind us of what was once obvious to Americans.

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Postcript: For his service David earned a Bronze Star Medal, and the European-African-Middle Eastern (EAME) Campaign medal. He was awarded the French Legion of Honor, but he said the “one that really mattered” was his Combat Infantry Badge. 

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Thank you for reading. Please share with friends and family to build help build awareness of our WWII legacy and ongoing fight against forces which would destroy national sovereignty and usher in a new reign of terror. To support my work you can buy me a coffee here: 

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DW Phillips is the executive producer of Kyiv of Mine. He is a filmmaker, attorney, journalist and director Ukraine Story. 

🇺🇸 Lights, Camera, Freedom 🇺🇦.