“He feigned death for 10 hours during the Battle of the Bulge,” says Patrick Kelley. His father, Jay Hillary Kelley, was a lieutenant in the 51st Engineer Battalion of the US Army when he took part in this terrible episode of the Second World War. During these ten weeks of terror in the freezing winter of 1944-1945, a million Allied soldiers faced 500,000 German soldiers during this confrontation called the “Battle of the Bulge” by the Anglo-Saxons, because of the shape of the front line.
To avoid being spotted, Jay “H” Kelley therefore hunkered down, remaining motionless in the cold at all costs, as he recounts in a diary where he records his daily life as a soldier day after day, which his son Patrick Kelley has recorded. found many years later and of which he entrusted us with some extracts.
A few months earlier, his father, then a 24-year-old officer, like thousands of other compatriots, landed in Normandy, on Utah Beach. He survived this carnage, just like the second in the Ardennes. The adventure is far from over.
On April 12, 1945, General Patton’s Third Army liberated the city of Erfurt. Not far from there, in the town of Gebesee, an SS man who ran a concentration camp in Latvia, Fritz Scherwitz, abandoned his uniform for civilian clothes. He enjoins the handful of prisoners who accompanied him from Riga to do the same.
For several months, the group had been transporting equipment in wagons, undoubtedly patched uniforms to the factory prison where they were detained, Lenta. As crazy as it may seem (1), the former prisoners, mostly Jews, had donned some of these uniforms in order to go unnoticed in Germany in total disarray where they had been moving since February or March 1945.
On April 12, 1945, this group “surrendered” to the American platoon present there. Platoon of which the famous Jay H. Kelley is a member. According to his son, Patrick Kelley, this boarded train “was leaving Berlin to go to Berghof”, Adolf Hitler’s second home in the Bavarian Alps. It “contained personal objects which belonged to Eva Braun and Adolf Hitler”, indicates the son of the officer, who also inherited a tablecloth bearing the monogram of Eva Braun (the latter married Hitler on April 29 1945, before their suicide in the dictator’s Berlin bunker the next day).
It is impossible at this time to say whether the cars containing personal items of the “Fürher” and his companion on the one hand, and these wagons transported by Scherwitz and his prisoners belonged to a single convoy. It is also difficult to state with certainty that it was the famous “Führersonderzug”, initially called “Amerika”, the train which was the subject of a documentary available from Netflix. Indeed, in May 1945, on the eve of the Armistice, Nazi partisans destroyed Hitler’s personal wagon.
However, a train containing Hitler’s personal effects was boarded by Kelley’s platoon and the group led by Scherwitz did indeed follow this same battalion in the days that followed. Among the former Jewish prisoners of Scherwitz, one man, Boris Jankolovics (the great-grandfather of the author of this article NLDR), even became Kelley’s translator, secretary and driver.
Former director of the Polish subsidiary of the Hollywood major Warner Bros, Jankolovics, a Latvian of origin, was deported in 1941, undoubtedly following his participation in the French resistance, within the Franco-Polish network “F2”. For him, as he wrote in his diary, Kelley tried to contact Jack Warner, the boss of the American group. He also got in touch with the USO (United States Organizations), which regularly brought together international stars of the time such as Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and Marlene Dietrich who came to entertain the troops not far from the front.
However, on a daily basis, Kelley’s work turns out to be much less pleasant. Integrated into the American military government after the armistice of May 8, 1945, its mission was to re-establish a local administration in the Dachau region, near Munich. “To regain control, he had to oust the local Nazi leaders,” who held all the important positions of power, reports Patrick Kelley. “He was furious with these administrators: there were very serious food shortages,” he adds.
Distrustful of his translator, whom he probably takes for a spy (which he perhaps was), Jay Kelley’s superior forces him to separate from Jankolovics. But he does not leave him completely without resources: he gives him the Mercedes requisitioned by the American troops and accompanies him to Paris, where he writes him a letter of recommendation.
Jankolovics later found his daughter, a refugee in London, but not his wife who had disappeared in the Stutthof camp in Poland, just like other Scherwitz prisoners. He was hired in 1946 by Paramount, where he became a representative in Benelux and Germany, before his death in 1973.
As for Jay Kelley, after his demobilization and his return to the United States, he resumed his studies and obtained a doctorate. A friend of the Kennedys, he became a scientific advisor to the former American president as well as to his successor Lyndon B Johnson. He was later named dean of West Virginia University. He died in 2014. His son Patrick undertook to transcribe his diary, from which they provided us with exclusive extracts.
(1) These elements come from auditions between 1948 and 1957 in view of the trial of Fritz Scherwitz, reported notably in the following book: Kugler, Anita. Scherwitz: The Jewish SS officer. 1st edition 757. Cologne: Kiepenheuer
