Jack Hendrick Taylor | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1909 California |
| Died | May 1959 (aged 50) El Centro, California |
| Allegiance |  United States |
| Service/ |  United States Navy,Office of Strategic Services |
| Years of service | 1941–1945 1946 |
| Rank | Lieutenant commander |
| Awards | |
Jack Hendrick Taylor was a United States Navy officer, OSS operative and Nazi concentration camp survivor.
Taylor was born in California. He lived in Hollywood, California where he operated a dental practice. An avid yachtsman and swimmer, Taylor was also a licensed pilot. [2]
After the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked Pearl Harbor Taylor enlisted in the US Navy and was assigned to a submarine chaser. Taylor, who had met William J. Donovan briefly before the war, was then recruited to join the OSS, the United States' wartime intelligence agency established in 1942. He was one of the first to join the organization's newly formed Maritime Unit, a precursor to the Navy SEALS. For this reason, Taylor is sometimes informally referred to as the "first Navy SEAL". [1]
Taylor initially served as chief instructor at the Maritime Unit's secret Smith Point training camp in Maryland. In November 1942, Taylor helped inventor Christian J. Lambertsen demonstrate his secret Lambertsen Amphibious Respiratory Unit for OSS officer Commander H. G. A. Woolley. The invention would eventually allow the Maritime Unit to undertake clandestine diving missions in support of the Allied forces. [3]
In summer 1943, Taylor was deployed to Cairo to gather watercraft for the unit's upcoming missions in the Aegean Sea. Taylor was active before the Battle of Leros, dodging German troops and carrying supplies to MI6 operatives. He often collaborated with American film actor Sterling Hayden, who worked for the OSS Special Operations branch. [4] In September 1943, Taylor was appointed OSS Operations Officer in Italy, where he set up a Maritime Unit branch in the city of Bari to supply Josip Broz Tito's Yugoslav Partisans, a guerilla force fighting against Nazi Germany in occupied Yugoslavia. After the December 1943 air raid on Bari, Taylor relocated the OSS base of operations to Monopoli. Taylor personally led many of the Maritime Unit's covert missions, including one into Albania to rescue a flight of American nurses and medics who had been forced down in the Ceraunian Mountains. On a later trip, Taylor and his men were trapped in Albania for three months, sneaking back into Italy in July 1944 with letters from Albanian nationalist Abaz Kupi. [5]
In October 1944, Taylor parachuted into Austria with three OSS operatives to spy on German supply lines around the city of Wiener Neustadt. However, they caught the attention of Gestapo agents and were arrested and sent to the Morzinplatz Gestapo headquarters in Vienna. [6] In March 1945, Taylor was transferred to the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp complex in northern Austria. He was one of the few American inmates in the camp and collected intelligence from fellow inmates regarding the atrocities committed in the camp. Taylor was also part of the slave labor force that built the crematorium used to exterminate the concentration camp prisoners. Suffering from dysentery and starvation, Taylor was scheduled to be executed four times, but was saved by fellow inmates who wanted him to survive to report on the camp conditions. Taylor was spared from execution a fifth time when part of the 11th Armored Division liberated the camp on May 5, 1945. He was interviewed inside the camp as part of the Nazi Concentration Camps film in 1945 by film director George Stevens. [7] Taylor spent his remaining time in Austria collecting documents and interviewing witnesses to gather evidence against the camp commanders and guards. [8]
After being honorably discharged in autumn 1945, Taylor returned to civilian life in California. He was briefly reactivated in 1946 to serve as one of the primary witnesses in United States of America vs. Hans Altfuldisch et al. . During the trial, he detailed many of the atrocities committed by Waffen-SS members at the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp complex, based on the evidence he had helped to gather. [1] [9]
According to biographer Patrick O'Donnell, Taylor suffered from symptoms contingent with posttraumatic stress disorder later in his life. [10]
He died in the crash of a private light plane that he was piloting in the vicinity of Imperial County, California, not far from his residence, on 10 May 1959. [2] His OSS files were not declassified until after his death.
The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was the intelligence agency of the United States during World War II. The OSS was formed as an agency of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) to coordinate espionage activities behind enemy lines for all branches of the United States Armed Forces. Other OSS functions included the use of propaganda, subversion, and post-war planning.
Mauthausen was a Nazi concentration camp on a hill above the market town of Mauthausen, Upper Austria. It was the main camp of a group with nearly 100 further subcamps located throughout Austria and southern Germany. The three Gusen concentration camps in and around the village of St. Georgen/Gusen, just a few kilometres from Mauthausen, held a significant proportion of prisoners within the camp complex, at times exceeding the number of prisoners at the Mauthausen main camp.
German Earth and Stone Works was an SS-owned company created to procure and manufacture building materials for state construction projects in Nazi Germany. DEST was a subsidiary company of Amtsgruppe W of SS Main Economic and Administrative Office (WVHA). Both Amt. W and the WVHA were headed by Waffen-SS generals Oswald Pohl and Georg Lörner.
Franz Xaver Ziereis was the commandant of the Mauthausen concentration camp from 1939 until the camp was liberated by the American forces in 1945.
The Dachau trials, also known as the Dachau Military Tribunal, handled the prosecution of almost every war criminal captured in the U.S. military zones in Allied-occupied Germany and in Allied-occupied Austria, and the prosecutions of military personnel and civilian persons who committed war crimes against the American military and American citizens. The war-crime trials were held within the compound of the former Dachau concentration camp by military tribunals authorized by the Judge Advocate General of the U.S. Third Army.
Lungitz is a village in the community of Katsdorf, Perg district of Upper Austria, Austria.
The Mauthausen-Gusen camp trials were a set of trials of SS concentration camp personnel following World War II, heard by an American military government court at Dachau. Between March 29 and May 13, 1946, and then from August 6 to August 21, 1947, a total of 69 former camp personnel were tried. Among them were some of the former guards at the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp system and August Eigruber, a former Gauleiter of Upper Austria.
Otakar Batlička was a Czech adventurer, journalist, ham (amateur) radio operator, and member of the Czech-based Nazi resistance group Obrana Národa during World War II.
Père (Father) Jacques de Jésus, OCD, was a French Roman Catholic priest and Discalced Carmelite friar. While serving as headmaster of a boarding school run by his order, he took in several Jewish refugees to protect them from the Nazi government of occupation, for which he was arrested and imprisoned in various concentration camps.
Patrick K. O’Donnell is an American author of books on military history.
The Austrian SS was that portion of the Schutzstaffel (SS) membership from Austria. The term and title was used unofficially. They were never officially recognized as a separate branch of the SS. Austrian SS members were seen as regular personnel and they served in every branch of the SS.
Rudolf Anton Haunschmied is an Austrian author and local historian.
Friedrich Karl Hermann Entress was a German camp doctor in various concentration and extermination camps during the Second World War. He conducted human medical experimentation at Auschwitz and introduced the procedure there of injecting lethal doses of phenol directly into the hearts of prisoners. He was captured by the Allies in 1945, sentenced to death at the Mauthausen-Gusen camp trials, and executed in 1947.
Hans Maršálek was an Austrian typesetter, political activist, detective, historian, and suspected spy for the Soviet Union. A devout socialist and active in the resistance, he was arrested by the Nazis and imprisoned in the Mauthausen concentration camp. After the war, he joined the Austrian political police and was instrumental in tracking down and convicting numerous Nazi criminals. He also became the main chronicler of the camp's history, helped establish the Mauthausen Memorial Museum, and published several books.
Albert Sauer was a Nazi German commandant of Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp. He died of wounds in 1945, and was never tried for his role in The Holocaust.
Granitwerke Mauthausen was one of the names used by the DEST company for its branch based in Sankt Georgen an der Gusen and which exploited the slave manpower confined in certain subcamps of the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp system: Gusen I, Gusen II, Gusen III, and Mauthausen.
Anna Strasser was an Austrian resistance activist during World War ll who helped forced labor and concentration camp victims until her arrest in 1944.
Gusen was a subcamp of Mauthausen concentration camp operated by the SS between the villages of Sankt Georgen an der Gusen and Langestein in the Reichsgau Ostmark. Primarily populated by Polish prisoners, there were also large numbers of Spanish Republicans, Soviet citizens, and Italians. Initially, prisoners worked in nearby quarries, producing granite which was sold by the SS company DEST.
