Arthur Dodd (British Army soldier)

Arthur Dodd (December 1919 in Northwich, Cheshire – 17 January 2011) served in the British Army during World War II.

However, as he had an HGV licence, he was permitted to enlist as a military driving instructor[1] for the Royal Army Service Corps.

At the beginning of World War II, Dodd served as a volunteer in France and was involved in the Dunkirk evacuation.

[1] When Dodd and the POWs disembarked they noticed dozens of bundles of clothing that had just been left by the rail tracks.

[2] As they were marched to the concentration camp and factory where they would be working, Dodd tells of a teenage Jewish girl, stripped to the waist, who was being savagely whipped by an SS officer.

[1][2] The filth of Camp E715,[3] with its accompanying smell of burning flesh from the crematorium at nearby Auschwitz II, was to be Dodd's home for the next 14 months.

[1] Some of the British POWs frequently put themselves in danger to try to get any scraps of food they could spare to the prisoners in the Jewish section.

On going outside to investigate, they saw about a thousand Jews, old men, women and children, walking towards Auschwitz II on the other side of the perimeter wire.

[1] On 23 January 1945, four days before Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army, in the coldest winter Poland had experienced for years, the British PoWs were given the option by their German guards to either start walking east towards the Russians or west towards the Americans.

As they walked, they passed the partially snow-covered bodies of hundreds of dead Jews, some of whom had died from cold or their exertions, while others had been shot.

[5][6] In the latter programme, Dodd returned to Auschwitz to find the location of Camp E715, and tried unsuccessfully to gain admission to the IG Farben plant to claim the 14 months backwages he said they owed him for his forced wartime labour there.