100th birthday celebrations for concentration camp liberator Teddy Dixon

Fighting his way through France into Germany with the US Army’s ‘Rainbow Division,’ the then Ravenhill Road resident saw more unspeakable horrors than he cares to remember – but the sheer barbarism of Dachau remains ingrained in his memory to this day.

“It was like going into Hell,” he said.

Edward Copeland Dixon was only 19 when UK went to war with Germany in 1939. By the time of the Belfast Blitz in 1941 he was working as an air raid warden on the streets of the city he had called home since 1925 – when his parents decided to return home from New York City along with five-year-old Teddy.

Despite having no recollection of his time in the US, Teddy was called up for active service with the US Army for big push into Europe following D-Day in June 1944.

Speaking to the East Belfast Herald newspaper at his Cregagh home in 2009, he said he was unsure if the call-up could be legally enforced, but decided to enlist in case he would be subsequently directed to serve with the Navy. What happened next took the Belfast bakery worker on an epic journey through France and into southern Germany via the Haardt Mountains and Hitler’s ‘eagle’s nest’ mountain base at Berchtesgaden.

As the war drew to a close in 1945, Teddy’s unit was involved in the capture of Hitler’s deputy – Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering – in Austria, and it was the newly-promoted Sergeant Dixon who dispatched to check out reports of a salt mine filled with priceless artworks, and then tasked with guarding the treasures at Salzburg Castle.

Members of Teddy’s family have travelled thousands of miles to be with him this weekend for a busy round of birthday celebrations, including a family lunch in the local church hall on Saturday and a hotel buffet event in his honour on Sunday evening.

The much-loved centenarian is in good spirits and will be reliving some of the many highlights of his amazing life surrounded by family and friends, but the shock of discovering thousands of Holocaust victims in 1945 has never left him. The dead had been packed into train carriages as the Nazis attempted to move the evidence of war crimes further away from the advancing Allies.

“I was one of the first 12 soldiers to enter the gates of Dachau camp on April 29 and can still see the bodies in my mind’s eye,” Teddy recalled in 2009.

“The dead were lying everywhere and the smell was indescribable. We found one man who had been left for dead in a carriage but was still alive and we got him some medical attention. We gave our rations to as many of those who could eat but it was too late for several who died in front of our eyes.

“It was like going into Hell.”

Speaking to the News Letter in 2014, he said the vivid memories would never leave him, but he continued to carry out speaking engagements to raise awareness of the warning from history.

“I still like doing the talks in schools but it can annoy you a bit sometimes when you think about it. Many a time when I wake up I find I’ve been dreaming about the Holocaust,” he added.

But thankfully Teddy can recall many happier times during his eventful 100 years – including countless honours and awards from Holocaust survivors, the US Government and Belfast City Council,

His wartime memories include partying on the Champs-Élysées in Paris on the first Bastille Day after liberation from the Germans in July 1945.

The life-long member or Orange lodge LOL242 in Sandy Row had been granted leave from tracking down war criminals in Austria and was on his way home for the Twelfth – but got stranded in the French capital due to the decimation of the rail infrastructure.

In more recent times, the Big Lottery Fund paid for Teddy to travel back to Dachau to commemorate the 65th anniversary of the liberation.

• With Teddy Dixon’s war record reading like the plot of a Hollywood film, it was no surprise that George Clooney brought one of the Belfast man’s adventures to life in a blockbuster movie.

The Monuments Men, released in 2014, was based on the story of the Nazis’ looted art treasures Teddy helped recover from an Austrian salt mine.

Each one of thousands of priceless artworks – including Michelangelo’s ‘Madonna of Bruges’ sculpture and Vermeer’s painting ‘The Astronomer’ – had been packed on to several train carriages and hidden in the mine close to Altaussee.

At the film’s launch, the then 94-year-old Teddy was a Movie House cinema guest for a special screening in Belfast.

He told the News Letter afterwards: “I enjoyed it. It was definitely based on fact and quite well done based on my point of view of having been in the mines. It brought back a lot of memories.”