The Triumph of the Will documentary was an ideal teaching tool and enabled Dolibois to point out to his students how individuals within the Nazi Party hierarchy spoke and gestured, what insignia they wore, who was subordinate to whom. Between the hateful speeches and the endless parades, the fawning inner circle and the Nuremberg rallies, John Dolibois had become so familiar with Hitler’s inner circle that he could almost recite their speeches himself.
He enjoyed teaching, but, like so many dedicated Americans of his generation, Dolibois wished to see action overseas. There was a tinge of envy as well. He stayed in touch with his former colleagues from Officer Candidates School, most of whom had been sent to Europe months ago. Many had already been promoted to captains and majors. As the war in Europe drew to a close, John Dolibois had accepted that he was, in all likelihood, not going to be sent overseas as part of an interrogation team, called an IPW team, to interview newly captured prisoners of war. Then, on Easter Sunday, April 1, 1945, he received orders to ship out with the next detachment. Steaming out of the New York harbor only days later, he was standing on the deck of the ?le de France when someone handed him a telegram. He’d been promoted to first lieutenant.
Things moved fast after he’d crossed the Atlantic. On April 13, Dolibois’s ship landed in West Scotland. Every vessel in the harbor was at half-mast; President Roosevelt had died the day before. A quick train trip to London bore witness to “appalling devastation.” Piles of rubble filled both sides of every street. Dolibois’s channel crossing took place under a full moon, and he was grateful to arrive in the war-torn port at Le Havre, France, without incident. “Up until then our move from Camp Ritchie to Le Havre had been well orchestrated,” explains Dolibois. “Now chaos set in.” Driving into Munich, destroyed vehicles and weaponry littered the road. In the clearings in the woods sat small fleets of wrecked Luftwaffe airplanes, their wings torn off and their fuselages pockmarked with holes. Corpses rotted in ditches. “Suddenly the war was very real,” Dolibois recalls.
His first assignment was at the Dachau concentration camp, just two days after its liberation. Dolibois had been sent to Dachau to look over groups of captured German soldiers to see if important generals, party officials, or scientists were hiding out among the crowd. “Primarily I was to watch for high ranking Nazis in disguise,” remembers Dolibois. “We had reports that many of them were passing themselves off as ordinary German soldiers, thus hoping to be overlooked in the confusion and to disappear.” His job was to intuit the meaning of certain manners of walk, greeting, and speech. Dolibois was on the lookout for anyone who might be useful to the Allies for a more detailed interrogation at a facility elsewhere.
At Dachau, John Dolibois scoured faces in the crowd for telltale marks, things that could not be hidden. The most obvious among them were the dueling scars of the Nazi elite. But at Camp Ritchie Dolibois had also become an expert in signs of concealment. Recently shaved facial hair or patches pulled off uniforms were indicators that a man had something to hide. True expertise, Dolibois knew, lay in recognizing nuance.