One of Iowa's oldest World War II veterans dies at 108

He didn’t attend the uniformed marches in veterans’ parades, but right up to the end Loren Greiner was more quietly telling the story of war.

“He hated, hated guns. He’d seen enough of them,” said son Keith Greiner, of Des Moines.

But he was known to give a history lesson to an unsuspecting young person who came to his door and was ignorant of D-Day or to regale the local football team crowded into the nursing home with tales of true battle.

Greiner, of Emmetsburg, died Saturday at age 108.

As one of Iowa’s oldest veterans, he made sure his generation’s war experience didn’t fade into history.

Two weeks before he died in Emmetsburg, son Keith pointed out to him that a 112-year-old survivor of Auschwitz concentration camp had died.

“He lived 112 years because you did what you and a lot of other Americans did in World War II,” his son told him.

“He thought about that, and then he said, ‘You know, you are right.'"

Greiner was one of the older men at age 36 to be in the sixth wave to land on Omaha Beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944. He was on the front lines through France and into Germany. When the war ended he joined his fellow U.S. soldiers as the first to liberate a Nazi concentration camp.

Nearly 70 years later, he was still telling the story, drawing sketches to describe the layout of the camp to a Des Moines Register journalist who visited him in the nursing home in 2013.

“There were two buildings there, nothing in them but straw,” he said then. “They didn’t gas them or anything. What they would do was put them in these buildings, not feed them, let them die in the cold. But over just a ways was a trench, about 100 feet long, 10 foot wide. What they did is lay 25 civilian inmates out for burial.”

The vision stuck with him throughout his life.

State Veterans Affairs officials say they can’t confirm if Greiner was the oldest veteran in Iowa before his death. U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs officials also say it’s difficult to track how many World War II veterans are still living – their estimate is 847,000 – but approximately 465 die every day.

“He was concerned that people knew what happened, so it wouldn’t fade into history,” Keith Greiner said.

He also wrote essays about the experience, for which he earned five bronze stars.

Greiner was the oldest of six children and grew up on a farm near Blairsburg, but quickly dreamed of the wider world, fashioning a crystal radio out of an oatmeal can and wire that fueled his spirit of ingenuity and love of science.

He eventually earned a master’s degree at Iowa State University and became concerned and fascinated with the Dust Bowl. Greiner eventually became a soil surveyor for the U. S. Soil Conservation Service, where for 32 years he surveyed farmland in Nebraska and Iowa as part of the national effort to map farmland in the entire country.

He married Alice Sweet, a chemistry teacher, in 1942.

“The two of them together, they were a nerdy group,” Keith Greiner said.

She died in 1977, but he never forgot to ask nurses if they had taken organic chemistry.

In retirement, he became an advocate for water and development issues around Iowa lakes and led the effort for a senior center in Emmetsburg.

As Keith cleaned out the numerous scientific papers and essays from his father’s life, there was also a German weight measurement device that the elder Greiner took great pride in and could describe in detail its exacting measurements.

He brought it back from the war and it was a rare thing to stay with him through life as much as the sad stories.

“Only thing I want to remember is we are free now,” he told the Register back in 2013. “We can go anywhere.”

Survivors include son Keith, a sister, Hester, and a sister-in-law, Eleanor and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Funeral services are 11 a.m. Friday at Martin-Mattice Funeral Home in Emmetsburg.