A joint project of the Sam Rayburn House Historic Site and the Fannin County Historical Commission celebrating America 250 with spotlights of Fannin County citizens who participated in or witnessed historical events

Fannin County, Texas -- Earl “Red” W. Young, son of Carrie Wright and Isom Young, was born in Ravenna, TX, on August 2, 1919. He had four siblings. He attended school in Ivanhoe, TX. He married Leota May Palmer on November 27, 1943, in Lubbock, TX, and they had one son.

Buchenwald was one of 44,000 camps and incarceration areas that Nazi Germany created between 1933 and 1945. People in these camps including Jews, Jehova’s Witnesses, Roma, people with disabilities, political prisoners, and more were subjected to forced labor, scientific experiments, and mass murder. Concentration camps like Buchenwald are primarily associated with the Holocaust, which the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum defines as “the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million European Jews by the Nazi German regime and its allies and collaborators” between 1933 and 1945. Red and others who liberated these camps saw survivors suffering from hard labor, malnutrition, disease, and starvation, and then did their best to treat the survivors.

Red earned a European-African-Middle East Campaign ribbon with battle stars as well as other awards. He worked in the maintenance department at the VA Hospital until his retirement. He was a member of the Corinth Baptist Church. Red passed away on November 17, 2004, in Bonham, TX and is buried in section L489 at the Willow Wild Cemetery in Bonham.