Dachau liberation reprisals

Corpses of prisoners who were left by their German guards to die in a train at Dachau. Thousands of prisoners were murdered by the Germans in the days before the camp's liberation.

SS men confer with Brigadier General Henning Linden during the capture of the Dachau concentration camp. Pictured from left to right: SS aide, camp leader SS-Untersturmführer Heinrich Wicker (mostly hidden by the aide), Paul M. G. Lévy, a Belgian journalist (man with helmet looking to his left), Dr. Victor Maurer (back), Brig. Gen. Henning Linden (man with helmet, looking to his right) and some U.S. soldiers.

On April 29, 1945, soldiers of the 3rd Battalion, 157th Infantry Regiment, 45th Infantry Division, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Felix L. Sparks, approaching the sprawling Dachau complex from the southwest, found 39 railway boxcars containing some 2,000 skeletal corpses parked on rail tracks just outside the complex itself. Brain tissue was splattered on the ground from one victim found nearby with a crushed skull. The smell of decaying bodies and human excrement, and the sight of naked, emaciated bodies induced vomiting, crying, disbelief, and rage in the advancing troops.[2][3][4] Advancing soldiers from H Company, 22nd Regiment used a loudspeaker to call on the SS to surrender, but they continued to fire in bursts.[5][6]

Upon moving deeper into the complex, and the prisoner area itself, the soldiers found more bodies. Some had been dead for hours or days before the camp's capture and lay where they had died. Soldiers reported seeing a row of concrete structures that contained rooms full of hundreds of naked and barely clothed dead bodies piled floor to ceiling, a coal-fired crematorium, and a gas chamber.[7] "The stench of death was overpowering," Sparks recalled.[8]

According to Harold Marcuse, American professor of German history, camp commander SS-Hauptsturmführer Martin Weiss, together with the camp guards and the SS garrisons, had fled the camp before the arrival of U.S. troops. SS-Untersturmführer Heinrich Wicker (murdered after the surrender) was left in charge and had roughly 560 personnel at his disposal; these came from conscripted inmates of the SS disciplinary prison inside the Dachau concentration camp and Hungarian Waffen-SS troops.[9]

On April 29, Dachau was surrendered to Brigadier General Henning Linden of the 42nd Infantry Division of the U.S. Army by Untersturmführer Wicker. According to Linden, he arrived at the command post in Dachau at about 15:00 and proceeded to make his way across the Amper River to the site of the complex, approximately one-half kilometre south of the bridge he crossed.[10] He proceeded to take control of the camp in some tumult; thereafter, he toured the camp with a group of reporters[11] (including Marguerite Higgins).[12] A description of the surrender appears in Linden's memorandum to Maj. Gen. Harry J. Collins, entitled Report on Surrender of Dachau Concentration Camp:

As we approached the southwest corner, three people came forward with a flag of truce. We met them about 75 yards north of the southwest corner. These three people were a Swiss Red Cross representative, Victor Maurer, and two SS troopers who said they were the camp commander and his assistant. They had come here on the night of the 28th to take over from the regular camp personnel for the purpose of surrendering the camp to the advancing Americans. The Swiss Red Cross representative said there were about 100 SS guards in the camp who had their arms stacked except for the people in the tower.... He had given instructions that there would be no shots fired and it would take about 50 men to relieve the guards, as there were 42,000 "half-crazed" inmates, many of them typhus infected... He asked if I were an officer. I replied, "I am Assistant Division Commander of the 42nd Infantry Division and will accept the surrender of the camp in the name of the Rainbow Division for the United States Army...."[13]

Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower issued a communiqué regarding the capture of Dachau concentration camp: "Our forces liberated and mopped up the infamous concentration camp at Dachau. Approximately 32,000 prisoners were liberated; 300 SS camp guards were quickly neutralized."[14]

Military historian Earl Ziemke describes the event:

The Americans came on April 29, a Sunday. Work had stopped in the camp on Wednesday, and an evacuation was being organized. One transport of 4,000 prisoners was able to get away, but the 42nd and 45th Infantry Divisions covered the 40 miles from the Danube faster than the Germans expected. At noon on Sunday the camp was quiet, and the SS guards were at their posts in the towers when the cry "Americans!" went up. A prisoner rushed toward the gate, and a guard shot him. Outside, a single American soldier stood looking casually at the towers while the guards eyed him and others who were two or three hundred yards away. When the Americans opened fire, the guards in the gate tower came down, hands in the air. One held a pistol behind his back, and the first American shot him. In the next few minutes a jeep drove up; in it were a blonde female war correspondent and a chaplain. The chaplain asked the prisoners, now crowding to the gate, to join him in the Lord's Prayer. ...Troops of the 42nd and 45th Divisions who liberated Dachau in the afternoon on 29 April were fighting in Munich the next morning and by nightfall had, along with XV Corps' other three divisions, captured the city that was the capital of Bavaria and the birthplace of Nazism.

— Earl F. Ziemke[15]

Walenty Lenarczyk, a prisoner at Dachau, stated that following the camp's liberation "prisoners swarmed over the wire and grabbed the Americans and lifted them to their shoulders... other prisoners caught the SS men... The first SS man elbowed one or two prisoners out of his way, but the courage of the prisoners mounted, they knocked them down and nobody could see whether they were stomped or what, but they were killed."[17] Elsewhere in the camp SS men, Kapos and informers were beaten badly with fists, sticks and shovels. There was at least one incident where US soldiers looked away as two prisoners beat a German guard to death with a shovel, and Lt. Bill Walsh witnessed one such beating.[25] Another soldier witnessed an inmate stomping on an SS trooper's face until "there wasn't much left." When the soldier said to him, "You've got a lot of hate in your heart," he simply nodded.[26]

An American chaplain was told by three young Jewish men, who had left the camp during liberation, that they had beaten to death one of the more sadistic SS guards when they discovered him hiding in a barn, dressed as a peasant.[27]

Lt. Col. Joseph Whitaker, the Seventh Army's Assistant Inspector General, was ordered to investigate after witnesses came forward testifying about the killings. He issued a report on June 8, 1945, called the Investigation of Alleged Mistreatment of German Guards at Dachau, also known as The I.G. Report. In 1991, an archived copy was found in the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and made public.[19]

Whitaker reported that close to the back entrance to the camp, Lt. William P. Walsh, commander of Company "I", 157th Infantry, shot four German soldiers in a boxcar who had surrendered to him. Pvt. Albert C. Pruitt then climbed into the boxcar and performed a coup de grâce on the wounded men.[19]

After he had entered the camp, Walsh, along with Lt. Jack Bushyhead, the executive officer of Company "I", organized the segregation of POWs into those who were members of the Wehrmacht and those who were in the SS. The SS were marched into a separate enclosure and shot by members of "I" Company with several different types of weapons.[19]

The investigation resulted in the U.S. military considering courts-martial against those involved, including battalion commander Lt. Col. Felix Sparks, while Lt. Howard Buechner was cited in the report for dereliction of duty for not giving medical aid to the wounded SS men in the coal yard.[19] However, Gen. George S. Patton, recently appointed military governor of Bavaria, chose to dismiss the charges. Therefore, the witnesses to the killings were never cross-examined in court.[17]

Col. Charles L. Decker, an acting deputy judge advocate, concluded in late 1945 that, while there had probably been a violation of international law, "in the light of the conditions which greeted the eyes of the first combat troops, it is not believed that justice or equity demand that the difficult and perhaps impossible task of fixing individual responsibility now be undertaken".[28]

• List of massacres in Germany
• Allied war crimes during World War II

• Complete transcript of the US Army investigation Boston.com | Boston Globe Online | Nation | The Secret History of World War II
• Goodell, Stephen, Kevin A Mahoney; Sybil Milton (1995). "1945: The Year of Liberation". Washington, D.C., U.S.: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. ISBN 0-89604-700-8
• Marcuse, Harold (2001). "Legacies of Dachau : The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, 1933–2001". Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-55204-4
• Zarusky, Jürgen, "'That is not the American Way of Fighting:' The Shooting of Captured SS-Men During the Liberation of Dachau," in: Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel (eds.): Dachau and the Nazi Terror 1933–1945, vol. 2, Studies and Reports (Dachau 2002), pp. 133–160. (German original in Dachauer Hefte vol. 13, 1997).

48°16′19.4″N 11°27′29.9″E