World War II Day by Day

Dachau, Germany • April 29, 1945

On a gray last Sunday in April 1945, 10 miles/­16 kilo­meters north of Munich, Bavaria’s capital, U.S. sol­diers of the 42nd Infan­try Divi­sion, nick­named the “Rain­bow Divi­sion,” the 45th “Thun­derbird” Infan­try Divi­sion, and the 27th Tank Bat­tal­ion were over­whelmed by the horror they saw as they closed in on Dachau con­cen­tra­tion camp and even more so on entering the com­plex. For the first time in their lives these battle-hardened men of Gen. Alex­ander Patch’s Seventh Army smelled and viewed their worst night­mare. Approaching South­eastern Germany, these green­horn “camp lib­er­ators”—for the most part “grunt sol­diers” who had seen 500 days of com­bat—had no ink­ling of what they might face nearing or entering a German prison camp.

Following a rail siding a few infantry­men from the 42th Divi­sion stum­bled across the “Dachau Death Train,” as it is known to pos­te­rity. Aban­doned on the siding were about 40 box­cars and gon­dola cars chuck-full of ema­ci­ated corpses of 2,000–2,300 inno­cent, mostly Hun­gar­ian Jews. The unfor­tu­nate souls had been evac­u­ated 3 weeks ear­lier from Buchen­wald con­cen­trat­ion camp north­east of Dachau. The gut-wrenching stench and sight of half-clothed pris­oners in ghoul­ish death poses—dehy­drated, asphyx­i­ated, and starved to death on a mur­der­ous 250‑mile/­400‑kilo­meter odys­sey to Dachau—caused GIs with quiv­ering stom­achs to empty them imme­di­ately. Some with stronger stom­achs seethed with blind rage while a hand­ful plotted to take revenge on the supposed perpetrators (see photo essay below).

Holocaust literature has covered the vile­ness of Nazi con­cen­tra­tion, slave labor, and exter­mi­na­tion camps: e.g., the severe over­crowding, phy­si­cal and men­tal exhaus­tion, mal­nu­trition, dis­ease (mainly typhus), bestial cruelty and floggings, expo­sure, deadly medi­cal exper­i­ments, star­va­tion, exe­cu­tion, gassing, corpses cremated in ovens or over fire pits burning cord­wood or coal. Exten­sive cov­er­age is as it should and must be. Less exten­sive cov­er­age has been accorded camp lib­er­ators who were trau­ma­tized, often for life, while rescuing pri­soners, helping gather up the dead, and nursing sur­vi­vors to health with clean water, ade­quate food, and medi­cal atten­tion. Ner­vous break­downs, recur­rent night­mares, melan­choly, detach­ment, silence, drug and alcohol abuse—such were some of the con­se­quences of GIs bearing witness to camp liberation.

The total number of Nazi camps and satellite camps exceeded 5,000. Dachau, with a recorded intake of 206,206 pri­soners during its exis­tence, was the oldest German con­cen­tra­tion camp. It opened less than 2 months after Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler became German chan­cellor in Janu­ary 1933. In time Dachau’s camp system grew to include nearly 100 satellite camps, mostly forced labor work camps that were spread over Southern Germany and Austria.

More than 250,000 GIs became unwitting wit­nesses to the horror of German con­cen­tra­tion, slave labor, and death camps. Supreme Allied com­mander Gen. Dwight D. Eisen­hower ordered his sol­diers from every bat­tal­ion with­in 50 miles/­80 kilo­meters of a dis­covered camp to send sol­diers to bear wit­ness. Eisen­hower sadly fore­saw a time when there would be many “Holo­caust deniers.” By his edict he believed that the aver­age GI would under­stand not just what he was fighting for but “he will know who he is fighting against.” His edict applied equally to German resi­dents in sur­rounding com­mu­ni­ties. One Dachau lib­er­ator with the 42nd Infan­try Divi­sion recounted his eye­wit­ness story to an inter­viewer: “It was as if I had entered hell. . . You just couldn’t believe it,” all the while rubbing his hands over and over each other. “My mind froze; the shock was com­plete and total. Espe­cially when we saw the cre­ma­toria—it [sic] was still hot, with these piles of bodies stacked five bodies high.” Camp records assert 41,500 in­mates were killed at Dachau. In the closing days of war a select group of U.S. con­gress­persons and mem­bers of the print and broad­cast media toured the camps with the intent to in­form state­side and inter­national audi­ences about the Nazi “death mills.”

Bearing Witness: What It Was Like in Hell

Left: Provisioned with little food or water the Dachau Death Train of approx­i­mately 40 box­cars sits at a siding near the camp entrance. Upon their arrival at the prison camp only 1,300 living skele­tons out of some 5,000 in­mates who had departed Buchen­wald con­cen­tra­tion camp 250 miles/­400 kilo­meters to the north­east were able to shuffle the short dis­tance from the rail spur to the prison com­pound where 30,000 in­mates, in dire con­di­tion, hoped for the swift arrival of the Americans.

Right: U.S. medics check for signs of life in a gondola (open-top) rail car left on a siding out­side Dachau con­cen­tra­tion camp on April 29, 1943. Over 2,300 decom­posing human remains were found on the Death Train, which had departed Buchen­wald con­cen­tra­tion camp just days before U.S. armed forces cap­tured the camp. Buchen­wald was about 4.5 miles/­7 kilo­meters north­west of the city of Weimar in Thueringen, Eastern Germany.

Left: Thrown off balance by the sight of starvation, cruelty, besti­al­ity, and death all around them on the day of Dachau’s lib­er­ation, a small group—no more than 10—from the 45th (Thunder­bird) Infan­try Divi­sion, bran­dishing rifles, pistols, and a BAR 30‑cali­ber/­7.62‑milli­meter machine gun, sum­ma­rily exe­cuted at least 17 Schutz­staffel (SS) and assorted German mili­tary pri­soners. Totaling around 100 pri­soners standing against an 8‑foot/­2.4‑meter stuc­co wall, the dying and wounded col­lapsed to the ground in a coal yard next to the prisoner camp’s heating plant. (Click here to read more about this ter­ri­ble inci­dent in Alex Ker­shaw’s The Lib­er­ator: One World War II Sol­dier’s 500‑Day Odys­sey from the Beaches of Sicily to the Gates of Dachau.) Cheers rang out from thou­sands of camp on­lookers. Many of them beat SS guards­men, in­formers, and pr­ison trustees known as Kapos (in­mates who were given privi­leges in exchange for super­vising pri­soner work gangs) to bloody pulps or to death with fists, sticks, and shovels. Few of their lib­er­ators intervened in the revenge killings. A private with the Thunder­birds recalled lib­er­a­tion day: “I don’t think there was a guy who slept that night, and I don’t think there was a guy who didn’t cry openly that night.”

Right: Bodies of SS personnel laid out along­side a road in Dachau con­cen­tra­tion camp, April 29, 1945. The SS-Toten­kopf­verbaende (SS-TV; lit.  “Death’s Head Units”) was the brutal and fanat­ical SS organi­za­tion respon­sible for admin­is­tering Nazi con­cen­tra­tion and exter­mi­na­tion camps. SS men and women had the assis­tance of Kapos and Jewish Sonder­kom­mandos, the latter helping with the dis­posal of bodies and other tasks. SS persons and their non-SS camp adju­tants bore the brunt of in­mate revenge after many of their col­leagues fled their beleaguered posts as Allied forces rapidly approached their camps.

Left: Liberated Dachau inmates cheer U.S. troops. Many broke into tears of joy, laughed, danced, and sang their national anthems—there were more than 30 nation­alities (one source put the num­ber at 40) at the sprawling Dachau com­plex. Two-thirds of the in­mates were polit­i­cal pri­soners, including 1,000 Catho­lic priests. Polish pri­soners were the major­ity of the pri­soner population (at 9,082) followed by Soviet POWs (4,258) until Dachau’s liberation.

Right: Female prisoners at Dachau wave to their liber­ators. On April 26, 1945, as Amer­i­can forces approached, there were 67,665 regis­tered pri­soners in Dachau and its sub­camps, 31,432 in the main camp (KZ Dachau). Of these, 43,350 were cate­go­rized as polit­i­cal pri­soners, while 22,100 were Jews, with the remainder falling into various other categories.

Left: As a rule camp lib­er­ators recoiled in dis­belief when they heard the per­pet­ual lament of visiting towns­people, who gaped in horror at the piles of decaying bodies and breathed in their putrid stench: “Wir wussten nicht.” (We didn’t know.) “Nie­mand sagte uns.” (No one told us.) The object of what Germans didn’t know or weren’t told (i.e., the missing “it” in sen­tences like these) was belied most often by, first, the one-way traf­fic of tens of thou­sands of locked rail cars leaving from or passing through German cities, towns, and vil­lages to out-of-the-way desti­na­tions where many of the con­cen­tra­tion and death camps were located and, secondly, the sooty smoke rising from cre­ma­toria chim­neys, floating long dis­tances over the Reich land­scape, the ash settling on trees turning leaves gray. Some of the towns­people and others like them in this pic­ture who solemnly swore they didn’t know, were never told, never saw any­thing out of the ordi­nary were con­ceiv­ably the same people who years or months or weeks earl­ier had jeered, hurled insults, and spat on camp arrivals who trag­i­cally ended up dead on cre­ma­toria floors like this one in Ohr­druf, a Buchenwald subcamp liberated on April 4, 1945.

Right: Combat-hardened soldiers oversee Dachau residents retrieving and burying camp vic­tims. The pre­vious fall more than 15,000 internees had died in a typhus epi­demic caused by poor sani­ta­tion and over­crowding, their green- and yellow-skinned bodies had been left to rot in piles and pits. U.S. mili­tary author­i­ties ordered near­by com­mun­i­ties to either pro­vide burial ser­vices (“forced assis­tance”) or par­take in mind-bog­gling walk-throughs of squa­lid camp bar­racks or cre­ma­toria with open-door ovens or beside open slit trenches filled with putre­fying corpses. This stra­ta­gem ensured that as many as pos­si­ble of those living in the vicin­ity of Dachau could bear wit­ness to the until-then unimag­in­able evil committed by their government.

Contemporary Footage of Dachau Concentration Camp’s Liberation, April 29, 1945