World War II Day by Day

Dachau, Germany • April 29, 1945

On a gray last Sunday in April 1945, 10 miles/­16 km 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‑km 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 sub­camps 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 sub­camps, 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 km 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 km 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 km 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 strong—from the 45th (Thunder­bird) Infan­try Divi­sion, bran­dishing rifles, pistols, and a BAR 30‑cali­ber machine gun, sum­ma­rily exe­cuted at least 17 Schutzstaffel (SS) and assorted German mili­tary pri­soners. Totaling around 100 pri­soners standing against an 8‑ft/­2.4‑m stuc­co wall in a coal yard next to the prisoner camp’s heating plant, the dying and wounded col­lapsed to the ground. (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