The liberation of Dachau

On the afternoon of Sunday 29 April 1945 soldiers of two infantry divisions of the US Seventh Army reached the concentration camp at Dachau near Munich. On the railway siding outside the camp they found a train full of corpses, and behind the wire more than 30,000 emaciated, typhus-stricken prisoners from all over Europe – among them thousands of Poles and several hundred Polish priests. That same day some of the shaken soldiers and prisoners killed several dozen SS men of the camp garrison.

The liberation of Dachau carried a particular significance. It was the first concentration camp set up by the Nazis, opened in March 1933, less than two months after Hitler came to power. For twelve years it served as a model and a school for the entire SS camp system. Its end came the day before Hitler’s suicide in Berlin and nine days before the surrender of Germany.

The camp’s last weeks

In the spring of 1945 Dachau was one of the last large concentration camps still in German hands. As the Americans and British liberated one camp after another deep inside the Reich – Ohrdruf, Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen – the SS sent transports of evacuated prisoners to Bavaria. The main camp, built for a few thousand people, together with more than a hundred subcamps, among them the Kaufering complex, held several tens of thousands of prisoners in the spring of 1945. An epidemic of typhus had been raging there since the autumn of 1944. According to a US Army report of 1945, 11,560 prisoners died in Dachau between January and April 1945; over the same period the camp administration recorded 12,596 deaths.

In the final days the SS covered its tracks and disposed of inconvenient witnesses. On 9 April Georg Elser was murdered in Dachau, on the same day that Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed at Flossenbürg. At the end of April the doctor Sigmund Rascher, who had earlier carried out criminal experiments on prisoners in the camp, was killed by the SS. Word circulated among the prisoners of an order from Heinrich Himmler that none of them should fall into enemy hands alive; the text of the telegram attributed to him, dated mid-April, is known from post-war accounts, and its authenticity is sometimes questioned by historians. Polish prisoners also passed on a rumour that the camp, along with its inmates, was to be destroyed on the evening of 29 April.

The camp commandant, Eduard Weiter, left Dachau on 26 April. That day the SS marched more than 10,000 prisoners out of the camp – on foot, by train and by lorry – towards the Tyrol. The largest column, some 7,000 people, marched south for several days towards the Tegernsee; the guards shot those who could not keep up. The survivors were freed on 2 May near Waakirchen by American soldiers, among them men of Japanese descent (Nisei). By estimates, more than a thousand prisoners did not survive the march. Earlier, a group of so-called special prisoners had also been taken south from Dachau, among them the former Austrian chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg, the former French prime minister Léon Blum and Pastor Martin Niemöller; they regained their freedom in South Tyrol at the beginning of May.

Command of the camp was taken over briefly by a former commandant, Martin Weiss, who on 28 April handed it to a young SS officer, Heinrich Wicker. That same day, in the town of Dachau, escaped prisoners and local opponents of the regime tried to seize the town hall; the SS crushed the attempt and killed several of those involved. A delegate of the International Red Cross, Victor Maurer, arrived at the camp with food parcels and urged the SS to hand the camp over to the Americans without a fight. During the night of 28–29 April control of the inside of the camp was taken over by the clandestine International Prisoners’ Committee, in which an important role was played by the Belgian doctor and British intelligence officer Albert-Marie Guérisse, known as Pat O’Leary.

The death train

In the last days of April two divisions of XV Corps of General Alexander Patch’s US Seventh Army were approaching Dachau: the 45th “Thunderbird” Infantry Division and the 42nd “Rainbow” Infantry Division. Both were pushing south towards Munich. On the morning of 29 April the 3rd Battalion of the 157th Infantry Regiment of the 45th Division, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Felix Sparks, was ordered to take the camp and approached it from the south-west.

The first thing the soldiers saw was a train of 39 boxcars and open wagons standing on the railway siding by the camp. They were full of corpses – about 2,000 according to American accounts, more according to some studies. It was a transport of prisoners evacuated from Buchenwald on 7 April. For almost three weeks the train had wandered over the bombed railway lines of the Reich; prisoners died of hunger, thirst, exhaustion and disease, or were killed by the escort. Of the several thousand who had been sent off, only some reached Dachau alive. American soldiers, many of whom had fought through Italy, France and Germany, recalled years later that the sight of the bodies in the wagons was the most terrible experience of their war.

Sunday 29 April

Sparks’s battalion entered the complex from the side of the SS barracks and the siding. Near the train the soldiers shot several SS men who had surrendered. Inside the camp they found more piles of bodies: in the huts by the crematorium lay hundreds of naked corpses which the SS had not managed to burn.

At almost the same time the assistant commander of the 42nd Division, Brigadier General Henning Linden, drove up to the gate between the camp and the SS barracks complex with a group of soldiers and war correspondents, among them Marguerite Higgins, a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune. In the presence of the Red Cross delegate Victor Maurer, Heinrich Wicker handed the camp over to Linden under a white flag. Thanks to the presence of journalists it was this scene that made the front pages, and for decades afterwards veterans of the two divisions argued over which of them had really liberated Dachau. In fact units of both divisions reached the camp independently of each other on the same afternoon. Wicker was taken prisoner; his subsequent fate is uncertain.

When the soldiers approached the gates of the prisoners’ compound, joy erupted behind the wire. A crowd of emaciated people rushed towards the fence; shots were still fired from the watchtowers, and according to eyewitnesses several prisoners were killed on the electrified wire. Polish tradition holds that the Americans entered the prisoners’ compound at about 5.15–5.25 p.m. The prisoners brought out flags of their countries, made in haste in the huts, sang national anthems, wept and embraced the soldiers. Those who had no strength to get up lay on their bunks.

The next day, 30 April, Seventh Army intelligence officers arrived at the camp. Their reports and the photographs taken by army photographers, as well as journalists’ accounts – the photographs of Lee Miller and the report by Martha Gellhorn – went round the world within days.

More than 30,000 survivors

In the main camp the Americans found more than 30,000 prisoners – about 32,000 by American count, and, by estimates, about 67,000 including the subcamps. They came from more than thirty countries: Poland, the Soviet Union, France, Yugoslavia, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the Benelux countries and Germany itself. Among them were Jews brought in during the last months from evacuated camps and from the Kaufering subcamps, Soviet prisoners of war, resistance activists and clergy. Poles formed the largest national group; according to Polish studies there were about 10,000 of them.

Poles had been sent to Dachau since the spring of 1940. Some of the Kraków professors arrested in Sonderaktion Krakau were brought here, as were young people from Łódź, underground activists and thousands of people seized in street round-ups. A list of Polish victims of Dachau compiled by former prisoners in 1946 contained more than 7,000 names.

The Polish priests

From December 1940 the SS concentrated clergy from all the camps in Dachau. According to Catholic Church figures, 2,794 Catholic priests, monks and seminarians passed through the camp, 1,773 of them from Poland. The Polish clergy, treated worse than the German, were forced into the hardest labour, and some were subjected to pseudo-medical experiments. 868 of them died. On the day of liberation about 800 Polish priests were alive in the camp, among them the future bishops Kazimierz Majdański (PL) and Ignacy Jeż.

Fearing the liquidation of the camp, the Polish priests, after a nine-day novena, on 22 April 1945 entrusted themselves and their fellow prisoners to the care of St Joseph and vowed to make annual pilgrimages of thanksgiving to his shrine in the collegiate church in Kalisz (PL) if they survived. They regarded their liberation a week later as the answer to that prayer. The survivors kept their vow: pilgrimages to Kalisz were held every year, and the Church in Poland observes 29 April as the Day of the Martyrdom of the Polish Clergy.

The killed guards

The sight of the train and the piles of corpses provoked a fury that some of the soldiers could not control. In the SS barracks area soldiers of the 157th Regiment shot a dozen or more SS men who had already surrendered – some near the wagons, some in a coal yard, where the prisoners had been lined up against a wall. Sparks later recalled that he stopped the shooting by firing into the air. Near one of the watchtowers another dozen or more Germans were killed; the circumstances of that incident – fighting, or the killing of men who were surrendering – remain disputed. Inside the camp, prisoners took summary revenge, killing guards and kapos who had not managed to escape.

The matter was investigated by the Seventh Army’s assistant inspector general, Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Whitaker. His report, submitted in June 1945, established that soldiers had killed at least 21 SS men after accepting their surrender, and prisoners between 25 and 50 guards. The German historian Jürgen Zarusky, who analysed the investigation files, estimated that soldiers shot 16 prisoners in the coal yard and 17 at the tower, while prisoners killed between 25 and more than 50 people. Sparks himself put the total number of Germans killed at no more than 50, and more probably about 30. Proceedings against the battalion’s officers and men were dropped; according to Sparks, the charges were dismissed by General George Patton, then military governor of Bavaria. A book published in 1986 by the battalion’s former surgeon, Howard Buechner, who claimed that more than 500 Germans had been killed, proved unreliable – its author had not witnessed the events he described, and his testimony of 1945 spoke of a dozen or so dead. Even so, it is used by Holocaust deniers. These events are known as the Dachau massacre.

Typhus and the first weeks of freedom

Liberation did not put an end to the dying. When the Americans arrived, by their estimates up to 200 people a day were dying in the camp. The camp was placed under quarantine, and the prisoners, against their will, were kept behind the wire so as not to spread typhus to the surrounding area. By 3 May about 2,000 cases had been identified. American field hospitals, army doctors and the prisoners themselves – doctors, nurses, clergy – fought the epidemic, delousing people and huts with DDT. The number of deaths fell to 50–80 a day, but over the following weeks hundreds more died, too emaciated to survive, including some who suddenly received more food than their bodies could take. The Americans ordered the inhabitants of the town of Dachau to view the camp.

Many survivors had nowhere to go back to. Some Poles, especially underground soldiers and priests, did not want to return to a country ruled by communists; they remained in the West as displaced persons. The Polish priests spent several more weeks in a transit camp before most of them returned to their dioceses at home.

Reckoning

The Americans used the camp grounds as an internment camp for members of the SS, and from November 1945 as the seat of an American military tribunal. The first of the Dachau trials (PL), against members of the camp staff, took place from 15 November to 13 December 1945. All the defendants were found guilty and 36 were sentenced to death; Martin Weiss was hanged on 29 May 1946. By 1948 more than 1,600 people had stood trial before American courts at Dachau, mainly members of concentration camp staffs and perpetrators of crimes against American prisoners of war. Eduard Weiter did not live to stand trial: he died on 2 May 1945 at Itter Castle in the Tyrol in unclear circumstances – either by suicide or shot.

The victims of Dachau cannot be counted precisely. According to the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site, more than 200,000 prisoners from more than thirty countries passed through the camp and its subcamps, and at least 41,500 people died – a figure that does not include many victims of executions, transports and death marches.

Significance

Dachau closed a road that had begun in March 1933. The camp set up for a few thousand political opponents became the model on which the SS built a system of camps that during the war stretched from France to occupied Poland. The liberation of Dachau by the Americans – like the earlier opening of Majdanek and Auschwitz by the Red Army, the photographs from Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen and the crime at Gardelegen – gave the world irrefutable evidence of what the German concentration camp system had been.

For Americans, Dachau became one of the most important symbols of what the war had been fought for – and at the same time a reminder that even soldiers fighting in a just cause can cross the line drawn by the laws of war. For Poland, the liberation of the camp is above all the memory of thousands of murdered compatriots, especially the Polish clergy, who suffered the heaviest losses at Dachau. The day after the liberation of Dachau the Americans took Munich, the cradle of the Nazi movement, and in Berlin Hitler took his own life. Little more than a week later the Third Reich surrendered.