On the morning of April 29, 1945, American troops of the 45th Infantry Division approached the outskirts of Dachau, a small Bavarian town sixteen kilometers from Munich. They had fought their way across Germany and were now closing on one of the most infamous sites of the Nazi regime: the Dachau concentration camp. What they found inside would shock even soldiers hardened by years of war, and what followed would become one of the most controversial episodes of the liberation of the camps. Dachau had been established on March 22, 1937, on the grounds of a former munitions factory that had been closed after the First World War.
It was one of the first concentration camps on German soil, created shortly after the Reichstag fire gave the Nazis the pretext to eliminate their political opponents. The camp’s construction, working structure, and regime were planned by Theodor Eicke, a man who had been treated in various clinics for abnormal behavior and who joined the Nazi Party, where his instability was reframed as racial fanaticism and valued by the regime. Dachau was designed to hold all those the Nazis considered undesirable: political enemies, priests who opposed Nazism, and even physically and mentally disabled Germans. The prisoner population was remarkably mixed, socially, nationally, religiously, and mentally, something not found in any other camp.
Unlike the death camps to the east, Dachau was not originally built for mass extermination through gas chambers. The majority of Jews were sent elsewhere. Prisoners at Dachau were used as forced labor in enterprises, including factories producing fabrics. Medical experiments were carried out on them, many of which led to death.
It was not until 1943 that a crematorium appeared, built as the Nazis, sensing their defeat, sought to eliminate traces of their crimes. The crematorium worked almost without interruption, and bones were buried deep in the ground. Estimates of the total number of deaths at Dachau vary widely, from seventy thousand to over two hundred forty thousand people. Life in the camp was designed to strip prisoners of their humanity.
New arrivals were led into a long distribution room, forced to strip naked, and processed by an admission committee. Their clothes and belongings were taken, their heads were shaved, and they were hosed down and given a robe with a number. The dead were screened out during this process. Prisoners were kept in monstrous sanitary conditions, and in winter they endured freezing temperatures.
Guards, motivated by racial hatred that had been intensified to a schizophrenic degree, mocked and tormented prisoners daily. Informants, known as kapos, were recruited from among the prisoners and given special privileges such as better food and access to showers, but their collaboration was often betrayed by the smell of cigars they were allowed to smoke, and other prisoners tried to kill them at any opportunity. Punishments and executions were designed to complete the dehumanization of the prisoners. Hundreds were used in medical experiments, becoming subjects for inexperienced students and hardened doctors who tested vaccines and medicines, made incisions, and introduced infections.
Teenagers with strong immunity were placed with infected people to contract diseases naturally. Pilots’ and divers’ uniforms were tested by placing prisoners in ice baths for long periods. Doctor Rascher was interested in whether it was possible to revive someone already frozen to the point of clinical death. There were also experiments involving blood transfusions of different blood types.
Disobedient prisoners were attached to poles by their wrists, sometimes hung from iron rafters, and beaten while suspended. For minor misdeeds, prisoners were flogged, an experience both painful and humiliating. Many died during death marches from distant places. Others died of hunger, were shot for dangerous behavior, or were killed during torture and experiments.
Members of the resistance, sometimes identified with the help of traitor prisoners, were honored with mass public executions and hung with signs around their necks. The dead were not always burned completely. Alcoholized organs and bleached skeletons served as teaching aids, hair and leather were used to make household items, and fat was used to make soap. As the front approached Germany, resistance in the camp gained momentum.
Prisoners’ hopes increased, and fewer were willing to cooperate with the Nazis. In 1944 and 1945, the SS, sensing their end, deprived prisoners not only of food but also of water. People lay on the floor trying to suck moisture from it. At the end of April 1945, camp personnel received orders to bring in and kill several times the number of prisoners already there, and then to load survivors onto a death train heading to a camp with the largest number of crematoria.
Resistance leaders advised prisoners to remain calm, not to sabotage work, and to save their strength, because liberators were close. On the eve of April 29, the camp commandant, SS-Hauptsturmführer Martin Weiss, a former physics teacher who had led the camp since 1933, departed with a detachment of guards and an entire SS unit, apparently knowing the Americans were near. He left behind SS-Hauptsturmführer Viktor Weirauch, who suspected nothing about the real deployment of American forces. Weirauch continued to manage the disposal of thousands of people with teams of prisoners.
But by that point, resistance members had killed all the kapos, and the behavior of the prisoners surprised him. Under Weirauch’s command were 560 SS officers and men, soldiers of an SS disciplinary unit, and Hungarian infantrymen, along with civilian household servants. When shots rang out and guards began falling from the towers, the SS understood what was happening. The Americans approached from the southwestern corner of the perimeter.
Some SS men entrenched themselves in one of the perimeter towers but were destroyed by grenades. At 6:00 a. m. , a new commandant in civilian clothes arrived at Dachau and ordered all camp employees to surrender.
A parliamentarian was sent to the southwest corner with a white flag. The Americans met three men seventy meters north of the southwest corner. They identified themselves as Swiss Red Cross spokesman Victor Maurer and two employees. In fact, one of them was Weirauch, posing as a Swiss national.
He reported that he had arrived on the night of the 28th to arrange the surrender of the camp to American troops. He claimed that about 560 SS guards remained in the camp, all of whom had surrendered their weapons, except for those in one perimeter tower who had already been killed. The false Swiss asked the Americans to avoid shooting and requested about fifty men to free guards surrounded by a crowd of prisoners armed with crowbars and shovels. He warned that some of the 42,000 prisoners were infected with typhus.
Harry Collins, the acting commander of the 42nd Infantry Division, accepted the surrender of the camp to the United States Army. At 10:55 a. m. , the camp commandant went out to meet the American troops but was killed in the ensuing battle.
The three parliamentarians were immediately shot, including Weirauch, whose deception did not save him. At 11:00 a. m. , units of the Third Battalion of the 45th American Division entered the camp.
Lieutenant William Walsh, commander of Company I of the 157th Infantry, shot four SS soldiers who declared their desire to surrender. Private Albert Praun entered a death car and killed a wounded SS man hiding there. Lieutenants Walsh and Bush divided prisoners of war into Wehrmacht soldiers and SS men, and then the SS men were shot with various weapons. At the same time, surviving prisoners took entrenching tools and hacked to death everyone in Hitler’s uniform they came across.
This went on for two hours. Around forty people were killed by prisoners. Some American soldiers provided prisoners with guns without orders. Photographers and television documentary crews who arrived with the army captured the events on film.
At 11:30 a. m. , the Americans fully surveyed the camp. They saw piles of corpses, many meters high, in the death train that had never been taken out.
Half-burned, half-dressed, or completely undressed bodies lay in the rooms of the barracks in high heaps. They saw torn bodies and blocks used for medical experiments. Many Americans vomited from what they saw. American soldiers shot another 122 German prisoners, mostly SS troops.
By 12:00 p. m. , order appeared restored, but only temporarily. Three hundred fifty-eight German soldiers were taken prisoner according to the rules of war, including wounded men brought from the hospital at 6:00 a.
m. by the new commandant, who had thought doctors were there, but they had already been killed by prisoners. At 12:05 p. m.
, an American machine gunner nicknamed Birdseye suddenly yelled that prisoners were trying to escape and opened fire with a thirty-caliber machine gun, killing more than a dozen Nazis. Lieutenant Colonel Felix Sparks pushed him away, shouting, “What are you doing? ”
Calm returned briefly. Most of the stronger prisoners had satisfied their desire for revenge.
About ninety-five percent of the prisoners did not participate in the massacre because they could not move, dying of thirst, hunger, beatings, and typhus. At 1:45 p. m. , another 346 German prisoners were shot at the wall of a blockhouse.
At least one German soldier was killed by a prisoner who blew off half his head with a shovel. Some Nazis, stuffed with bullets, begged for mercy or twitched while barely alive, and they were finished off with single shots. At 6:00 p. m.
, additional forces arrived to guard the camp. Of the SS survivors, only forty remained. They were deliberately kept in the same barracks, in the same unbearable conditions as their recent victims. A tribunal of US Army officers was convened in the most decent local room.
There were plenty of witnesses and evidence. The court’s decision was death for thirty-six functionaries, with the sentence to be carried out by hanging in Landsberg prison. In the case of one SS man, the execution was commuted to life imprisonment. The head of the consiliary service also received a life sentence as an indirect accomplice to the atrocities.
Three Hungarian perimeter guards who had not even been allowed into the area where the massacres took place were sentenced to ten years in a bunk. Their further fate remains unknown. As for the massacre itself, an investigation was conducted by an American military tribunal against those involved, including Lieutenant Colonel Felix Sparks and Colonel Howard Buechner. Significant charges were brought against them, but no one knew of any orders from Sparks or Buechner.
Soldiers and junior officers knew they would not be punished anyway, since everyone had participated in the massacre in one way or another. The military maintained that neither officer had forced anyone to do anything, and everything had happened situationally. General George Patton, who had been appointed governor of Bavaria and concurrently head of the tribunal, insistently asked military prosecutors to drop the case. On June 8, 1945, Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Whitaker issued a document known as the IG Report, titled “Investigation of Alleged Mistreatment of German Guards at Dachau.
” In 1991, an archival version of it was discovered in the US National Archives and made public. Much of the detailed account of that day comes from this report. The massacre at Dachau left a complicated legacy. For the prisoners who had endured unimaginable suffering, the liberation brought justice in its rawest form.
For the American soldiers who witnessed the horrors of the camp, the killing of SS guards was a visceral response to what they had seen. And for the historians who have studied the event, the question of whether soldiers can kill those who deserve death for war crimes remains an open and troubling one. The events of April 29, 1945, stand as a consequence of years of Nazi cruelty, a moment of violent summary justice that even the liberators themselves struggled to fully explain.