American soldiers of the U. S. Seventh Army’s 45th Infantry Division entered the Dachau concentration camp on April 29, 1945, and within hours, the liberation of the first Nazi concentration camp had turned into one of the most violent reprisal episodes of World War II in Europe, as U.
S. troops and freed prisoners executed surrendering SS guards in the camp’s coal yard and along its perimeter.
The killings, which historians estimate claimed the lives of between 30 and 50 SS men, occurred after soldiers discovered more than 30 railroad cars filled with decomposing bodies, piles of emaciated corpses inside the camp, and roughly 30,000 survivors reduced to what witnesses described as walking skeletons. Many of the liberators, unprepared for the scale of the atrocity, broke down in sobs or vomited as they moved through the grounds.
Dachau, situated near Munich, was established in March 1933, less than two months after Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933. The first prisoner transports arrived on March 22, 1933. It became the model for the entire Nazi camp system and a training center that historians have called a school of violence for SS guards deployed across occupied Europe.
In October 1933, Dachau’s commandant, Theodor Eicke, introduced a system of regulations that inflicted brutal punishments on prisoners for the slightest offenses. Eicke ensured that Dachau served as a template for all later concentration camps, and the SS personnel trained there carried its methods throughout the network.
During its first year, the camp held a capacity of 5,000 prisoners. The initial internees were primarily German Communists, Social Democrats, trade unionists, and other political opponents of the Nazi regime. Over time, the camp also held Jehovah’s Witnesses, Roma and Sinti people, homosexuals, repeat criminal offenders, and so-called asocials whom the regime incarcerated because they could not or would not find gainful employment.
In early 1937, the SS began construction of a large complex of buildings on the grounds of the original camp using prisoner labor. Prisoners were forced to carry out the work, starting with the destruction of an old munitions factory, under terrible conditions. Construction was officially completed in mid-August 1938, and the camp remained essentially unchanged until the end of the war in 1945.
The number of Jewish prisoners at Dachau rose with the increased persecution of Jews. On November 10 and 11, 1938, in the aftermath of Kristallnacht, when Jewish homes, businesses, synagogues, hospitals, and schools were ransacked by the Nazi SA and German civilians, almost 11,000 Jewish men were interned there. Most were released after a few weeks to a few months, many after proving they had arranged to emigrate from Germany.
The camp was divided into two sections, the camp area and the crematoria area. The camp area consisted of 32 barracks, including one for clergy imprisoned for opposing the Nazi regime and one reserved for medical experiments. The camp administration was located in the gatehouse at the main entrance.
Support buildings contained the kitchen, laundry, showers, and workshops, as well as a prison block called the Bunker.
Detention in the Bunker enabled the SS to isolate rebellious and defiant prisoners, confine them outside the reach of fellow prisoners, and expose them to harsher conditions, torture, or murder. The courtyard between the prison and the central kitchen was used for the summary execution of prisoners. An electrified barbed-wire fence, a ditch, and a wall with seven guard towers surrounded the camp.
After the Second World War began on September 1, 1939, living conditions for prisoners at Dachau drastically worsened. Murderous working conditions, insufficient rations, and a lack of hygiene facilities led to a soaring death rate. From 1940, more and more prisoners were transported to Dachau from countries occupied by the German armed forces.
The crematorium area was constructed next to the main camp in 1942. It included the old crematorium and a new crematorium with a gas chamber. There is no credible evidence that this gas chamber was used to murder human beings.
Instead, prisoners underwent so-called selection, and those judged too sick or weak to continue working were sent to the Hartheim euthanasia killing center near Linz in Austria. More than 2,500 Dachau prisoners were murdered in the gas chambers at Hartheim.
Mass executions by shooting took place first in the Bunker courtyard and later at a specially designed SS shooting range. Thousands of Dachau prisoners were murdered there, including at least 4,000 Soviet prisoners of war following the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.
Beginning in 1942, German physicians performed medical experiments on prisoners at Dachau. Physicians and scientists from the Luftwaffe and the German Experimental Institute for Aviation conducted high-altitude and hypothermia experiments, as well as experiments to test methods of making seawater potable. German scientists also carried out experiments to test the efficacy of pharmaceuticals against diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis.
Hundreds of prisoners died or were permanently disabled as a result.
Dachau prisoners were also used as forced laborers. They were employed in the operation of the camp, in various construction projects, and in small handicraft industries established in the camp. They built roads, worked in gravel pits, and drained marshes, all under terrible conditions.
During the war, forced labor using concentration camp prisoners became increasingly important to German armaments production.
In the summer and fall of 1944, to increase war production, satellite camps under the administration of Dachau were established near armaments factories throughout southern Germany. Dachau alone had some 140 subcamps, mainly in southern Bavaria, where prisoners worked almost exclusively in armaments works. Thousands were worked to death.
As Allied forces advanced toward Germany, the Germans began to move prisoners from concentration camps near the front to prevent the capture of intact camps and their prisoners. Transports from evacuated camps in the east arrived continuously at Dachau, resulting in a dramatic deterioration of conditions. With more than 30,000 prisoners, the camp was dramatically overcrowded.
Barracks built to house 200 prisoners were jammed with more than 1,600.
After days of travel with little or no food or water, prisoners arrived weak and exhausted, often near death. Due to overcrowding, poor sanitary conditions, insufficient provisions, and the weakened state of the prisoners, a typhus epidemic swept through Dachau, killing 100 to 200 prisoners a day. Of some 41,500 persons who lost their lives between 1933 and 1945, over one-third died during the final six months of the war.
At the end of April 1945, the SS began evacuating prisoners from Dachau to prevent their liberation by Allied troops. At least 25,000 prisoners from the Dachau camp system were sent on exhausting foot marches in the direction of Tyrol or taken away in freight trains. During these so-called death marches, the Germans shot anyone who could no longer continue.
Many also died of starvation, hypothermia, or exhaustion. Several thousand prisoners died in the process.
On April 29, 1945, the Dachau main camp was liberated by units of the 45th Infantry Division. Before U. S.
soldiers arrived, the camp’s commandant, Martin Weiss, had already fled. However, SS guards remained in the camp, and Nazi guards in the camp’s gate tower foolishly fired upon the liberators. When American soldiers opened fire in return, the guards came down with their hands held in the air.
After the SS guards surrendered, U. S. troops moved further into the camp.
None of their prior combat experiences had prepared them for what lay ahead. The first clue that something was terribly wrong was the smell. As they neared the camp, American soldiers found more than 30 railroad cars filled with bodies in various states of decomposition.
It was the moment they understood the origin of the smell: the overpowering stench of death.
Inside the camp they found even more dead bodies, often naked, lying where they had fallen in the last few hours or days before liberation. Sometimes the bodies were stacked on top of one another like firewood. For many soldiers, seeing these atrocities gave the war a new meaning.
They realized they were not just fighting an enemy, but fighting pure evil itself.
The Nazis had tried to cremate as many bodies as they could before abandoning Dachau, but there were simply too many. One soldier later remembered: “Everywhere you turn is just the horror of bodies, and people near death or in a state of complete decrepitude that you cannot even process it.” While many American soldiers broke down in sobs, others were filled with rage, anger, and hatred.
When four German officers emerged from the woods holding up a white handkerchief, one U. S. lieutenant marched them into one of the box cars, which were littered with corpses, and shot them with a pistol.
When the mortally wounded Germans cried out in agony, another American officer finished the job.
Later, it only got worse. After U. S.
soldiers ordered the SS guards to line up along the wall in the coal yard by the guard tower, Lieutenant Walsh yelled “Let them have it,” and the American soldiers opened fire with rifles, pistols, and a . 30 caliber machine gun. After a 30-second flurry of gunfire, the Nazi guards were killed on the spot.
Even this was not the end. The prisoners themselves, many of them tortured and treated as nothing but animals for years, also got their revenge. While all the prisoners had lost at least some family members, some had been forced to watch their wives being abused and raped.
Others witnessed shooting competitions in which SS members threw small children in the air while others shot at them. Others saw their friends die of starvation or during the death marches shortly before liberation.
Some inmates swore to all that was sacred to them that if they could ever 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 their SS guards, they would not hesitate. They kept their word. When the prisoners caught the SS guards, one of them elbowed one or two prisoners out of his way.
The prisoners knocked the guards down and killed them all. Several other SS men and kapos were beaten to death by the prisoners with bare fists as well as with sticks and shovels.
Another soldier witnessed how an inmate was stomping on an SS trooper’s face until, as he later claimed, there was not much left. There were some SS guards who had changed their uniforms for camp clothing. However, they were recognized and lynched on the spot.
While all this was happening, fellow prisoners and American soldiers alike often stood motionless, watching coldly and without sympathy as revenge was exacted. As one soldier later said: “We stood aside and watched while these guards were beaten to death, beaten so badly that their bodies were ripped open and innards protruded. We watched with less feeling than if a dog were being beaten.
In truth, it might be said that we were completely without feeling. Deep anger and hate had temporarily numbed our emotions.”
Upon finding a dog kennel with German Shepherds and Doberman Pinschers, the soldiers shot many of the animals. Rumors circulated that the Germans had fed political prisoners to these dogs. Later, American troops forced the German citizens of the town of Dachau to come to the camp to see for themselves the conditions there and to help bury the dead bodies.
Many local residents were shocked by the experience and claimed they had no knowledge of the atrocities that had been going on there for years.
To this day it is unclear how many SS guards were killed, but it is estimated that the number is between 30 and 50. Because General Patton, then military governor of Bavaria, dismissed all the charges, nobody has ever stood trial before the court for this reprisal.
Out of more than 200,000 people who were imprisoned in Dachau and in the numerous subsidiary camps during its 12 years of existence between 1933 and 1945, nearly 42,000 people were murdered. The liberation of Dachau remains one of the most searing and morally complex episodes of the Second World War, a moment when the full horror of the Nazi camp system was 𝓮𝔁𝓹𝓸𝓼𝓮𝓭 to the world and when the line between justice and vengeance blurred in the coal yard of the first Nazi concentration camp.