On April 29, 1945, with only eleven days left in the war in Europe, Colonel Robert Sparks was leading the 157th Infantry Regiment of the 45th Infantry Division. His men had liberated the Dachau camp that morning. They entered through its gates and saw what twelve years of imprisonment had left behind: bodies, survivors barely alive, and the infrastructure of a system that had existed since 1933.
Sparks did not report on what was inside the camp. Everyone already knew that. He reported on what happened at the wall, where 45 SS guards were shot along the western wall of the camp by American soldiers. Some had surrendered. Others had refused. The details of the events were never fully clarified, but what was confirmed was the number: 45.
Sparks filed the report himself the same day. He did not try to hide what had happened, and he did not wrap it in vague language. He described the event, identified the location, and stated the number clearly.
The report moved up the chain of command. It reached the commander of the 45th Division, then the Seventh Army, then Eisenhower's headquarters, and finally arrived on Patton's desk on May 3. Patton read it at his desk late that afternoon and studied it for a long time before taking any action.
Patton had not visited Dachau on April 29. He arrived several days after the liberation, once the initial chaos had calmed enough for the commanding general to inspect the situation without disrupting the ongoing medical and administrative work of treating survivors and documenting what had been found.
He had visited other camps before Dachau. He had visited Ohrdruf in early April, the first Nazi concentration camp liberated by American forces in the European theater. He had stood inside it and ordered the mayor of the nearest German city and his wife to come and see what had been happening in their neighborhood. Both killed themselves before the next morning.
He wrote about Ohrdruf in his memoirs in terms he rarely used. He wrote about what standing in such a place did to him. He wrote about what it meant for such a place to exist. Dachau was worse than Ohrdruf by every measure. He wrote about that too, in the same personal terms.
So when Colonel Sparks's report reached his desk on May 3, Patton was not reading about something abstract. He was reading about men who had been through what he had been through, and who had then stood at a wall facing 45 SS guards. He understood what the men of the 157th Infantry had endured in the hours before they reached that wall. He understood it in a way that generals who had not visited the camps could not fully grasp from a written account. He understood what had happened at the wall, why it had happened that way, and what the report now on his desk required of him.
Colonel Robert Sparks had commanded the 157th Infantry Regiment since before the Sicily campaign in 1943. He was not a new officer, and his men were not a new unit. They had fought from Sicily through Italy, through the landing in southern France in August 1944, through the brutal fighting in the Vosges Mountains in the fall, through Alsace in the winter, and into Germany in the spring of 1945. By the time they reached Dachau, the regiment had been in continuous or near-continuous combat for nearly two years. He was one of the most experienced regimental combat commanders in the entire U.S. Army. His men had seen what war leaves behind across twelve different campaigns in three countries. Nothing could have prepared them for what waited inside the walls of Dachau. Nothing could have.
Along the western wall surrounding the camp, 45 SS guards died in the first hours after the liberation. The exact sequence of events could not be determined then or later. Some guards were trying to flee when the shooting occurred, while others had already surrendered. What was established was the location, the time, and the number.
Sparks did not take part in the shooting. He was inside the camp itself when he realized what was happening at the wall. According to his account, he headed toward the wall and tried to stop what was going on. Whether he arrived in time to stop any part of it, or after it was complete, he addressed in his account carefully and without the biased certainty that marked many accounts written after the fact.
He filed his report on the same day as the liberation and did not try to hide what had happened. He did not use vague language that might allow the matter to pass unnoticed amid the flood of administrative paperwork circulating at that stage of the war, when Germany was collapsing on all fronts and liberation and occupation documents were burdening every level of command. He described what happened, identified the location, and stated the number: 45.
The pressure from higher command was real and immediate. Eisenhower's headquarters received the report, and the response from that command was clear and unambiguous. The men responsible for the shooting at the wall had to be identified and court-martialed. The U.S. Army could not be seen as sanctioning the execution of prisoners, regardless of what they had done or who they were. The rules of war had been written precisely for cases like this. The question of what the camp was and what had happened inside it was not relevant to the legal question of what happened at the wall.
Patton was familiar with this argument. He had encountered versions of it in other contexts during the preceding months. He understood it legally and politically, and he recognized that the men making it were not wrong about the framework they were applying.
He picked up the phone and called his judge advocate. The conversation that followed was not officially recorded, and no written transcript of it exists. What remains are its results and the accounts of officers who were present at various stages in the following days, which inspired him to write his own account years later in an interview with a military historian documenting the liberation of the concentration camps.
Patton told his judge advocate that he intended to conduct a thorough and complete investigation of the incident before beginning any court-martial proceedings, that the investigation would take the time it needed, and that no charges would be filed against any soldier of the 45th Division until it was formally concluded. The judge advocate told him that Eisenhower's headquarters expected immediate action. Patton said the investigation was immediate action, and that it would produce a complete record.
He assigned a team of judge advocate officers to conduct formal interviews with every soldier and officer involved. Every soldier who had been present at the wall on the afternoon of April 29 was to be questioned under oath. Every officer who had issued orders or failed to issue them in those minutes was to be questioned. The sequence of events was to be reconstructed as accurately as possible from the accounts and physical evidence available.
The investigation reached what investigations of chaotic events conducted under conditions of extreme psychological pressure usually reach: a sequence that was clear in its broad outlines but ambiguous in its critical details. Soldiers had shot SS guards. Some guards were trying to flee when they were shot. Some had already surrendered before they were shot. The exact order of specific events in those specific minutes at that specific location could not be determined with the confidence that criminal prosecution requires.
But what could be fully established, without any doubt, was the specific context in which those minutes occurred. These soldiers had spent the hours before they reached the wall walking through Dachau. They had seen what twelve years had left inside those gates. They had come face to face, directly and unavoidably, with the reality of what the camp was and what the men now standing at the wall had been doing there for years.
Patton presented the investigation's findings to Eisenhower's headquarters. He presented them in full. He did not minimize what had happened at the wall. He did not argue that the number was lower or that the circumstances were more clearly defensive than they were. He presented the full picture: what happened, the timeline that could be established, the conditions under which it occurred, and what the investigation could and could not determine with confidence.
Then he made the argument he had been building since May 3. He argued that the context could not be separated from the event. He argued that the soldiers who fired at the wall had not been operating within any normal operational context, and that applying normal standards of military conduct to decisions made by men in the particular psychological state produced by walking through Dachau required applying a standard no army had ever been forced to articulate before. Because no army had ever found itself in precisely this situation.
He argued that court-martial proceedings would be seen as deeply unjust by every soldier in the Third Army who had the slightest knowledge of what the men of the 45th Division had endured before reaching that wall, and that the effect on the relationship between soldiers and command would be severe and lasting.
Eisenhower's headquarters was not satisfied with the investigation's findings as a substitute for criminal proceedings. The pressure continued through the first week of May and into the second. The war in Europe officially ended on May 8, 1945. The pressure from higher command did not end with the war.
Patton met with Eisenhower personally during that period. The meeting was private, and no official record of what was discussed remains. Both men understood the situation clearly from their positions. Eisenhower understood the political and legal pressures under which he was operating, the international scrutiny of what Allied forces did and were doing in the final weeks of the European war, and the precedent any outcome would set. Patton understood what his soldiers had endured, and what he believed justice required in a situation that had no precedent and no clear solution.
The proceedings produced an outcome that satisfied no one entirely. No soldier of the 45th Division was court-martialed in connection with the shooting at the western wall of Dachau. An administrative review was conducted for the officers who had been present during the incident. The official investigation was closed without filing criminal charges against any American soldier.
Sparks was not court-martialed for any part of what happened. He had filed his report honestly and transparently. He had not taken part in the shooting. According to his account and the accounts of others who were present, he had made serious attempts to stop what was happening when he learned of it. He served throughout the occupation and was discharged retaining his record and his command.
The soldiers who fired at the wall were not court-martialed. They returned to the United States carrying what they carried from Dachau, a burden most of them kept silent about for the rest of their lives, and they returned home without criminal convictions.
Whether this outcome represented justice in the conventional sense, or something far more complicated than that sense can accommodate, is a question that has not yet been settled to the satisfaction of everyone who has studied it over the decades. It was not settled in 1945, and it remains unsettled.
Sparks spoke about the matter at length late in his life to a military historian who was documenting the liberation of the concentration camps through the accounts of the men who had been there. The historian asked him directly and without evasion whether Patton had done the right thing. Sparks thought about the question for a long time before saying a word.
He said Patton understood what we were about to face before we reached that wall. He said, finally, that Patton had been there himself. He did not pretend. He did not know what it meant. And he did not ask us to pretend either.
Sparks was silent for a long moment after that. He said he still did not know whether what Patton did was justice or not. He said he had been trying to answer that question for forty years, and had not found the answer yet.