The gallows at Landsberg Prison were built in the courtyard, a simple structure staffed by American soldiers. On the morning of May 28, 1946, the first of the condemned were led from their cells. Each man had his identity confirmed, the death sentence read aloud again at the foot of the stairs, and a priest was provided to stay with him until the end. A black hood was placed over each head, the noose was fitted and checked, and the prisoner was left standing on the trapdoor as the chaplain spoke a final few words.
The executions continued through May 29, for so many had been sentenced that two days were required. Afterward, the bodies were cut down and placed into coffins, each marked with a name and a wooden cross. The doctors beneath the trapdoor confirmed death quickly. The condemned men would have seen their own coffins, labeled with their names, as they walked to the gallows.
In total, twenty-eight former guards and staff from Dachau were executed at Landsberg. The executions were the culmination of a trial that had begun months earlier, but the story of why those men stood on that scaffold began more than a decade before, in March 1933. Heinrich Himmler opened Dachau on March 22, 1933, as the first permanent camp in Germany, a prototype for the system that would follow. Initially, it was a place of forced labor, holding around five thousand prisoners in its first year, most of them German communists and political opponents of the Nazi Party.
Over time, other groups were sent there as well: Jehovah’s Witnesses, Gypsies, and after the violence of Kristallnacht, Jews. Around eleven thousand Jewish men were imprisoned at Dachau and forced to work in the munitions factory. As the camp grew, so did the forced labor system, and the guards treated the prisoners with brutality that was by design. The guards watched the prisoners closely and often goaded them, stealing their caps and throwing them near the perimeter fence.
When a prisoner went to retrieve his cap, the guards in the towers would shoot him, claiming he was attempting to escape. Some prisoners, choosing to end their suffering, simply walked toward the fence to be shot. Beatings were routine, and prisoners were beaten to death in cold blood. Guards strung prisoners up from trees by their arms, which were pinned behind their backs, a torture that resembled a medieval device.
Public executions were carried out in the roll-call yard, with prisoners forced to stand and watch for hours. The crematory was established in 1942, its ovens used to dispose of the evidence of the deaths, and gas chambers were present as well. There was also a firing range where those deemed unfit to work, or even those caught stealing a small amount of food, were shot. As the war turned against Germany, the conditions inside Dachau deteriorated severely.
Camps closer to the front lines had their prisoners force-marched on death marches to camps farther inland, and Dachau became grossly overcrowded. There was a severe shortage of food, and disease spread rapidly as typhus epidemics swept through the packed barracks. In the final six months before liberation, an estimated fifteen thousand prisoners died at Dachau from the conditions, and five hundred Soviet prisoners of war were shot dead. The prisoners kept coming, with the final group arriving on April 19, 1945.
The U. S. Army was driving deep into Germany and Bavaria by that time. It was proposed that the camp be handed over to the Allies to save lives, but Himmler refused, declaring that no prisoner should fall into the hands of the enemy alive.
Just before the Allies arrived, the commandant and the SS guards forced seven thousand prisoners onto a death march, shooting anyone unable to keep up. Many died from exhaustion. Mass graves holding hundreds of prisoners were found. By late April 1945, around two hundred people were dying each day at Dachau.
On April 29, 1945, soldiers from the 3rd Battalion, 157th Infantry Regiment, of the 45th Infantry Division approached the camp. Even before they entered, they found twenty-nine railway boxcars with bodies dumped inside, around two thousand corpses in all. Emaciated bodies were everywhere, many left dead for days. In some huts and houses, bodies were piled from floor to ceiling.
One liberator later remarked that the stench of death was overpowering. The commandant, Martin Weiss, had fled the camp along with many of the SS guards responsible for the crimes. An SS Untersturmführer, Heinrich Wicker, was left in charge of more than five hundred personnel still inside. It was claimed that many of the guards remained armed, and despite a large number being seized, further bloodshed followed.
A Swiss Red Cross representative met the American troops, and together they planned to liberate the camp. But some American soldiers, disgusted by what they saw, took justice into their own hands and executed dozens of the guards on the spot, carrying out instant bloody reprisals. In the aftermath, the task of bringing those responsible to justice fell to the postwar trials. The Dachau camp trials took place from November 15 to December 15, 1945, to address crimes committed at Dachau and its subcamps.
The official case was titled The United States of America versus Martin Gottfried Weiss, et al. Forty people were charged with war crimes against Allied civilians and prisoners of war, accused of participating in their mistreatment and killing. Many of the guards and leadership had been captured. The prosecution outlined the allegations, the judges affirmed the lawfulness of the court, and motions from the defense challenging the court’s legality were dismissed.
When asked how they pleaded, all forty defendants answered not guilty. The prosecution presented images, artifacts, and the camp’s death records, and called former prisoners to testify. Their accounts were horrific: beatings, disease, poor sanitation, a lack of food, public executions, and medical experiments. The defense responded with ninety-three witnesses, and cross-examination followed.
Those who worked at the camp were accused of mistreating and killing prisoners; others were accused of taking part in executions. The camp doctors were charged with declaring the deaths of the condemned and with taking part in selections that resulted in killings. The commandant, Martin Weiss, was charged with overall responsibility for the conditions and crimes at the camp. One notable defendant was Claus Schilling, a seventy-four-year-old doctor who tried to justify his human experiments as a matter of scientific interest.
The court dismissed that claim. Also on trial were guards and kapos who had worked in the crematorium. The verdicts were severe. Thirty-six death sentences were handed down, including for less senior members of the staff.
Among those condemned were Claus Schilling, Otto Moll, who had participated in the death marches, Friedrich Ruppert, and the commandant Martin Weiss. Those whose sentences were not commuted were transported to Landsberg Prison, where the executions were carried out on May 28 and 29, 1946. The Dachau trials resulted in far more than those first executions. They were followed by 121 additional proceedings, bringing around five hundred others before judges, with further death sentences and prison terms given to those who worked at Dachau.
Executions at Landsberg for Dachau staff continued until 1951, six years after the first ones were carried out. For the victims and for those who had suffered at the hands of the camp staff, the executions served as some measure of penance for the horrors committed there.