On April 29, 1945, with only eleven days left in the war in Europe, Colonel Robert Sparks commanded the 157th Infantry Regiment of the 45th Infantry Division. His men liberated the Dachau camp that morning. They entered through its gates and saw what twelve years of imprisonment had produced: 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. 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 full details of the events were never entirely clear, but the number 45 was confirmed.
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 plainly.
The report moved up the chain of command. It reached the 45th Division commander, then the Seventh Army, then Eisenhower's headquarters, and finally reached Patton directly on May 3. He 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 a 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 been to Ohrdruf in early April, the first Nazi concentration camp liberated by American forces in the European theater. He stood inside it and ordered the mayor of the nearest German town and his wife to come and see what had been happening in their own neighborhood. Both took their own lives before the next morning.
He wrote about Ohrdruf in his memoirs in unusually personal terms. He wrote about what standing in such a place had done to him. He wrote about what it meant that such a place could exist. Dachau was worse than Ohrdruf by every measure. He wrote about it 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 never visited the camps could not fully grasp from a written account.
He understood what had happened at the wall, why it had happened the way it did, and what the report now on his desk required of him.
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. Sparks 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 at the time or later. Some guards were trying to flee when the shooting occurred. 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 learned what was happening at the wall. According to his account, he moved 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 carefully in his account, without the biased certainty that marked many accounts written after the fact.
He filed his report the same day as the liberation and did not try to hide what had happened. He did not use vague language that might let the matter pass unnoticed amid the enormous volume 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.
Pressure from higher headquarters was real and immediate. Eisenhower's headquarters received the report, and the response from that command was 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 in previous 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 Sparks 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 into the incident before beginning any court-martial proceedings, that the investigation would take the time it needed, and that no charges would be brought 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 present at the wall on the afternoon of April 29 was to be questioned under oath. Every officer who had given or failed to give orders in those minutes was to be questioned. The sequence of events was to be reconstructed as accurately as possible from the available accounts and physical evidence.
The investigation reached what investigations of chaotic events under conditions of extreme psychological stress usually reach: a sequence that was clear in its broad outlines but ambiguous in its decisive details. Soldiers had fired on SS guards. Some guards were trying to flee when they were shot. Some had already surrendered before they were shot.
The precise 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 established fully and beyond doubt was the specific context in which those minutes occurred. These soldiers had spent the hours before reaching the wall walking through Dachau. They had seen what twelve years had produced inside those gates. They had come face to face 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 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 complete 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 were not 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 would require applying a standard no army had ever been forced to articulate before. Because no army had ever found itself in this specific situation.
He argued that court-martial proceedings would be seen as profoundly unjust by every soldier in the Third Army with any 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 headquarters 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 said between them survives. Both men understood the situation clearly from their own positions. Eisenhower understood the political and legal pressures under which he was operating, the international scrutiny of what Allied forces had done 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 Dachau's western wall. An administrative review was conducted for the officers present during the incident. The official investigation was closed without 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 present, he had made serious attempts to stop what was happening once he learned of it. He served throughout the occupation and was discharged with his record and his command intact.
The soldiers who fired at the wall were not court-martialed. They returned to the United States carrying what they had 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 contain, is a question that has not 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 documenting the liberation of the concentration camps through the accounts of the men who were there. The historian asked him directly whether Patton had done the right thing.
Sparks thought about the question for a long time before saying a word. Patton understood what we were about to face before we reached that wall, he said finally. He had been there himself. He did not pretend. He did not know what it meant. And he did not ask us to pretend either.
He was silent for a long moment after that. I still do not know whether what he did was justice or not, he said. I have been trying to answer that question for forty years, and I have not found it yet.