Seventy-five years after the guns fell silent across Europe, the raw testimony of Major Richard “Dick” Winters — the celebrated commander of Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division — has resurfaced with devastating force, offering an unfiltered account of what he witnessed when American forces liberated the Kaufering IV concentration camp in the final days of World War II.
Winters, whose leadership during the D-Day invasion and the Battle of the Bulge made him one of the most revered combat officers of the Second World War, described the moment of encountering the camp as an experience that “just stops you,” a shock so profound that it stripped away every emotion he had carried through years of combat.
“You’ve never seen anything like this,” Winters recalled in an interview conducted in the early 2000s with Pennsylvania State Representative John Payne. “It’s a complete shock. It just stops every feeling of emotions that you have.
The horror of it is you could never imagine anything like this before.”
The camp in question, Kaufering IV, was one of eleven subcamps attached to the main Dachau concentration camp network, situated near the town of Landsberg in southwest Bavaria, roughly forty miles west of Munich. Established in September 1944 to house between 500 and 800 prisoners, its population swelled to more than 3,000 at its peak, with the vast majority of inmates being Jewish.
Initially designed as a labor facility, Kaufering IV forced its prisoners to excavate underground tunnels and factories in the nearby hills — part of a desperate German effort to relocate military aircraft production beyond the reach of Allied bombing raids. These subterranean facilities were intended to manufacture German fighter planes, including the Messerschmitt Me 262, the world’s first operational jet-powered combat aircraft.
But by late 1944, the camp had been gradually converted into what the Nazis euphemistically called a “sick camp” — a place where prisoners were sent to die once they could no longer work. The transition became official in January 1945, coinciding with a typhus outbreak that reached its deadly peak during that period.
SS guards refused to enter the barracks. Jewish doctors imprisoned alongside their fellow inmates could do almost nothing, lacking medicine and equipment. Prisoners suffered from dysentery, edema, scabies, and tuberculosis.
Overcrowding and the constant influx of sick prisoners quarantined together turned the camp into a breeding ground for disease and death.
Starvation, exhaustion, and execution claimed countless lives alongside illness. By the time liberation forces arrived, the SS had already executed many prisoners or forced them onto death marches toward Dachau. On the morning of April 27, 1945, before abandoning the camp, SS personnel burned approximately twelve of the eighty sunken barracks to the ground, locking hundreds of prisoners too sick or weak to move inside.
The buildings were doused in fuel and set ablaze.
An estimated 500 bodies were found at the site. Of the more than 3,000 prisoners held there at its peak, only a few dozen to a couple hundred survivors remained. No precise figure has ever been consistently documented, as records are incomplete and the circumstances of the liberation were chaotic.
Winters, in commentary recorded for various scenes in the acclaimed HBO miniseries “Band of Brothers,” noted that Steven Spielberg exaggerated the physical size of the camp as depicted on screen. He also observed that the scene showing Easy Company soldiers entering one of the sunken barracks featured more men inside than were actually found there, as most prisoners had been marched to the main Dachau camp as Allied forces closed in.
Thousands of prisoners from the eleven Kaufering subcamps, including Kaufering IV, died during those forced marches to Dachau and other locations, succumbing to exhaustion, starvation, or execution by guards.
One of the most significant divergences between the miniseries and historical record concerns the discovery of the camp. “Band of Brothers” portrays members of Easy Company stumbling upon the camp during a patrol. In reality, it was the 12th Armored Division that first discovered Kaufering IV on April 27, 1945, and began liberation efforts.
Frank Perconte and his patrol from Easy Company, including Bull Randleman, arrived the following day, April 28, but they were not the first on the scene.
Like in the series, Perconte relayed news of the camp to Major Winters, though Perconte stated he did not personally deliver the message to Winters as depicted on screen. The visual representation of Kaufering IV in “Band of Brothers” is largely accurate, as filmmakers drew from historical photographs and newsreels of the site.
Members of Easy Company, including Perconte, recalled discovering rail cars filled with bodies, mass graves, and skeletal survivors. When Easy Company arrived, they helped distribute food and medical care. Overfeeding was indeed a serious concern, as severely emaciated prisoners were at risk of refeeding syndrome — a potentially fatal condition.
Some Easy Company members recalled giving prisoners their rations, only to later learn that doing so could 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 them.
The scene in which Joseph Liebgott reluctantly delivers the news to starving prisoners that they must stop eating and return inside the camp is fictional. While Liebgott was fluent in German and did communicate with some prisoners, the series dramatizes him having to make such an announcement, after which he breaks down in tears.
As Major Winters tells Lewis Nixon in the series, General Maxwell Taylor declared martial law and ordered every able-bodied German to bring shovels and rakes to help clean up the camps and bury the dead — forcing citizens to come face to face with the atrocities that had been unfolding in their midst.
In one of the series’ most searing moments, Private David Kenyon Webster confronts a local baker complaining about troops taking food from his shop. Webster pulls his sidearm and asks, “Are you going to tell me you never smelled the effing stench?” The man denies knowing anything.
In reality, German civilians would have been well aware of the Kaufering camps. They were scattered near small towns and villages in the Landsberg-Kaufering area and were not hidden. Prisoners in striped uniforms had been regularly marched through local areas to work sites, including quarries, farms, factories, and the bunker construction area.
Some locals even rented prisoner labor for farms or businesses.
While locals would have been aware of some level of mistreatment, it remains unclear to what extent they knew about the atrocities happening inside the camps. This uncertainty is one reason it became Allied policy that locals be forced to clean up the camps and handle the dead. They could no longer turn a blind eye or claim ignorance.
Winters’ recollection of his first thought upon seeing the camp remains one of the most powerful testimonies to emerge from the war. “Now I know why I’m here,” he said. “This made any sacrifice that I’m giving of myself or the rest of us are giving.
This is worth it. This is worse than death. This is worse than being shot at.”
In a separate interview obtained by the Gettysburg Museum of History, Winters stated that what he saw in the concentration camp was much worse than what is shown in “Band of Brothers.” As emphasized in episode nine of the series, titled “Why We Fight,” upon witnessing the horrors of the camp, Winters clearly understood what he had been fighting for.
Winters also reflected on the broader context of the war, noting that he had seen men killed and witnessed suffering in France, Holland, Belgium, and other occupied countries. He had seen civilians endure privation and hunger. But nothing compared to the camps.
“How you can take people and… the way they treat them was just unbelievable,” Winters said. “You can never forget it.
Can never forget it and never understand it. How anybody could think like this, act like this, do something like this to fellow man. I can understand shooting the man.
We’ve seen that down the line. But not to this extent.”
Kaufering IV was one of thousands of camps discovered across Germany and occupied territories. Dachau alone had over 100 subcamps, which included the Kaufering network. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and other authoritative sources estimate that the Nazis established over 44,000 camps and detention sites.
Of the 30,000 prisoners held in the eleven Kaufering camps, an estimated 14,500 died before liberation — from disease, hunger, exhaustion, or execution. They made up just a small fraction of the six million Jews and millions of others murdered during the Holocaust, many in similar camps or the larger extermination facilities.
Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower toured Ohrdruf, a liberated subcamp of Buchenwald, on April 12, 1945. He then encouraged American soldiers to see the concentration camps firsthand to document the atrocities so they could not be dismissed as mere propaganda.
While popular culture often associates Dick Winters, Easy Company, and the 101st Airborne with the liberation of concentration camps due to “Band of Brothers,” in reality an estimated 50,000 to 100,000 American soldiers across multiple divisions witnessed the horrors of the camps, and many assisted in liberation efforts.
The conditions at Kaufering IV were among the worst encountered by Allied forces. The testimony of Winters and his fellow soldiers stands as an enduring reminder of what they witnessed — and why the world must never forget.