The first concentration camp built by the Nazis and opened was Dachau. The site became
operational on the 22nd March 1933, and it was a place where over 188,000 people were
imprisoned within the barbed wire fences. At least 41,500 people would never make it
out alive at Dachau. It was a huge camp which also had nearly 100 sub camps serving it,
and it was a place which was synonymous with torture and execution. There were standing
cells and pole hangings that took place inside the roll call yards, and the SS guards became
horrifically savage and brutal. They were schooled in how to run a sadistic site where
they terrorised the inmates. But in the final days of the camps operation, the SS began
to cover their crimes at the site and destroy evidence of the killings there. Huge death
marches took place, and these led to more killing. But there were a number of reprisal
executions in Dachau in which the Allied soldiers and also the prisoners took revenge. Join
us today as we look at the brutal executions of the final days of Dachau, to support our
channel please make sure to subscribe.
When Dachau opened, a speech was made to the SS men who were working there. It summed up
the attitude that the guards had towards the staff, and it was said, ‘Comrades of the
SS! You all know what the Fuehrer has called us to do. We have not come here for human
encounters with those pigs in there. We do not consider them human beings, as we are,
but as second-class people. For years they have been able to continue their criminal
existence. But now we are in power. If those pigs had come to power, they would have cut
off all our heads. Therefore we have no room for sentimentalism. If anyone here cannot
bear to see the blood of comrades, he does not belong and had better leave. The more
of these pig dogs we strike down, the fewer we need to feed.” Over the years they would
brutalise many different prisoners from day one. Inside of the camp many medical experiments
took place, and the SS doctors would conduct many cruel experiments onto innocent people.
There were many different people from different countries who were imprisoned there, and the
camp was originally designed to hold German and Austrian political prisoners as well as
Jews. There were thousands of members of the clergy who also were held there. There were
19 female guards who served there at Dachau until they were liberated, but most of the
guards were men. It seems that at Dachau there was a lower percentage of female guards than
at other sites such as Auschwitz and Stutthof.
The first deaths occurred at Dachau shortly after the camp was opened, but the inmates
were forced to conduct back breaking labour. It was used as a site for SS guards to train
to then go to other sites, and 4000 Soviet prisoners of war were murdered by the Dachau
commandant’s guard at the SS shooting range. This was 2kms from the site, and this was
of course a war crime, but then as the war continued Dachau became a site where thousands
more were being sent to each week and month. Dachau was secured by a heavily guarded number
of watch towers, and there was also a no mans land around Dachau, and some of the guards
threw inmates hats into this area. When they went to retrieve these, they were then shot
dead by the guards. Some inmates decided to take their own lives by just walking into
this area as they could not take the conditions and brutality any more. The torture at the
site was horrific with standing cells, tiny little prison cells in which inmates were
forced to stand up 24 hours a day with a number of prisoners with hardly any oxygen. These
could be considered the oubliettes of Dachau, but also as mentioned at roll call flogging
would take place as would executions to strike further fear into the hearts of the prisoners.
A women camp opened there in August 1944, and as the war turned against the Germans
the conditions of Dachau got much worse. The prisoners were suffering from a lack of food
and disease was spreading around the site with Typhus causing major problems due to
the overcrowding, poor sanitation and lack of provisions. The final transports of prisoners
were sent to Dachau on the 19th April 1945, and a train from Buchenwald was later diverted
to keep the new transports from Dachau. Onboard this train were around 300 corpses who had
died on the way, and the prisoners were then forced to carry the dead to a ravine, and
they were then shot by the guards. But as the Americans drove through Bavaria, the Commandant
of Dachau said to Himmler that they should hand over the camp to the Americans, but Himmler
said ‘No prisoners shall be allowed to fall into the hands of the enemy alive.’ On the
24th April 1945, the SS ordered up to 7000 inmates on a death march south, and any inmate
who could not keep up was shot, and a mass grave containing 1071 prisoners was found
on the route. The death rate before liberation was around 200 a day, and Himmler had ordered
prisoners from the north of Germany to also be marched into the North Sea and Baltic Sea
and drowned or shot dead in the sea. But as the war was over, the SS destroyed much of
the evidence of the crimes, but the Americans would take control of the camp. On the 29th
April 1945, soldiers from the 3rd Battalion, 157th Infantry Regiment, 45th Infantry Division
commanded by Leftenant Colonel Felix L Sparks approached Dachau, and they first came across
39 railway boxcars with 2000 corpses inside. The smell and sight of the horror made many
Americans sick, and they then began to move towards the Dachau complex firing on members
of the SS. The soldiers found more bodies further in the complex, and they then found
a row of concrete structures containing hundreds of dead bodies, and also the gas chambers
and crematoria.
The camp was surrendered to Brigadier General Henning Linden of the 42nd Infantry Division.
It was said, ‘The Swiss Red Cross representative said there were about 100 SS guards in the
camp who had their arms stacked except for the people in the tower.... He had given instructions
that there would be no shots fired and it would take about 50 men to relieve the guards,
as there were 42,000 "half-crazed" inmates, many of them typhus infected... He asked
if I were an officer. I replied, "I am Assistant Division Commander of the 42nd Infantry Division
and will accept the surrender of the camp in the name of the Rainbow Division for the
United States Army.’ Dwight Eisenhower would comment on the capture of Dachau saying, ‘Our
forces liberated and mopped up the infamous concentration camp at Dachau,’ and this
led to the liberation of 32,000 prisoners and 300 SS guards were neutralised.” It
was said regarding the capture of Dachau, ‘The Americans came on April 29, a Sunday.
Work had stopped in the camp on Wednesday, and an evacuation was being organized. One
transport of 4,000 prisoners was able to get away, but the 42nd and 45th Infantry Divisions
covered the 40 miles from the Danube faster than the Germans expected. At noon on Sunday
the camp was quiet, and the SS guards were at their posts in the towers when the cry
"Americans!" went up. A prisoner rushed toward the gate, and a guard shot him. Outside, a
single American soldier stood looking casually at the towers while the guards eyed him and
others who were two or three hundred yards away. When the Americans opened fire, the
guards in the gate tower came down, hands in the air. One held a pistol behind his back,
and the first American shot him. In the next few minutes a jeep drove up; in it were a
blonde female war correspondent and a chaplain. The chaplain asked the prisoners, now crowding
to the gate, to join him in the Lord's Prayer. ...Troops of the 42nd and 45th Divisions who
liberated Dachau in the afternoon on 29 April were fighting in Munich the next morning
and by nightfall had, along with XV Corps' other three divisions, captured the city that
was the capital of Bavaria and the birthplace of Nazism.”
But the US soldiers, affected by what they had found at the site conducted reprisal shootings
and executions of the SS men who worked there. Lt Colonel Sparks saw around 50 German prisoners
who were captured being rounded up and hustled into an area which was used for storing coal.
The area was enclosed by an L shaped wall. These POWs were guarded by a machine gun team,
and then Sparks left those men as he went to force the surrender of other SS men who
had not yet given up. But as he left, he heard a soldier shout, ‘They’re trying to get
away,’ and then the machine gun fire came. Sparks ran back and a 19 year old soldier
nicknamed Birdeye manned the machine gun, and Sparks said he killed about 12 of the
prisoners and wounded many more. The gunner was in tears, and said the prisoners were
trying to escape. He also added, that ‘It was the foregoing incident which has given
rise to wild claims in various publications that most or all of the German prisoners captured
at Dachau were executed. Nothing could be further from the truth. The total number of
German guards killed at Dachau during that day most certainly did not exceed fifty, with
thirty probably being a more accurate figure. The regimental records for that date indicate
that over a thousand German prisoners were brought to the regimental collecting point.
Since my task force was leading the regimental attack, almost all the prisoners were taken
by the task force, including several hundred from Dachau.”
Another testimony given by Howard Buechner a first leftenant did not contradict Sparks,
and he said when he arrived in the yard that he saw around 15 or 16 German soldiers lying
dead along the wall. He said some of the wounded were still moving, and he did not know if
any medical attention was called for the wounded. He would later claim that the US forces killed
520 Germany soldiers including 346 on the orders of 1st Leftenant Jack Bushyhead in
a mass execution that allegedly took place in the coal yard hours after the first hospital
shooting. Buechner did not witness this, and his sworn testimony did not include anything
about the second shooting leading to historians to doubt this. Another account offered the
short extra information saying ‘some of the Nazis were rounded up and summarily executed
along with the guard dogs.’ It was alleged that around 17 German SS soldiers were shot
near to Tower B and that around 25 to 50 were killed by the inmates. It was said by a prisoner
at Dachau that following the liberation, ‘prisoners swarmed over the wire and grabbed the Americans
and lifted them to their shoulders, other prisoners caught the SS men, the first SS
man elbowed one or two prisoners out his way, but the courage of the prisoners mounted,
they knocked them down and nobody could see whether they were stomped or what, but they
were killed.’ In the other parts of the site, SS men, Kapos and collaborators were
beaten with sticks and shovels. There was a number of incidents where American soldiers
turned a blind eye as prisoners beat German guards to deaths with shovels. One witness
Leftenant Bill Walsh witnessed a beating and another said ‘there wasn’t much left of
an ss soldier’s face.’ But the soldier said to the man who did the beating, ‘You’ve
got a lot of hate in your heart.’
But in the aftermath of the clean up, there were immediate war crimes trials held inside
of Dachau which dealt with many of the guards and former commandants who had took part in
crimes at Dachau and other sites. There were actually 465 trials, but the Dachau camp trial
saw 40 men charged with war crimes in connection with Dachau and the sub camps. These defendants
were accused of mistreatment and killing other prisoners, and also taking part in crimes
linked to the evacuation of Dachau, and also camp doctors and medical staff were charged
with selections, mistreatment and experiments upon prisoners. 36 death sentences were given
out, and these occurred inside of the walls of Landsberg prison where a gallows was found
in a courtyard there.
Inside of Dachau in the final days of the war in Europe, there was much horror and devastation.
The SS guards had tried to hide the remains of thousands of people who died at the camp,
and they must have hoped that these corpses would never be found. However they were the
ones who were responsible for the conditions at the camp and the liquidating of inmates
who were tragically killed. But the American liberators in reprisal for the horrors that
they saw carried a number of killings of the SS guards and former staff at Dachau that
were found, and they also turned a blind eye to some of the prisoners getting revenge for
themselves.
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