Five Days That Shocked the World: Eyewitness Accounts from Europe at the End of World War II (15 page)

The prisoners had come from Buchenwald. The journey had taken more than two weeks, because of Allied attacks on the line, including at least one on their train. Packed tight into every car, some in open-top gondolas, others in enclosed boxcars with the doors locked, the prisoners had died like flies on the way, some of thirst, some of hunger, some of cold, and some simply of disease or exhaustion. The Germans had done nothing for them. As at Belsen, they had just washed their hands of the whole business and left the prisoners to get on with it by themselves. A few prisoners had managed to survive the journey, a very few, but the SS had shot them as soon as they arrived, or else clubbed them to death to save ammunition.

For the Americans who arrived to find their bodies, the smell was the worst of it. That, and the dreadful state of the corpses. Some naked, some in striped prison garb, but all skeletal, all parchment white, all sprawling helplessly in their own blood and filth. Some lay with their eyes still open, staring accusingly at the Americans who had failed to save them, others with their teeth bared and their arms protectively over their faces to ward off the blows that had killed them.

“They were spilled out of the boxcar as if you had taken it and just turned it over and poured the people out onto the side of the tracks,” recalled Private Jimmy Gentry.

Some of the bodies were still in the train, some were hanging out over the tops of the piles of people outside, and that’s when I saw for the first time that they were not soldiers. We were used to seeing soldiers, both American and German soldiers who had been killed, but we’d never seen anything like this. They were striped, dressed in striped clothes, their head was the largest part of their body, their eyes all sunken back. They were ashen white, almost a blue colour also, their ribs would protrude, their arms the size of broomsticks, their legs the same.
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“I saw two prisoners lying on the pavement with their brains squashed,” remembered Lieutenant-Colonel Felix Sparks, commanding the battalion of the Forty-fifth Thunderbird Division, tasked with capturing the camp. “We didn’t do a detailed examination of the bodies in the cars. We looked in to see if anyone was alive and then continued on. I heard later that there might have been a couple of people still alive, but I doubt it very much.”
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Like the British at Belsen, the Americans thought they had seen it all in the fight across Europe. But what they found in the boxcars filled them with a blind, incandescent rage as they pushed past the train cars and continued into the SS barracks. Almost at once, four soldiers emerged from hiding and surrendered to Lieutenant Bill Walsh, the commander of I Company. But Walsh wasn’t having it. Outraged, he ordered the men into one of the boxcars and shot them immediately with his pistol, one after another. Private Albert Pruitt joined him, finishing the men off with his rifle as they lay moaning on the floor. The Americans were in no mood to take prisoners after what they had just seen. It was immediately understood among them that none of the Germans in the camp should get out of there alive. None deserved to live.

Ironically, most of the Germans responsible for the atrocities had already fled the camp. Almost a thousand had left Dachau the previous day, hastily putting a safe distance between themselves and the approaching enemy. Only a few hundred remained behind, some convalescents newly arrived from the front, others too wounded in the hospital to move. The distinction between the fighting soldiers of the Waffen-SS, billeted in the adjoining barracks, and the prison guards of the SS-Totenkopf was lost on Walsh. After six months of more or less continuous combat, he had reached his breaking point. He ran amok after shooting the SS men, chasing after every German he found, waving his gun and shouting, “You sons of bitches, you sons of bitches!” He had to be knocked to the ground by Colonel Sparks and held down by seven of his men until he stopped crying and came to his senses.

Later, pulling himself together, Walsh rejoined his company as they advanced through the SS barracks, methodically clearing each building of the enemy. When they reached the infirmary, Walsh ordered all the Germans outside, regardless of their condition. Private John Lee helped to bundle them out:

Our platoon entered the hospital and searched room to room to clear everyone out. Several were in hospital beds with bandages on their arms and legs. Some were on crutches, feigning injury. These were German Wehrmacht, and SS guards dressed as Wehrmacht soldiers. They were moved outside and lined up with the doctors, nurses, and medics. There were also four or five inmates working in the hospital who became very helpful in picking out the real SS men, as well as those faking injury.
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Lee was helping to separate the SS from the other prisoners when he and his friend Bob McDonnell heard screaming from outside. Rushing out to investigate, they found two prisoners with shovels attacking a medic in a white coat. “By the time we got there, he was a bloody mess. We ordered them to halt. They said they were Poles, and one of them dropped his pants to show he had been castrated in the hospital and this German was somehow involved in the operation.”

While Lee’s platoon cleared the hospital, Walsh lined up sixty of the SS against a wall in the adjoining coal yard. Although they had been disarmed, the SS easily outnumbered the Americans nervously guarding them. Ordering them to keep their hands up, Walsh told Private William Curtin, a machine gunner from M Company, to shoot if the SS refused to stay back. Curtin cocked his weapon obediently. Assuming the worst, the SS allegedly began to run. Curtin and four others immediately opened fire. Colonel Sparks, a few yards away, twisted around to see what was happening:

I ran back and kicked the gunner in the back and knocked him forward onto the gun, then grabbed him by the collar and yelled: “What the hell are you doing?” He said they were trying to get away, and then he started crying. I pulled out my .45 and fired several shots into the air and said there would be no more firing unless I gave the order. I told them I was taking over command of the company, and I ordered them to get the wounded into the infirmary.
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But it was too late for the SS. Seventeen had been killed, perhaps deliberately murdered. All but three of the remainder lay in a tangled heap at the base of the wall, some wounded, others feigning death. The last three were still on their feet, two with their hands in the air, the third with his arms folded, defiantly awaiting the inevitable.

By some accounts, there was a similar incident later, when a further 346 Waffen-SS were lined up against the same wall and machine-gunned at the order of I Company’s executive officer, Lieutenant Jack Bushyhead. A Cherokee from Oklahoma, Bushyhead was said to have directed the fire from the flat roof of a bicycle shed. Afterward, three or four prisoners were given pistols and went down the line finishing off the wounded.

Whatever the truth, nobody wanted to discuss the killings in the days that followed. There was talk of courts martial at first, almost certainly scotched by General Patton’s refusal to proceed. Stories changed later and accounts grew in the telling, once the threat of legal proceedings had receded. Some soldiers told their stories of Dachau at once, others not for fifty years. A handful left graphic eyewitness accounts even though they had been nowhere near Dachau at the time. And the official history told a different story again. All that could be said for sure was that it had been a proud day for the Thunderbird Division when it liberated the camp at Dachau … and for a few chaotic minutes, a shameful day as well.

*   *   *

WHILE THE MEN
of the Thunderbird Division advanced through the SS barracks, clearing it of the enemy before turning their attention to the prisoners in the adjacent concentration camp, other American troops were approaching from a different direction. An advance party from the Forty-second Rainbow Division was probing forward toward Munich, but had been urged by some war correspondents to make a quick detour to Dachau on the way, even though it wasn’t part of the plan. With thirty thousand inmates in imminent danger of execution, the division’s commander had needed little persuading. He had sent Brigadier-General Henning Linden forward to reach Dachau and report back on what he found there.

Linden was a small man brandishing a swagger stick just like General Patton’s. Accompanied by a posse of reporters, he followed the railway spur to the abandoned boxcars and then drove east around the perimeter of the camp toward the main gate. They were almost there when they heard shooting. Thinking it was aimed at them, Linden’s party abandoned their Jeeps and ran for cover in a drainage ditch. The shooting stopped after a while and an SS officer strolled over to make contact. He declined to put up his hands at first, but was persuaded to do so after Henning hit him on the side of the head with his stick.

The Germans were waiting to surrender the camp at the main gate. They were led by Lieutenant Heinrich Wicker, Dachau’s new commandant, who had only been at the camp two days. The real commandant had fled the day before, leaving Wicker to surrender to the Americans and take the blame for something that had had nothing to do with him.

Wicker was not a happy man as he stood at the gate, a very junior officer recently arrived from the Russian front and now saddled with the responsibility for appalling crimes committed by other people. He, too, had wanted to flee that morning, but had been persuaded to stay by Victor Maurer, a Swiss representative of the Red Cross. Maurer argued that Wicker should continue to keep order in the camp until the Americans took over, for fear that the prisoners would riot into the town otherwise, spreading typhus in all directions and wreaking havoc on the local population. Maurer had assured Wicker that the Americans would give the German garrison safe conduct once the camp had been handed over, allowing them to return unharmed to their own lines. The two of them had negotiated an agreement to that effect, after which Wicker had ordered his men to remain at their posts and offer no resistance when the Americans appeared.

Carrying a white flag on a broomstick, Maurer accompanied Wicker toward General Linden. Wicker saluted and formally surrendered the camp to Linden. The general didn’t have enough troops with him to move in at once, so he sent to the rear for reinforcements and stood waiting for a few minutes until they arrived. In an account hotly disputed by others, Marguerite Higgins of the
New York Herald Tribune
claimed that she and Sergeant Peter Furst of
Stars and Stripes
then became the first Americans to enter the camp, in the company of an SS guide:

There was not a soul in the yard when the gate was opened. As we learned later, the prisoners themselves had taken over control of their enclosure the night before, refusing to obey any further orders from the German guards, who had retreated to the outside. The prisoners maintained strict discipline among themselves, remaining close to their barracks so as not to give the SS men an excuse for mass murder.

But the minute we entered, a jangled barrage of “Are you Americans?” in about sixteen languages came from the barracks two hundred yards from the gate. An affirmative nod caused pandemonium.

Tattered, emaciated men weeping, yelling and shouting “Long live America!” swept toward the gate in a mob. Those who could not walk limped or crawled. In the confusion, they were so hysterically happy that they took the SS man for an American. During a wild five minutes, he was patted on the back, paraded on shoulders and embraced enthusiastically by the prisoners. The arrival of the American soldiers soon straightened out the situation.
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General Linden, too, remembered the enthusiasm of the prisoners:

I moved in with my guards and found that the inmates—having seen the American uniform of my guards there, and those of the 45th Division—approaching the main stockade from the east, had stormed to the fence in riotous joy. This seething mass increased in intensity until the surge against the steel barbed wire fence was such that it broke in several places, and inmates poured out into the roadway between the fence and the moat. In this process, several were electrocuted on the charged fence.
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Colonel Sparks saw what was happening and tried to calm the prisoners down:

I told Karl Mann, my interpreter, to yell at them and tell them that we couldn’t let them out, but that food and medicine would be arriving soon. He yelled himself hoarse. Then I saw bodies flying through the air, with the prisoners tearing at them with their hands. I had Karl ask what was going on. The prisoners told him that they were killing the informers among them. They actually tore them to pieces with their bare hands. This went on for about five minutes until they wore themselves out. I had Karl tell them to send their leaders to the fence, where I told them to keep calm, that medicine and food would be coming soon. This seemed to settle them down.
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Jimmy Gentry, who may have arrived later, saw little excitement in the faces of the prisoners. On a ration of six hundred calories a day, most were simply too apathetic for sustained celebration as the Americans appeared:

There was not a lot of screaming and yelling and jubilation, not at all. They were blank faced, they were stunned. They did come up to you and hug you and someone, I don’t know who, someone in my squad, said “Don’t let them kiss you on the mouth.” They had diseases, typhus fever, for example, and they would fall down to their knees and hug you around the legs, and kiss your legs and kiss your boots. And of course we didn’t know enough German to know what they were saying and some of them weren’t German. We just knew they were happy to be released, but they were a pitiful sight.
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Filth, squalor, bodies heaped in piles. A gas chamber and crematorium. Medical experiments, guard dogs, arbitrary execution. The prisoners of Dachau came from all over Europe, but they had all suffered unimaginably at the hands of the Nazis, the German prisoners as much as anyone else. They were in no mood for forgiveness as they embraced their liberators. Their first thoughts were of revenge, summary justice for the guards who had tormented them. It wasn’t enough to have killed the informers in their midst. The prisoners wanted to see their jailers suffer, too, see them writhe in pain and plead miserably for their lives, as the prisoners had done. Some of the inmates had waited years for the day. They were not to be denied, now that it had come.