An estimated 50 to 125 SS officers and assorted German military, including hospital personnel, were rounded up in a coal yard. When the mortally wounded Germans cried out in agony, other American GIs finished the job. William Walsh marched them into one of the box cars littered with corpses and shot them with his pistol. When four German officers emerged from the woods holding up a white handkerchief, Lt. Many of the American soldiers broke down in sobs. But then there was this train filled with innocent bodies, their eyes and mouths open as if crying out for mercy. The men of the 45th had been in combat for 500 days and thought they had witnessed every grisly atrocity that war could throw at them. When the American soldiers of the 45th “Thunderbird” Division stumbled upon the death train, it was like lighting a fuse that couldn’t be snuffed out.
The survivors were herded into the concentration camp while thousands of fallen corpses were left to rot on the railway cars.Īmerican troops directing the liberation operations of the Dachau concentration camp in April 1945. All but a quarter of the train’s 3,000 passengers died from starvation, dehydration, asphyxiation and disease. The train was supposed to arrive in Dachau a few days later, but the tortuous odyssey ended up lasting three weeks. Weeks earlier, Nazi commanders at Buchenwald, another notorious German concentration camp, packed at least 3,000 prisoners into 40 train cars in order to hide them from the approaching Allied armies. None of their prior combat experiences prepared them for what lay ahead. Some soldiers thought they were downwind from a chemical factory, while others compared the acrid odor to the sickening smell of feathers being burned off a plucked chicken. infantrymen who marched into Dachau in late April 1945, the first clue that something was terribly wrong was the smell. Prisoners were subjected to medical experiments, including injections of malaria and tuberculosis, and the untold thousands that died from hard labor or torture were routinely burned in the on-site crematorium.ĭozens of dead bodies were discovered by American troops on a train in April 1945 in Dachau, Germany.įor the unwitting U.S. The prisoners even built their own “protective custody camp,” the euphemistically named concentration camp within the sprawling Dachau complex, composed of 32 squalid barracks surrounded by an electrified barbed-wire fence, a ditch and seven guard towers. The Dachau prisoners labored under brutal conditions tearing down a massive WWI-era munitions factory and then constructing the barracks and offices that would serve as the chief training ground for the SS. The cruelly efficient operation of Dachau was largely the brainchild of SS officer Theodor Eike, who instituted a “doctrine of dehumanization” based on slave labor, corporal punishment, flogging, withholding food and summary executions of anyone who tried to escape. When Dachau opened in 1933, the notorious Nazi war criminal Heinrich Himmler christened it as “the first concentration camp for political prisoners.” And that’s what Dachau was in its early years, a forced labor detention camp for those judged as “enemies” of the National Socialist (Nazi) party: trade unionists, communists, and Democratic Socialists at first, but eventually Roma (Gypsies), homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses and of course, Jews. Thousands of prisoners entered these doors and never came out alive. American soldiers standing at the main entrance to the Dachau Concentration Camp, 1945.
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