Robert Besser is a news editor who has worked in television and newspapers in the United States, Asia and the Middle East.
On April 29, 1945 American soldiers liberating the Dachau concentration camp responded to the atrocities they witnessed by shooting dead as many as 50 unarmed SS guards.
Later, US army officials wrote reports about this breakdown in military order. However, it was widely accepted that the young American soldiers were deeply traumatized by the horrors of Dachau, and General George Patton was to dismiss all charges against soldiers and end any plans to hold trials.
Eighty-one years later, here is what we know.
It is believed that at least 41,000, mostly Jews, were killed at Dachau. Thirty thousand Jews were in the camp when it was liberated in 1945, though 10,000 were critically ill and many would soon die.
On April 29, US soldiers of the 3rd Battalion, 157th Infantry Regiment, 45th Infantry Division, were ordered to enter and secure the camp. The soldiers, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Felix L. Sparks, were told that Dachau was a labor camp.
Approaching from the rear, the American boys immediately came upon 39 boxcars containing over 2,000 Jewish corpses. Officers and soldiers later recalled what they witnessed and the impact it had on them.
According to one report, the experience of US soldiers coming face to face with genocide “induced vomiting, crying, disbelief, and rage in the advancing troops."
As the Americans entered the camp, two SS officers and a Red Cross representative carrying a white flag approached the Americans to surrender the camp.
A 23 year old SS officer, Lieutenant Heinrich Wicker who joined the SS at age 16, had been placed in charge of the camp after his superior officer had fled for his life. Wicker was never seen again and believed to be among the 50 SS killed that day.
Once inside the camp, US soldiers found themselves walking among many hundreds of corpses littering the ground. Soldiers also came across buildings containing many hundreds of naked dead bodies piled floor to ceiling, a coal-fired crematorium, and a gas chamber.
American Carl Segrave, then 19 years-old, said this about entering Dachau:
“The stench of rotting cadavers. The boxcars filled with the emaciated dead….The storage rooms filled with stacks of recently gassed innocents. The ghastly crematorium. And the piles upon piles of human ashes.
"I didn't hate the Germans before that, not even during the fighting," he said. “We were invading their homeland, so you expected them to defend their country."
"But this …" he said, trailing off.
Adding to the severity of their trauma, the American soldiers found themselves being confronted by the walking dead--the Jewish prisoners who were more dead than alive.
“Everywhere we went, the poor, miserable prisoners cheered us, kissed our hands, our cheeks, clung to us, or just maybe touched us to see if we were real," Sgt. Scott Corbett wrote in a letter to his wife on May 1, 1945.
“We entered the camp itself and saw the living," chaplain Major Eli Bohnen said. “The Jews were the worst off. Many of them looked worse than the dead. They cried as they saw us."
“They were emaciated, diseased, beaten, miserable caricatures of human beings. I don't know how they didn't all go mad. Even the other prisoners who suffered miseries themselves couldn't get over the horrible treatment meted out to the Jews.
“I shall never forget what I saw, and in my nightmares the scenes recur. No possible punishment would ever repay the ones who were responsible."
Amidst the chaos, Lt. Col. Sparks was soon to be confronted by the loss of army discipline among his soldiers. Sparks recalled, “My company commander was running around and yelling, ‘You bastards, you bastards, you bastards.’ He went crazy. Some guys cried, some cursed and some didn't say anything."
After taking control of the camp, the US soldiers had to watch yet more horrors, as prisoners grabbed SS guards and beat them to death.
Walenty Lenarczyk, a prisoner at Dachau, recalled, "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 of 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."
At the same time, other SS guards, kapos and informers were beaten by the prisoners with fists, sticks and shovels.
US soldiers looked away as two prisoners beat a German guard to death with a shovel, according to Lt. Bill Walsh.
Another soldier reported witnessing an inmate stomping on an SS guard until "there wasn't much left."
In the midst of this, Sparks ordered a group of a dozen or so surrendered SS guards to be held along a wall in an area where coal was stored. He also ordered a machine gun be set up by the American soldiers guarding the SS.
As he moved across the camp to try and establish order, Sparks heard that machine gun firing. Running back to his men, he found a very young soldier shooting, while crying and shouting that the SS were trying to escape. Despite repeated orders to cease fire, the young soldier would not stop shooting.
To put an end to the machine gun fire, Sparks was forced to repeatedly kick the soldier until the young American behind the gun fell over.
And there was more gunfire. Sparks’ soldiers found four SS guards hiding inside a rail car among the dead Jews.
They immediately shot these SS, with another American climbing into the car and adding one more shot, the coup de grâce, just to make sure any wounded SS were indeed dead.
These scenes were repeated throughout the camp. While there were 560 SS captured in the camp, the Americans only killed, at the most, 50.
In being ordered to occupy that hell called Dachau, these American boys also became victims as the unspeakable was burned into their souls, and many admitted that they suffered nightmares about Dachau for the remainder of their lives.
In 1973 I was living among American boys at a rural college in central Illinois. They sometimes invited me home to Sunday dinner with their extended families, and I would find myself living inside one of those Norman Rockwell paintings of Americana.
I would look at those seated around the table, and today I know that my friends’ fathers were exactly the type of boys who had liberated Dachau.
These were Americans. They did not know of Europe’s eternal Jew hatred, which built the foundation for the Holocaust. They had never heard priests screaming about Jews from their church pulpits. They had never seen swarms of their neighbors running through towns and cities murdering Jews in pogroms.
The American boys I knew were only concerned with cars, sports, beer and girls….in that order. And they were all good human beings.
It is unbearable to think that such American youth, the fathers of my friends, had to experience the horrors of the concentration camp, to be confronted by mountains of dead Jews, to be hugged by filthy prisoners they had just liberated, to witness this ultimate truth about the German people and Christian Europe--Dachau.
I hope, in our Jewish memories, that we might remember these young American soldiers who saved thousands upon thousands of imprisoned Jews throughout Europe, and acted with great compassion to ensure the Jewish survivors received food, shelter and medical care.
On April 29, 1945 they entered Dachau, these soldiers, these most innocent American boys, all of them unknowing of hatred, all of them naive, and on that day they, too, became victims of the Nazis.
For individually, the Americans who witnessed the camps paid a most terrible price from which they could never escape, as the horrors of Dachau became a slashing wound seared into their young souls, one they carried for the rest of their lives.