The End of Dachau
The camp was built for 5,000 prisoners. However, toward the end of the war, as Germany was losing, they shipped and marched thousands of victims away from the advancing allies. They did not want their crimes to be discovered “intact”. Himmler’s orders were that no prisoner would fall into enemy hands alive. Barracks made to house 200 people were stuffed with up to 2,000 men.
Hatred
The largest number of Europeans detained at Dachau were Polish. At the end, the majority of prisoners were Poles. A Polish American soldier carrying a hand gun was the first American into the camp followed by two of his fellow soldiers. The prisoners, as weak and as sick as they were, hoisted the men onto their shoulders and paraded them around. One interesting, albeit disturbing, fact of life at the camp was how much the Polish prisoners hated the Jews, even the Polish Jews. American Rabbi Max Eichorn discovered this through subsequent interviews of prisoners. That they could not find solidarity under these oppressive conditions is unsettling.
Shock
The Swiss Red Cross worker, Victor Maurer, said to the Americans when they entered the camp, “it would take about 50 men to relieve the 100 SS guards, as there were 42,000 “half-crazed” inmates, many of them typhus infected…”
The Americans had to face more than the prisoners, however. Up to 2,000 rotting corpses were found on a train stationed beside the camp. These innocent civilians had been shipped from Buchenwald, but only a quarter of them survived the journey. The American soldiers had never seen a concentration camp. They did not know what to expect but they were not expecting this. The stench and the sight of the slaughtered bodies of men, women and children, some falling off the train, was more than these battle-hardened GIs could stand.
As the Americans stood in front of the rail cars, four German soldiers came out of the woods waving a white handkerchief. Lieutenant William Walsh shoved them onto a boxcar filled with corpses and shot them. Having only wounded the Germans, his men delivered the coup de grace. The fuse had been lit.
Reprisals at Dachau
In one of the very few instances of its kind, 16 German guards were killed in the coal yard by American forces led by Lieutenant Walsh. General Patton chose to dismiss the charges against the Americans responsible. The Americans also allowed, even encouraged, the prisoners to beat and kill their tormentors. Political prisoners were believed to have been fed to the Doberman Pinschers and German Shepherd guard dogs so some of the dogs were shot as well.
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