April 29, 1945: *Liberation of Dachau Concentration Camp by US Troops, Nazi Germany, WW2

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Last edited Mon Apr 29, 2024, 06:57 PM - Edit history (2)

Liberating Dachau, Mark Felton Prod. 16 mins.
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The Horrifying Discovery of Dachau Concentration Camp—And Its Liberation by US Troops. History, Dec. 4, 2020. Ed.

The wrenching images and 1st-hand testimonies of Dachau recorded by U.S. soldiers brought the horrors of the Holocaust home to America. When the men of the 42nd “Rainbow” Division rolled into the Bavarian town of Dachau at the tail end of World War II, they expected to find an abandoned training facility for Adolf Hitler’s elite SS forces, or maybe a POW camp. What they discovered instead would be seared into their memories for as long as they lived—piles of emaciated corpses, dozens of train cars filled with badly decomposed human remains, and perhaps most difficult to process, the thousands of “walking skeletons” who had managed to survive the horrors of Dachau, the Nazi’s first and longest-operating concentration camp.

“Almost none of the soldiers, from generals down to privates, had any concept of what a concentration camp really was, the kind of condition people would be in when they got there, and the level of slavery and oppression and atrocities that the Nazis had perpetrated,” says John McManus, a professor of U.S. military history and author of Hell Before Their Very Eyes: US Soldiers Liberate Concentration Camps in Germany, April 1945. - “It was stunning.” The liberation of Dachau by American troops on April 29, 1945, wasn’t the first such deliverance by Allied troops. The Soviets had found and freed what remained of Auschwitz and other death camps months earlier.

But the wrenching images and first-hand testimonies recorded by Dachau’s shocked liberators brought the horrors of the Holocaust home to America.

Dachau Became a Model for Nazi Concentration Camps: When Dachau opened in 1933, the notorious Nazi war criminal Heinrich Himmler christened it as “the 1st 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. 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.

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. They 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 7 guard towers. 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. - Forged into the iron gate separating the camp from the rest of Dachau were the taunting words, Arbeit Macht Frei (“Work sets you free”)... https://www.history.com/news/dachau-concentration-camp-liberation
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-- The Last Days of the Dachau Concentration Camp, National WW2 Museum. July 15, 2022. - For the last several days of its existence, before soldiers of the United States 7th Army arrived, Dachau was a small, self-enclosed universe of decay and death...
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/last-days-dachau-concentration-camp

- Munich, Germany and the Liberation of Dachau Concentration Camp. (6 mins).

- (2 mins). US Lieut. General Alexander M. Patch awards the Medal of Honor to US officers at Zeppelinfeld, Nurnberg, Germany (near Munich), April 22, 1945. Commander of the US 7th Army Lieut. General Alexander M. Patch, Major General John W. O'Donnell and other officers review troops from the speaker's platform of the Nurnberg Zeppelin Field. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Patch