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

[appalachiablue]

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

[RKP5637]

1. I'm so afraid this is what parts of the US will eventually be. The US is on an extremely

dangerous path with the *MAGA Party.* The GOP is dead! I'm getting out of where I live because it is now a very very ugly blood red. Sometimes, I think maybe leaving the US is a better long term plan.

[appalachiablue]

6. Many others have these concerns, for good reason. I never thought the US

would go this way, what a challenge for democracy. For those who can move, I wish them the best.

During WWII my father was a young artillery officer in the US 7th Army under Gen. Patch. He saw combat in the Rhineland Campaign, was at Dachau and endured battle fatigue. Like many other veterans, he never spoke much about his wartime experiences. His younger brother served in the US Coast Guard in WWII. They were fighters.

I have some of Dad's insignia, medals and parts of his uniform, also an SS patch. In a way I'm glad he and my mom aren't here now given the sacrifices they and many others made to defeat fascism 50 years ago.

When young I travelled to the Munich area and environs with European students and I saw it again several years later. We spent time in the lively Schwabing student district, the famous Hofbrau House and more. Many years later I learned my father was in the very same area at the end of WWII and also in Marseille in Southern France on leave.

[RKP5637]

7. It's all so incredible. It's like some skipped the history of WWII and what it was about.

I was watching a Hitler film recently and some it really sounded like what the idiot factor of the US wants to head toward.

[Karadeniz]

2. People need to know what lack of accountability authoritarians are capable of, even if it makes

them uncomfortable.

[Drum]

3. My father's division in the US Army, WW2...

He would never ever talk about his time fighting in France or Germany or Austria.

[keithbvadu2]

4. Meanwhile, Trumpsters have been wearing shirts that say, 'Camp Auschwitz' and '6MWE'.

Meanwhile, Trumpsters have been wearing shirts that say, 'Camp Auschwitz' and '6MWE'.

(Six Million Wasn't Enough)

[Desert grandma]

5. My dad was part of this group of GI's.

He was traumatized after what he saw in that camp. He was a young compassionate boy, really and the only thing he really said about the liberation is that he became physically ill and vomited along with many of the other soldiers. I recall as a young girl that he had frequent nightmares and would cry out with his name and serial number. My dad was finally given VA compensation for what they called a "nervous condition", because PTSD was not a diagnosis at the time. He never really talked about his military service much but my mom (who he met in Munich) says she believes he was captured for a time. My dad was this young Hispanic kid from New Mexico that could speak very good German. We always wondered how he learned the language so quickly. My mom says he was also a guard at the Nuremberg trials. The horrors of war...

[bucolic_frolic]

8. You might try to see if there are any Army records of his service

Most, but not all WWII records were destroyed in a fire in the late 1960s, but about 20% remain. I think they are free from National Archives.

Also, it seems logical there would be records of the personnel at Nuremberg Trials. Someone documented everything there.