DACHAU
CONCENTRATION CAMP 1933-1945 GERMANY HOLOCAUST EXTERMINATION LIBERATION
SOFTBOUND BOOK in ENGLISH (1978)
230-PAGES
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Additional Information from
Internet Encyclopedia
Dachau was a Nazi concentration
camp opened on 22 March 1933, which was initially intended to hold political
prisoners. It is located on the grounds of an abandoned munitions factory
northeast of the medieval town of Dachau, about 16 km (10 mi) northwest of
Munich in the state of Bavaria, in southern Germany. After its opening by
Heinrich Himmler, its purpose was enlarged to include forced labor, and,
eventually, the imprisonment of Jews, Romani, German and Austrian criminals,
and, finally, foreign nationals from countries that Germany occupied or
invaded. The Dachau camp system grew to include nearly 100 sub-camps, which
were mostly work camps or Arbeitskommandos, and were located throughout
southern Germany and Austria. The main camp was liberated by U.S. forces on 29
April 1945.
Prisoners lived in constant fear
of brutal treatment and terror detention including standing cells, floggings,
the so-called tree or pole hanging, and standing at attention for extremely
long periods. There were 32,000 documented deaths at the camp, and thousands
that are undocumented. Approximately 10,000 of the 30,000 prisoners were sick
at the time of liberation.
In the postwar years, the Dachau
facility served to hold SS soldiers awaiting trial. After 1948, it held ethnic
Germans who had been expelled from eastern Europe and were awaiting
resettlement, and also was used for a time as a United States military base
during the occupation. It was finally closed in 1960.
Dachau served as a prototype and
model for the other German concentration camps that followed. Almost every
community in Germany had members taken away to these camps. Newspapers
continually reported "the removal of the enemies of the Reich to
concentration camps." As early as 1935, a jingle went around: "Lieber
Herr Gott, mach mich stumm, Das ich nicht nach Dachau komm'" ("Dear
God, make me dumb [silent], That I may not to Dachau come").
The camp's layout and building
plans were developed by Commandant Theodor Eicke and were applied to all later
camps. He had a separate, secure camp near the command center, which consisted
of living quarters, administration and army camps. Eicke became the chief
inspector for all concentration camps, responsible for organizing others
according to his model.
The Dachau complex included the
prisoners' camp which occupied approximately 5 acres, and the much larger area
of SS training school including barracks, factories plus other facilities of
around 20 acres.
Dachau was the concentration
camp that was in operation the longest, from March 1933 to April 1945, nearly
all twelve years of the Nazi regime. Dachau's close proximity to Munich, where
Hitler came to power and where the Nazi Party had its official headquarters,
made Dachau a convenient location. From 1933 to 1938, the prisoners were mainly
German nationals detained for political reasons. After the Reichspogromnacht or
Kristallnacht, 30,000 male Jewish citizens were deported to concentration
camps. More than 10,000 of them were interned in Dachau alone. As the German
military occupied other European states, citizens from across Europe were sent
to concentration camps. Subsequently, the camp was used for prisoners of all
sorts, from every nation occupied by the forces of the Third Reich.
In the postwar years, the camp
continued in use. From 1945 through 1948, the camp was used by the Allies as a
prison for SS officers awaiting trial. After 1948, when hundreds of thousands
of ethnic Germans were expelled from eastern Europe, it held Germans from
Czechoslovakia until they could be resettled. It also served as a military base
for the United States, which maintained forces in the country. It was closed in
1960. At the insistence of survivors, various memorials have been constructed
and installed here.
Demographic statistics vary but
they are in the same general range. History will likely never know how many
people were interned or died there, due to periods of disruption. One source
gives a general estimate of over 200,000 prisoners from more than 30 countries
for the Third Reich's years, of whom two-thirds were political prisoners, including
many Catholic priests, and nearly one-third were Jews. 25,613 prisoners are
believed to have died in the camp and almost another 10,000 in its
subcamps,[17] primarily from disease, malnutrition and suicide. In late 1944, a
typhus epidemic occurred in the camp caused by poor sanitation and
overcrowding, which caused more than 15,000 deaths.[18] It was followed by an
evacuation, in which large numbers of the prisoners died. Toward the end of the
war, death marches to and from the camp caused the deaths of numerous
unrecorded prisoners. After liberation, prisoners weakened beyond recovery by
the starvation conditions continued to die.[19] Two thousand cases of "the
dread black typhus" had already been identified by 3 May, and the U.S.
Seventh Army was "working day and night to alleviate the appalling
conditions at the camp".[20] Prisoners with typhus, a louse-borne disease
with an incubation period from 12 to 18 days, were treated by the 116th
Evacuation Hospital, while the 127th would be the general hospital for the
other illnesses. There were 227 documented deaths among the 2,252 patients
cared for by the 127th.
Over the 12 years of use as a
concentration camp, the Dachau administration recorded the intake of 206,206
prisoners and deaths of 31,951. Crematoria were constructed to dispose of the
deceased. Visitors may now walk through the buildings and view the ovens used
to cremate bodies, which hid the evidence of many deaths. It is claimed that in
1942, more than 3,166 prisoners in weakened condition were transported to
Hartheim Castle near Linz, and were executed by poison gas because they were
deemed unfit.
History
Establishment
After the takeover of Bavaria on
9 March 1933, Heinrich Himmler, then Chief of Police in Munich, began to speak
with the administration of an unused gunpowder and munitions factory. He toured
the site to see if it could be used for quartering protective-custody
prisoners. The Concentration Camp at Dachau was opened 22 March 1933, with the
arrival of about 200 prisoners from Stadelheim Prison in Munich and the
Landsberg fortress (where Hitler had written Mein Kampf during his
imprisonment).[25] Himmler announced in the Münchner Neuesten Nachrichten
newspaper that the camp could hold up to 5,000 people, and described it as
"the first concentration camp for political prisoners" to be used to
restore calm to Germany.[26] It became the first regular concentration camp
established by the coalition government of the National Socialist German
Worker's Party (Nazi Party) and the German National People's Party (dissolved
on 6 July 1933).
Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals
and emigrants were sent to Dachau after the 1935 passage of the Nuremberg Laws
which institutionalized racial discrimination.[27] In early 1937, the SS, using
prisoner labor, initiated construction of a large complex capable of holding
6,000 prisoners. The construction was officially completed in mid-August
1938.[13] More political opponents, and over 11,000 German and Austrian Jews
were sent to the camp after the annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland in
1938. Sinti and Roma in the hundreds were sent to the camp in 1939, and over
13,000 prisoners were sent to the camp from Poland in 1940.[27][28]
Representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross inspected the
camp in 1935 and 1938 and documented the harsh conditions.
Shortly after the SS was
commissioned to supplement the Bavarian police overseeing the Dachau camp, the
first reports of prisoner deaths at Dachau began to emerge. In April 1933,
Josef Hartinger, an official from the Bavarian Justice Ministry and physician
Moritz Flamm, part-time medical examiner, arrived at the camp to investigate
the deaths in accordance with the Bavarian penal code.[30] They noted many
inconsistencies between the injuries on the corpses and the camp guards'
accounts of the deaths. Over a number of months, Hartinger and Flamm uncovered
clear evidence of murder and compiled a dossier of charges against Hilmar
Wäckerle, the SS commandant of Dachau, Werner Nürnbergk the camp doctor and
Josef Mutzbauer, the camp's chief administrator (Kanzleiobersekretär). In June
1933, Hartinger presented the case to his superior, Bavarian State Prosecutor,
Karl Wintersberger. Initially supportive of the investigation, Wintersberger
became reluctant to submit the resulting indictment to the Justice Ministry,
increasingly under the influence of the SS. Hartinger reduced the scope of the
dossier to the four clearest cases and Wintersberger signed it, after first
notifying Himmler as a courtesy. The killings at Dachau suddenly stopped
(temporarily), Wäckerle was transferred to Stuttgart and replaced by Theodor
Eicke. The indictment and related evidence reached the office of Hans Frank,
the Bavarian Justice Minister, but was intercepted by Gauleiter Adolf Wagner
and locked away in a desk only to be discovered by the US Army.[31] In 1934,
both Hartinger and Wintersberger were transferred to provincial positions. Dr.
Flamm was no longer employed as a medical examiner and was to survive two
attempts on his life before his suspicious death in the same year. Flamm's
thoroughly gathered and documented evidence within Hartiger's indictment
ensured that it achieved convictions of senior Nazis at the Nuremberg trials in
1947. Wintersberger's complicit behaviour is documented in his own evidence to
the Pohl Trial.
Forced labor
The prisoners of Dachau
concentration camp originally were to serve as forced labor for a munition
factory, and to expand the camp. It was used as a training center for the
SS-Totenkopfverbände guards and was a model for other concentration camps.[33]
The camp was about 300 m × 600 m (1,000 ft × 2,000 ft) in rectangular shape.
The prisoners' entrance was secured by an iron gate with the motto "Arbeit
macht frei" ("Work will make you free"). This reflected Nazi
propaganda, which had concentration camps as labor and re-education camps. This
was their original purpose, but the focus was soon shifted to using forced
labor as a method of torture and murder.[34] The original slogan was left on
the gates.
As of 1938, the procedure for
new arrivals occurred at the Schubraum, where prisoners were to hand over their
clothing and possessions.[35]: 61 One former Luxembourgian prisoner, Albert
Theis, reflected about the room, "There we were stripped of all our
clothes. Everything had to be handed over: money, rings, watches. One was now
stark naked".
The camp included an
administration building that contained offices for the Gestapo trial
commissioner, SS authorities, the camp leader and his deputies. These
administration offices consisted of large storage rooms for the personal
belongings of prisoners, the bunker, roll-call square where guards would also
inflict punishment on prisoners (especially those who tried to escape), the
canteen where prisoners served SS men with cigarettes and food, the museum
containing plaster images of prisoners who suffered from bodily defects, the
camp office, the library, the barracks, and the infirmary, which was staffed by
prisoners who had previously held occupations such as physicians or army
surgeons.
Operation Barbarossa
Over 4,000 Soviet prisoners of
war were murdered by the Dachau commandant's guard at the SS shooting range
located at Hebertshausen two kilometers from the main camp in the years
1941/1943.[38][39][40] These murders were a clear violation of the provisions
laid down in the Geneva Convention for prisoners of war. The SS used the
cynical term Sonderbehandlung ("special treatment") for these
criminal executions. The first executions of the Soviet prisoners of war at the
Hebertshausen shooting range took place on 25 November 1941.
After 1942, the number of
prisoners regularly held at the camp continued to exceed 12,000.[42] Dachau
originally held Communists, leading Socialists and other "enemies of the
state" in 1933, but over time the Nazis began to send German Jews to the
camp. In the early years of imprisonment, Jews were offered permission to
emigrate overseas if they "voluntarily" gave their property to
enhance Hitler's public treasury.[42] Once Austria was annexed and Czechoslovakia
was dissolved, the citizens of both countries became the next prisoners at
Dachau. In 1940, Dachau became filled with Polish prisoners, who constituted
the majority of the prisoner population until Dachau was officially liberated.
The prisoner enclosure at the
camp was heavily guarded to ensure that no prisoners escaped. A 3-metre-wide
(10 ft) no-man's land was the first marker of confinement for prisoners; an
area which upon entry would elicit lethal gunfire from guard towers. Guards are
known to have tossed inmates' caps into this area, resulting in the death of
the prisoners when they attempted to retrieve the caps. Despondent prisoners
committed suicide by entering the zone. A four-foot-deep and eight-foot-broad
(1.2 × 2.4 m) creek, connected with the river Amper, lay on the west side
between the "neutral-zone" and the electrically charged, and barbed
wire fence which surrounded the entire prisoner enclosure.
In August 1944 a women's camp
opened inside Dachau. In the last months of the war, the conditions at Dachau
deteriorated. As Allied forces advanced toward Germany, the Germans began to
move prisoners from concentration camps near the front to more centrally
located camps. They hoped to prevent the liberation of large numbers of
prisoners. Transports from the evacuated camps arrived continuously at Dachau.
After days of travel with little or no food or water, the prisoners arrived
weak and exhausted, often near death. Typhus epidemics became a serious problem
as a result of overcrowding, poor sanitary conditions, insufficient provisions,
and the weakened state of the prisoners.[citation needed]
Owing to repeated transports
from the front, the camp was constantly overcrowded and the hygiene conditions
were beneath human dignity. Starting from the end of 1944 up to the day of
liberation, 15,000 people died, about half of all the prisoners held at KZ
Dachau. Five hundred Soviet POWs were executed by firing squad. The first
shipment of women came from Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Final days
As late as 19 April 1945,
prisoners were sent to KZ Dachau; on that date a freight train from Buchenwald
with nearly 4,500 was diverted to Nammering. SS troops and police confiscated
food and water that local townspeople tried to give to the prisoners. Nearly
three hundred dead bodies were ordered removed from the train and carried to a
ravine over 400 metres (.25 mi) away. The 524 prisoners who had been forced to
carry the dead to this site were then shot by the guards, and buried along with
those who had died on the train. Nearly 800 bodies went into this mass grave.
During April 1945 as U.S. troops
drove deeper into Bavaria, the commander of KZ Dachau suggested to Himmler that
the camp be turned over to the Allies. Himmler, in signed correspondence,
prohibited such a move, adding that "No prisoners shall be allowed to fall
into the hands of the enemy alive."
On 24 April 1945, just days
before the U.S. troops arrived at the camp, the commandant and a strong guard
forced between 6,000 and 7,000 surviving inmates on a death march from Dachau
south to Eurasburg, then eastwards towards the Tegernsee; liberated two days
after Hitler's death by a Nisei-ethnicity U.S. Army artillery battalion.[48]
Any prisoners who could not keep up on the six-day march were shot. Many others
died of exhaustion, hunger and exposure.[49] Months later a mass grave
containing 1,071 prisoners was found along the route.
Though at the time of liberation
the death rate had peaked at 200 per day, after the liberation by U.S. forces
the rate eventually fell to between 50 and 80 deaths per day. In addition to
the direct abuse of the SS and the harsh conditions, people died from typhus
epidemics and starvation. The number of inmates had peaked in 1944 with
transports from evacuated camps in the east (such as Auschwitz), and the
resulting overcrowding led to an increase in the death rate.
Main camp
On Wednesday the first
concentration camp is to be opened in Dachau with an accommodation for 5000
people. 'All Communists andwhere necessaryReichsbanner and Social Democratic
functionaries who endanger state security are to be concentrated here, as in
the long run it is not possible to keep individual functionaries in the state
prisons without overburdening these prisons, and on the other hand these people
cannot be released because attempts have shown that they persist in their
efforts to agitate and organize as soon as they are released.
Whatever the publicly stated
purpose of the camp, the SS men who arrived there on 11 May 1933 were left in
no illusion as to its real purpose by the speech given on that day by
Johann-Erasmus Freiherr von Malsen-Ponickau
Comrades of the SS!
You all know what the Fuehrer
has called us to do. We have not come here for human encounters with those pigs
in there. We do not consider them human beings, as we are, but as second-class
people. For years they have been able to continue their criminal existence. But
now we are in power. If those pigs had come to power, they would have cut off
all our heads. Therefore we have no room for sentimentalism. If anyone here
cannot bear to see the blood of comrades, he does not belong and had better
leave. The more of these pig dogs we strike down, the fewer we need to feed.
Between the years 1933 and 1945,
more than 3.5 million Germans were imprisoned in such concentration camps or
prison for political reasons.[55][56][57] Approximately 77,000 Germans were
killed for one or another form of resistance by Special Courts, courts-martial,
and the civil justice system. Many of these Germans had served in government,
the military, or in civil positions, which were considered to enable them to
engage in subversion and conspiracy against the Nazis.
Organization
The camp was divided into two
sections: the camp area and the crematorium. The camp area consisted of 32
barracks, including one for clergy imprisoned for opposing the Nazi regime and
one reserved for medical experiments. The courtyard between the prison and the
central kitchen was used for the summary execution of prisoners. The camp was
surrounded by an electrified barbed-wire fence, a ditch, and a wall with seven
guard towers.
In early 1937, the SS, using
prisoner labor, initiated construction of a large complex of buildings on the
grounds of the original camp. The construction was officially completed in
mid-August 1938 and the camp remained essentially unchanged and in operation
until 1945. A crematorium that was next to, but not directly accessible from
within the camp, was erected in 1942. KZ Dachau was therefore the longest
running concentration camp of the Third Reich. The Dachau complex included
other SS facilities beside the concentration campa leader school of the
economic and civil service, the medical school of the SS, etc. The camp at that
time was called a "protective custody camp," and occupied less than
half of the area of the entire complex.
Medical experimentation
Hundreds of prisoners suffered
and died, or were executed in medical experiments conducted at KZ Dachau, for
which Sigmund Rascher was in charge. Hypothermia experiments involved exposure
to vats of icy water or being strapped down naked outdoors in freezing
temperatures. Attempts at reviving the subjects included scalding baths, and
forcing naked women to have sex with the unconscious victim. Nearly 100
prisoners died during these experiments.[59] The original records of the
experiments were destroyed "in an attempt to conceal the atrocities".
Extensive communication between
the investigators and Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, documents the
experiments.
During 1942, high altitude
experiments were conducted. Victims were subjected to rapid decompression to
pressures found at 4,300 metres (14,100 ft) and experienced spasmodic
convulsions, agonal breathing, and eventual death.
Demographics
The camp was originally designed
for holding German and Austrian political prisoners and Jews, but in 1935 it
began to be used also for ordinary criminals. Inside the camp there was a sharp
division between the two groups of prisoners; those who were there for
political reasons and therefore wore a red tag, and the criminals, who wore a
green tag.[52] The political prisoners who were there because they disagreed
with Nazi Party policies, or with Hitler, naturally did not consider themselves
criminals. Dachau was used as the chief camp for Christian (mainly
Catholic)[63] clergy who were imprisoned for not conforming with the Nazi Party
line.
Polish prisoners in Dachau toast
their liberation from the camp. Poles constituted the largest ethnic group in
the camp during the war, followed by Russians, French, Yugoslavs, Jews, and
Czechs.
During the war, other nationals
were transferred to it, including French; in 1940 Poles; in 1941 people from
the Balkans, Czechs, Yugoslavs; and in 1942, Russians.
Prisoners were divided into
categories. At first, they were classified by the nature of the crime for which
they were accused, but eventually were classified by the specific
authority-type under whose command a person was sent to camp.[64]: 53
Political prisoners who had been arrested by the Gestapo wore a red badge,
"professional" criminals sent by the Criminal Courts wore a green badge,
Cri-Po prisoners arrested by the criminal police wore a brown badge,
"work-shy and asocial" people sent by the welfare authorities or the
Gestapo wore a black badge, Jehovah's Witnesses arrested by the Gestapo wore a
violet badge, homosexuals sent by the criminal courts wore a pink badge,
emigrants arrested by the Gestapo wore a blue badge, "race polluters"
arrested by the criminal court or Gestapo wore badges with a black outline,
second-termers arrested by the Gestapo wore a bar matching the color of their
badge, "idiots" wore a white armband with the label Blöd (Stupid),
Romani wore a black triangle, and Jews, whose incarceration in the Dachau
concentration camp dramatically increased after Kristallnacht, wore a yellow
badge, combined with another color.
The average number of Germans in
the camp during the war was 3,000. Just before the liberation many German
prisoners were evacuated, but 2,000 of these Germans died during the evacuation
transport. Evacuated prisoners included such prominent political and religious
figures as Martin Niemöller, Kurt von Schuschnigg, Édouard Daladier, Léon Blum,
Franz Halder, and Hjalmar Schacht.[52]
Clergy
Priest Friedrich Hoffman
testifies at the trial of former camp personnel and prisoners from Dachau. In
his hand he holds records showing that hundreds of priests died at the camp
after being exposed to malaria during Nazi medical experiments.
In effort to counter the
strength and influence of spiritual resistance, Nazi security services
monitored clergy very closely.[65]: 1412 Priests were frequently denounced,
arrested and sent to concentration camps, often simply on the basis of being "suspected
of activities hostile to the State" or that there was reason to
"suppose that his dealings might harm society".[65]: 142 Despite SS
hostility to religious observance, the Vatican and German bishops successfully
lobbied the regime to concentrate clergy at one camp and obtained permission to
build a chapel, for the priests to live communally and for time to be allotted
to them for the religious and intellectual activity. Priests Barracks at Dachau
were established in Blocks 26, 28 and 30, though only temporarily. 26 became
the international block and 28 was reserved for Poles the most numerous
group.
Of a total of 2,720 clergy
recorded as imprisoned at Dachau,[63] the overwhelming majority, some 2,579 (or
94.88%) were Catholic. Among the other denominations, there were 109
Protestants, 22 Greek Orthodox, 8 Old Catholics and Mariavites and 2 Muslims.
In his Dachau: The Official History 19331945, Paul Berben noted that R.
Schnabel's 1966 investigation, Die Frommen in der Hölle ("The Pious Ones
in Hell") found an alternative total of 2,771 and included the fate all
the clergy listed, with 692 noted as deceased and 336 sent out on "invalid
trainloads" and therefore presumed dead.[65]: 276277 Over 400 German
priests were sent to Dachau.[66] Total numbers incarcerated are nonetheless
difficult to assert, for some clergy were not recognised as such by the camp
authorities, and someparticularly Polesdid not wish to be identified as such,
fearing they would be mistreated.
The Nazis introduced a racial
hierarchykeeping Poles in harsh conditions, while favoring German
priests.[65]: 148 697 Poles arrived in December 1941, and a further 500 of
mainly elderly clergy were brought in October the following year. Inadequately
clothed for the bitter cold, of this group only 82 survived. A large number of
Polish priests were chosen for Nazi medical experiments. In November 1942, 20
were given phlegmons. 120 were used by Dr Schilling for malaria experiments
between July 1942 and May 1944. Several Poles met their deaths with the
"invalid trains" sent out from the camp, others were liquidated in
the camp and given bogus death certificates. Some died of cruel punishment for
misdemeanorsbeaten to death or run to exhaustion.
Staff
The camp staff consisted mostly
of male SS, although 19 female guards served at Dachau as well, most of them
until liberation.[67] Sixteen have been identified including Fanny Baur,
Leopoldine Bittermann, Ernestine Brenner, Anna Buck, Rosa Dolaschko, Maria
Eder, Rosa Grassmann, Betty Hanneschaleger, Ruth Elfriede Hildner, Josefa
Keller, Berta Kimplinger, Lieselotte Klaudat, Theresia Kopp, Rosalie Leimboeck,
and Thea Miesl.[68] Women guards were assigned also to the Augsburg
Michelwerke, Burgau, Kaufering, Mühldorf, and Munich Agfa Camera Werke
subcamps. In mid-April 1945, female subcamps at Kaufering, Augsburg, and Munich
were closed, and the SS stationed the women at Dachau. Several Norwegians
worked as guards at the Dachau camp.
In the major Dachau war crimes
case (United States of America v. Martin Gottfried Weiss et.al.), forty-two
officials of Dachau were tried from November to December 1945. All were found
guilty thirty-six of the defendants were sentenced to death on 13 December
1945, of whom 23 were hanged on 2829 May 1946, including the commandant,
SS-Obersturmbannführer Martin Gottfried Weiss, SS-Obersturmführer Freidrich
Wilhelm Ruppert and camp doctors Karl Schilling and Fritz Hintermeyer.[70] Camp
commandant Weiss admitted in affidavit testimony that most of the deaths at
Dachau during his administration were due to "typhus, TB, dysentery,
pneumonia, pleurisy, and body weakness brought about by lack of food." His
testimony also admitted to deaths by shootings, hangings and medical
experiments.[71][72][73] Ruppert ordered and supervised the deaths of
innumerable prisoners at Dachau main and subcamps, according to the War Crimes
Commission official trial transcript. He testified about hangings, shootings
and lethal injections, but did not admit to direct responsibility for any
individual deaths.[74] An anonymous Dutch prisoner contended that British
Special Operations Executive (SOE) agent Noor Inayat Khan was cruelly beaten by
SS officer Wilhelm Ruppert before being shot from behind; the beating may have
been the actual cause of her death.
Satellite
camps and sub-camps
Further information: List of
subcamps of Dachau
Satellite camps under the authority
of Dachau were established in the summer and autumn of 1944 near armaments
factories throughout southern Germany to increase war production. Dachau alone
had more than 30 large subcamps, and hundreds of smaller ones,[76] in which
over 30,000 prisoners worked almost exclusively on armaments.
Overall, the Dachau
concentration camp system included 123 sub-camps and Kommandos which were set
up in 1943 when factories were built near the main camp to make use of forced
labor of the Dachau prisoners. Out of the 123 sub-camps, eleven of them were
called Kaufering, distinguished by a number at the end of each. All Kaufering
sub-camps were set up to specifically build three underground factories (Allied
bombing raids made it necessary for them to be underground) for a project
called Ringeltaube (wood pigeon), which planned to be the location in which the
German jet fighter plane, Messerschmitt Me 262, was to be built. In the last
days of war, in April 1945, the Kaufering camps were evacuated and around 15,000
prisoners were sent up to the main Dachau camp. Typhus alone was estimated to
have caused 15,000 deaths between December 1944 and April 1945.[78][79]
"Within the first month after the arrival of the American troops, 10,000
prisoners were treated for malnutrition and kindred diseases. In spite of this
one hundred prisoners died each day during the first month from typhus,
dysentery or general weakness".
As U.S. Army troops neared the
Dachau sub-camp at Landsberg on 27 April 1945, the SS officer in charge ordered
that 4,000 prisoners be murdered. Windows and doors of their huts were nailed
shut. The buildings were then doused with gasoline and set afire. Prisoners who
were naked or nearly so were burned to death, while some managed to crawl out
of the buildings before dying. Earlier that day, as Wehrmacht troops withdrew
from Landsberg am Lech, towns people hung white sheets from their windows.
Infuriated SS troops dragged German civilians from their homes and hanged them
from trees.
Liberation
SS men confer with General
Henning Linden (man with helmet, looking to his right) during the camp's
liberation (29 April 1945)
Main camp
As the Allies began to advance
on Nazi Germany, the SS began to evacuate the first concentration camps in
summer 1944.[35] Thousands of prisoners were killed before the evacuation due
to being ill or unable to walk. At the end of 1944, the overcrowding of camps
began to take its toll on the prisoners. The unhygienic conditions and the
supplies of food rations became disastrous. In November a typhus fever epidemic
broke out that took thousands of lives.
In the second phase of the
evacuation, in April 1945, Himmler gave direct evacuation routes for remaining
camps. Prisoners who were from the northern part of Germany were to be directed
to the Baltic and North Sea coasts to be drowned. The prisoners from the
southern part were to be gathered in the Alps, which was the location in which
the SS wanted to resist the Allies.[35] On 28 April 1945, an armed revolt took
place in the town of Dachau. Both former and escaped concentration camp
prisoners, and a renegade Volkssturm (civilian militia) company took part. At
about 8:30 am the rebels occupied the Town Hall. The SS gruesomely suppressed
the revolt within a few hours.
Being fully aware that Germany
was about to be defeated in World War II, the SS invested its time in removing
evidence of the crimes it committed in the concentration camps. They began
destroying incriminating evidence in April 1945 and planned on murdering the
prisoners using codenames "Wolke A-I" (Cloud A-1) and
"Wolkenbrand" (Cloud fire).[82] However, these plans were not carried
out. In mid-April, plans to evacuate the camp started by sending prisoners
toward Tyrol. On 26 April, over 10,000 prisoners were forced to leave the
Dachau concentration camp on foot, in trains, or in trucks. The largest group
of some 7,000 prisoners was driven southward on a foot-march lasting several
days. More than 1,000 prisoners did not survive this march. The evacuation
transports cost many thousands of prisoners their lives.
On 26 April 1945 prisoner Karl
Riemer fled the Dachau concentration camp to get help from American troops and
on 28 April Victor Maurer, a representative of the International Red Cross,
negotiated an agreement to surrender the camp to U.S. troops. That night a
secretly formed International Prisoners Committee took over the control of the
camp. Units of 3rd Battalion, 157th Infantry Regiment, 45th Infantry Division,
commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Felix L. Sparks, were ordered to secure the
camp. On 29 April Sparks led part of his battalion as they entered the camp
over a side wall.[83] At about the same time, Brigadier General Henning Linden
led the 222nd Infantry Regiment of the 42nd (Rainbow) Infantry Division
soldiers including his aide, Lieutenant William Cowling,[84] to accept the
formal surrender of the camp from German Lieutenant Heinrich Wicker at an
entrance between the camp and the compound for the SS garrison. Linden was
traveling with Marguerite Higgins and other reporters; as a result, Linden's
detachment generated international headlines by accepting the surrender of the camp.
More than 30,000 Jews and political prisoners were freed, and since 1945
adherents of the 42nd and 45th Division versions of events have argued over
which unit was the first to liberate Dachau.
Satellite camps liberation
The first Dachau subcamp
discovered by advancing Allied forces was Kaufering IV by the 12th Armored
Division on 27 April 1945.[89][90] Subcamps liberated by the 12th Armored
Division included: Erpting, Schrobenhausen, Schwabing, Langerringen, Türkheim,
Lauingen, Schwabach, Germering.
During the liberation of the
sub-camps surrounding Dachau, advance scouts of the U.S. Army's 522nd Field
Artillery Battalion, a segregated battalion consisting of Nisei, 2nd generation
Japanese-Americans, liberated the 3,000 prisoners of the "Kaufering IV
Hurlach"[92] slave labor camp.[93] Perisco describes an Office of
Strategic Services (OSS) team (code name LUXE) leading Army Intelligence to a
"Camp IV" on 29 April. "They found the camp afire and a stack of
some four hundred bodies burning ... American soldiers then went into Landsberg
and rounded up all the male civilians they could find and marched them out to
the camp. The former commandant was forced to lie amidst a pile of corpses. The
male population of Landsberg was then ordered to walk by, and ordered to spit
on the commandant as they passed. The commandant was then turned over to a
group of liberated camp survivors".[94] The 522nd's personnel later discovered
the survivors of a death march[95] headed generally southwards from the Dachau
main camp to Eurasburg, then eastwards towards the Austrian border on 2 May,
just west of the town of Waakirchen.
Weather at the time of
liberation was unseasonably cool and temperatures trended down through the
first two days of May; on 2 May, the area received a snowstorm with 10
centimetres (4 in) of snow at nearby Munich. Proper clothing was still scarce
and film footage from the time (as seen in The World at War) shows naked, gaunt
people either wandering on snow or dead under it.
Due to the number of sub-camps
over a large area that comprised the Dachau concentration camp complex, many
Allied units have been officially recognized by the United States Army Center
of Military History and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as
liberating units of Dachau, including: the 4th Infantry Division, 36th Infantry
Division, 42nd Infantry Division, 45th Infantry Division, 63rd Infantry
Division, 99th Infantry Division, 103rd Infantry Division, 10th Armored
Division, 12th Armored Division, 14th Armored Division, 20th Armored Division,
and the 101st Airborne Division.
Killing of camp guards
American troops killed some of
the camp guards after they had surrendered. The number is disputed as some were
killed in combat, some while attempting to surrender, and others after their
surrender was accepted. In 1989, Brigadier General Felix L. Sparks, the Colonel
in command of a battalion that was present, stated:
The total number of German
guards killed at Dachau during that day most certainly does not exceed fifty,
with thirty probably being a more accurate figure. The regimental records of
the 157th Field Artillery Regiment for that date indicate that over a thousand
German prisoners were brought to the regimental collecting point. Since my task
force was leading the regimental attack, almost all the prisoners were taken by
the task force, including several hundred from Dachau.
An Inspector General report
resulting from a US Army investigation conducted between 3 and 8 May 1945 and
titled, "American Army Investigation of Alleged Mistreatment of German
Guards at Dachau," found that 21 plus "a number" of presumed SS
men were killed with others being wounded after their surrender had been
accepted. In addition, 25 to 50 SS guards were estimated to have been killed by
the liberated prisoners. Lee Miller visited the camp just after liberation, and
photographed several guards who were killed by soldiers or prisoners.
According to Sparks,
court-martial charges were drawn up against him and several other men under his
command but General George S. Patton, who had recently been appointed military
governor of Bavaria, chose to dismiss the charges.
Colonel Charles L. Decker, an
acting deputy judge advocate, concluded in late 1945 that, while war crimes had
been committed at Dachau by Germany, "Certainly, there was no such
systematic criminality among United States forces as pervaded the Nazi groups
in Germany."
American troops also forced
local citizens to the camp to see for themselves the conditions there and to
help bury the dead.[90] Many local residents were shocked about the experience
and claimed no knowledge of the activities at the camp.
Post-liberation Easter
6 May 1945 (23 April on the
Orthodox calendar) was the day of Pascha, Orthodox Easter. In a cell block used
by Catholic priests to say daily Mass, several Greek, Serbian and Russian
priests and one Serbian deacon, wearing makeshift vestments made from towels of
the SS guard, gathered with several hundred Greek, Serbian and Russian
prisoners to celebrate the Paschal Vigil. A prisoner named Rahr described the
scene:
In the entire history of the
Orthodox Church there has probably never been an Easter service like the one at
Dachau in 1945. Greek and Serbian priests together with a Serbian deacon
adorned the makeshift 'vestments' over their blue and gray-striped prisoners'
uniforms. Then they began to chant, changing from Greek to Slavic, and then
back again to Greek. The Easter Canon, the Easter Sticheraseverything was
recited from memory. The GospelIn the beginning was the Wordalso from memory.
And finally, the Homily of Saint Johnalso from memory. A young Greek monk from
the Holy Mountain stood up in front of us and recited it with such infectious
enthusiasm that we shall never forget him as long as we live. Saint John
Chrysostomos himself seemed to speak through him to us and to the rest of the
world as well!
There is a Russian Orthodox
chapel at the camp today, and it is well known for its icon of Christ leading
the prisoners out of the camp gates.
After liberation
Authorities worked night and day
to alleviate conditions at the camp immediately following the liberation as an
epidemic of black typhus swept through the prisoner population. Two thousand
cases had already been reported by 3 May.
By October of the same year the
camp was being used by the U.S. Army as a place of confinement for war
criminals, the SS and important witnesses.[108] It was also the site of the
Dachau Trials for German war criminals, a site chosen for its symbolism. In
1948, the Bavarian government established housing for refugees on the site, and
this remained for many years.[109] Among those held in the Dachau internment
camp set up under the U.S. Army were Elsa Ehrich, Maria Mandl, and Elisabeth
Ruppert.
The Kaserne quarters and other
buildings used by the guards and trainee guards were converted and served as
the Eastman Barracks, an American military post.[citation needed] After the
closure of the Eastman Barracks in 1974, these areas are now occupied by the
Bavarian Bereitschaftspolizei (rapid response police unit).
Deportation of Soviet nationals
By January 1946, 18,000 members
of the SS were being confined at the camp along with an additional 12,000
persons, including deserters from the Russian army and had number who had been
captured in German Army uniform. The occupants of two barracks rioted as 271 of
the Russian deserters were to be loaded onto trains that would return them to
Russian-controlled lands, as agreed at the Yalta Conference. Inmates barricaded
themselves inside two barracks. While the first was able to be cleared without
too much trouble those in the second building, set fire to it, tore off their
clothing in an effort to frustrate the guards, and linked arms to resist being
removed from the building.[111] Tear gas was used by the American soldiers
before rushing the barrack, only for them to find that many had committed
suicide. The American services newspaper Stars and Stripes reported:
The GIs quickly cut down most
of those who had hanged themselves from the rafters. Those still conscious were
screaming in Russian, pointing first at the guns of the guards, then at
themselves, begging to us to shoot.
Ten of the soldiers were
successful in their bid to commit suicide during the riot while another 21
attempted suicide, apparently with razor blades. Many had "cracked
heads" inflicted by 500 American guards, in the attempt to bring the
situation under control.