U.S. troops were shocked by the death and suffering they found at Dachau while liberating the camp in April 1945 — and they responded by massacring dozens of the SS guards.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records AdministrationA scene from the Dachau reprisals of April 1945.
On April 29, 1945, the Dachau concentration camp was liberated by the U.S Army’s 45th and 42nd Infantry Divisions. But that’s not all that happened at Dachau. Shocked and horrified at what they found that day — thousands of corpses, tens of thousands of sick and starving prisoners — the U.S. troops took revenge on the SS guards. During the so-called Dachau liberation reprisals, dozens of the camp guards were massacred.
Though some have claimed that hundreds of SS guards were killed, the true number is closer to 30 to 50. Still, the U.S. Army debated whether or not the American troops had committed a war crime. The Army ultimately decided that “the conditions which greeted the eyes of the first combat troops to reach Dachau” were so horrific that the case could be quietly closed.
This is the story of the Dachau reprisals, from what the U.S. troops found when they liberated the camp, to how they took revenge against the guards.
The U.S. Soldiers Arrive In Dachau
Opened in 1933, Dachau was the first concentration camp established by the Nazis. Located near Munich, it imprisoned more than 200,000 people over the course of its 12-year existence. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum at least 40,000 people were murdered there.
But U.S. soldiers — though they knew about the mistreatment of European Jews and other groups targeted by the Nazis — had little conception of concentration camps. They didn’t know about their horrific conditions, gruesome medical experiments, gas chambers, or crematoriums.
As such, when soldiers from the U.S Army’s 45th and 42nd Infantry Divisions came upon the camp shortly before the capture of Munich, they were unprepared for the scene that awaited them. Though the men had seen terrible things in war, they knew so little about the horrors of concentration camps that, as they approached and noticed several abandoned boxcars, they initially thought they were filled with piles of laundry.
United States Holocaust Memorial MuseumA horrifying look at the Dachau death train, where U.S. troops found more than 2,000 corpses.
Upon closer inspection, however, they realized that the boxcars were packed with thousands of emaciated human corpses. As HISTORY reports, some 3,000 prisoners had been packed into the boxcars in Buchenwald and sent to Dachau to hide them from the approaching Allied forces. But the journey, which was supposed to only take a few days, took three weeks. More than 2,000 of the passengers died, mostly from starvation and dehydration.
The Americans were shocked and outraged by what they saw. And when four Germans approached them with their hands raised, one soldier, 25-year-old Lt. William Walsh ordered them into one of the boxcars.
He shot them with his pistol. Another soldier, 23-year-old Private Albert C. Pruitt, joined in with his rifle. The Dachau liberation reprisals had begun.
The Dachau Liberation Reprisals
As the U.S. soldiers approached Dachau, further horrors awaited. Though the Nazis had tried to hide evidence of the concentration camp by cremating bodies, transporting prisoners to other camps, or sending them on death marches, more than 30,000 prisoners still remained at Dachau.
The soldiers were shocked by the sight of the prisoners, who were sick, weak, and emaciated. “Gandhi, after a thirty-day fast, would still look like Hercules when compared with some of these men,” Private Harold Porter wrote to his parents, according to History Net. He added: “It is easy to read about atrocities, but they must be seen before they can be believed. I even find myself trying to deny what I am looking at with my own eyes.”
Indeed, the fuse of anger that had been lit upon seeing the boxcars had not gone out. Inside the camp, Walsh rounded up dozens of SS guards in the camp’s courtyard and told 22-year-old Private William C. Curtin to guard them. Instead, Curtin opened fire with his machine gun, prompting a number of other soldiers to start shooting as well. When the 28-year-old battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Felix L. Sparks, rushed to the scene and yanked Curtin away from his gun, Curtin began crying hysterically.
National ArchivesLieutenant Colonel Felix intervened during the Dachau reprisals, ordering the soldiers to stop shooting.
The battalion’s doctor, Howard Buechner, refused to treat the wounded guards. And elsewhere, the Dachau reprisals continued. At the concentration camp’s guard tower, seven guards were killed by U.S. troops.
The U.S. soldiers weren’t the only ones who attacked the guards, however. Prisoners — those strong enough — also turned on their former jailors.
One of them, Walenty Lenarczyk, testified that newly liberated prisoners gained a newfound sense of courage. They caught the SS men “and knocked them down and nobody could see whether they were stomped or what, but they were killed… We were, all these years, animals to them and it was our birthday. It was ordered… that the SS kill all prisoners before the Americans arrived and so when they came fast it was truly our second birthday.”
United States Holocaust Memorial MuseumLiberated prisoners at Dachau also attacked and killed the SS guards.
Meanwhile, the U.S. soldiers sat idly by as the prisoners sought revenge.
“We watched with less feeling than if a dog were being beaten,” army chaplain David Max Eichorn recalled, according to History Net.
The Murky Aftermath Of The Dachau Reprisals
Amid the violence of the Dachau reprisals, there was joy too. The prisoners of Dachau were free, and one man, Jack Goldman remembered how liberation restored their humanity.
“After the Americans arrived, they took our names,” he recalled. “For the first time, we were no longer numbers. They asked for our names.”
That said, the American troops had seemingly acted outside the bounds of the Geneva Convention, and the U.S. Army ordered an investigation into the Dachau reprisals to determine if the massacre of SS guards could be defined as a war crime. However, the investigation didn’t go far. Though an Army lawyer determined that potential war crimes had been committed at the boxcar, in the coal yard, and at guard tower, Colonel Charles L. Decker ultimately closed the case without charging any of the soldiers.
“It appears that there was a violation of the letter of international law in that the SS guards seem to have been shot without trial,” Decker wrote.
Public DomainU.S. soldiers guarding Dachau following the liberation of the camp.
However, Decker continued: “In the light of the conditions which greeted the eyes of the first combat troops to reach Dachau, it is not believed that justice or equity demand that the difficult and perhaps impossible task of fixing individual responsibility now be undertaken.”
Sparks also remembered that Army commanders brushed the Dachau reprisals under the rug. He was brought before General George S. Patton, who told him: “I’ve had these godamned charges investigated, and they’re a bunch of crap. You’ve been a damn fine soldier. You go on home.”
Scrutiny of the Dachau reprisals returned in the 1960s, when Buechner — the doctor who had refused to treat the SS guards — wrote a book, Dachau: The Hour of the Avenger: An Eyewitness Account. In it, he claimed that hundreds of German soldiers had been massacred. However, his claims have been debunked. It’s estimated that 30 to 50 guards were killed.
And Walsh, who arguably led the Dachau reprisals, later expressed little regret about his actions.
“I don’t think there was any SS guy that was shot or killed in the defense of Dachau that wondered why he was killed… or couldn’t figure it out,” he said in a 1990 interview, according to History Net. “When I get to hell, I’ll check it out and find out whether they really understood.”
After reading about the Dachau reprisals, look through this database of the guards at Auschwitz. Then discover the story of Ravensbruck, the all-female concentration camp.
