The Execution Of Nazis By American Soldiers At Dachau Concentration Camp
Wikimedia CommonsU.S. troops executed Nazi personnel at Dachau following the camp’s liberation on April 29, 1945.
The revenge story of Dachau — the first regular concentration camp built by the Nazis to enslave, torture, and murder Jews — is reminiscent of Quentin Tarantino’s fictional Nazi hunter gang epic, Inglorious Bastards, only even more grisly.
Between 1933 and 1945, there were over 67,665 registered prisoners, in addition to others who were unregistered, held at the main Dachau concentration camp and its sub camps.
When American soldiers descended on Dachau and liberated the camp on April 29, 1945, the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis were ghastly: mounds of corpse littered the camp’s grounds while the bodies of others rotted away in stacks piled up in the railway wagons nearby.
The sudden and extreme horror of Dachau triggered something in the newly-arrived Allied troops, who threw the formalities of surrender out the window. According to an account by survivor Abram Sachar, the execution was swift:
“Some of the Nazis were rounded up and summarily executed along with the guard dogs. Two of the most notorious prison guards had been stripped naked before the Americans arrived to prevent them from slipping away unnoticed. They, too, were cut down.”
Wikimedia CommonsSome of the young prisoners of Dachau, newly freed by the American troops.
The execution of the Nazi guards was a direct violation of the Geneva Convention, and so an inquiry was opened once word spread about the executions conducted by American soldiers at Dachau.
In his book Dachau: The Hour of the Avenger, medical officer Col. Howard A. Buechner recounted the “deliberate killing of 520 Prisoners of War by American soldiers,” and claimed 19 American soldiers were present or involved in the incident.
This is where accounts of the event from different sources begin to contradict one another. While Buechner had described the execution of more than 500 Nazis, General Felix L. Sparks wrote that, “the total number of German guards killed at Dachau during that day most certainly not exceed fifty, with thirty probably being a more accurate figure.”
Nevertheless, accounts of the Dachau massacre also spoke of acts of revenge against the Nazi guards by the liberated prisoners themselves.
“I knew men in camp who had sworn by everything that was holy to them that if they ever got out that they would kill every German in sight,” said Jack Goldman, who was among the liberated prisoners at Dachau. “They had to watch their wives mutilated. They had to watch their babies tossed in the air and shot.”
One prisoner, Walenty Lenarczyk, said that at the moment of liberation, prisoners were consumed by the desire for revenge against their captors. They captured some 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.”
While the unsanctioned killing of the Nazis at Dachau went against protocol, the swift and brutal vengeance visited on the prison guard is viewed by many as the justifiable comeuppance for their atrocities.
