Dachau Liberation & Guard Reprisals (1945) ✊

On 29 April 1945, soldiers of the U.S. Seventh Army’s 45th Infantry Division liberated Dachau concentration camp, the first camp established by Nazi Germany in 1933. What they discovered shocked even hardened combat veterans of the Second World War. As American troops approached the camp, they encountered the unbearable smell of human excrement and decomposing bodies. Railroad cars near the camp were filled with thousands of dead prisoners who had died during transport. Inside the camp itself, roughly 30,000 survivors remained alive, many of them starving, diseased, and barely able to stand. The liberators found horrific conditions: piles of corpses stacked like firewood, emaciated prisoners suffering from typhus and starvation, and evidence of systematic abuse and murder carried out by the Nazi SS guards. Many American soldiers were overwhelmed by the scene—some cried, while others vomited as they confronted the scale of the atrocities committed at Dachau. Before the American troops arrived, the camp’s commandant Martin Weiss had already fled. However, several SS guards remained behind and initially fired at the approaching American soldiers from the guard towers. Once the Americans returned fire, the guards quickly surrendered. As U.S. soldiers inspected the camp and uncovered even more evidence of the horrors inside, anger and shock turned into rage. In the coal yard near a guard tower, a group of captured SS guards was lined up against a wall and shot by American troops in an act of retaliation for the atrocities discovered inside the camp. Former prisoners also sought revenge against their captors. Many had lost family members or had witnessed unimaginable brutality during years of imprisonment. When the opportunity arose, some inmates attacked SS guards and kapos, beating them with sticks, shovels, or their bare hands. Others hunted down guards who attempted to escape disguised as civilians. Later, American forces forced residents of the nearby town of Dachau to visit the camp and assist in burying the dead, confronting them with the crimes committed nearby.

Historians estimate that 30 to 50 SS guards were killed during the chaotic aftermath of liberation. No American soldiers were ever prosecuted for the incident.
Between 1933 and 1945, nearly 200,000 prisoners passed through Dachau, and approximately 42,000 people died there.

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