"What Would You Do?- Dachau Liberation Reprisals"

 "What Would You Do?- Dachau Liberation Reprisals"

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"What Would You Do?- Dachau Liberation Reprisals"

  

In late 1940 and early 1941 when it became likely the United States would be drawn into the war already raging in Europe, a number of National Guard units were activated. Among them was the 45th Infantry Division from the Oklahoma Army National Guard. 

Following months of rigorous training at various stateside army posts, the division participated in their first of four amphibious landings, beginning with Sicily on July 19, 1943. In all the division served 511 days in combat; fighting their way across Sicily, Italy, France, and Germany, suffering 7,791 casualties, including 1,831 killed in action.

By the end of the war the 45th Infantry Division became highly regarded by both regular army forces and the enemy for their valiant efforts and fighting abilities. There were however three war crime incidents that should have blackened that reputation had they not been "swept under the rug." The first two incidents occurred during the Italian Campaign.

On July 14, 1943, the division's 180th Infantry Regiment was tasked with capturing the Biscari airfield in southern Sicily. The fighting was intense but by 10 am, the Regiment had taken a number of prisoners, including 35 Italians and 2 Germans. Ordered to take the prisoners off the road and question them, Sergeant Horace T. West instead marched them a mile away and personally executed all 37 of them.

 

The second incident also occurred that same day at the Biscari airport. Captain John T. Compton, Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 180th Infantry Regiment, set off and reached the airfield around 11 am. Immediately they began receiving artillery, mortar, and sniper fire. When the battle ended, 36 Italian soldiers surrendered. Without hesitation, Compton assembled an 11 man firing squad and on his orders that he "didn't want a man left standing when the firing was done," the firing squad began shooting, killing all of the prisoners. 

Known as the "Biscari massacre," troops of the 180th Infantry killed a total of 73 Italian and two German POWs in those two incidents. 

Both Sgt. West and Capt. Compton were charged with premeditated murder. West was stripped of his rank and sentenced to life imprisonment. Later in 1944, his sentence was canceled and he was restored to active duty and received an honorable discharge at the end of the war. Charged with murdering 36 POWs under his charge, Capt. Compton pleaded not guilty, claiming that he was merely following orders of his division's Commanding General in a speech given to the officers. Four months after the murders, a court martial panel acquitted him. He was transferred to the division's 179th Infantry Regiment and 16 days later killed in action. 

The third incident occurred in late April 1945, when the 42nd Infantry Division, 45th Infantry Division and the 20th Armored Division were ordered to liberate the Dachau concentration camp in Munich in southern Germany. 

Two days before the Americans arrived at Dachau, Commandant, SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer (Lieutenant Colonel) Wilhelm Eduard Weiter, began the evacuation of the Dachau concentration camp. Jewish prisoners and Russian POWs, who were considered the most dangerous if they were to be released by the Americans, were the first to be evacuated. Left as acting Commandant was SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer (Lieutenant Colonel) Martin Gottfried Weiss. The next day, April 28, 1945, he and most of the regular guards and administrators also abandoned the camp. With all the top layers of the command gone, the duties of acting Commandant fell to SS-Untersturmfuhrer (Second Lieutenant) Heinrich Wicker, who had been in Dachau for only two days.

When an advance party from the 42nd Division arrived in a jeep on the street that borders the south side of the SS complex, they saw Wicker waiting to surrender the camp under a white flag of truce. Wicker was never heard from or seen again after that day. Several photographs apparently show his dead body and that he was later thrown onto a pile of dead prisoners in the camp crematorium, an ironic end for an SS officer.

 

At the same time Wicker was surrendering, I Company of the 157th Regiment of the 45th Division was arriving at the railroad gate into the SS camp, on the west side of the complex, almost a mile from the prison enclosure.

There they found thirty-nine boxcars contain over two-thousand skeletal corpses. Brain tissue was splattered on the ground from one of the victims found nearby with a crushed skull. The smell of decaying bodies and human excrement and the sight of naked, emaciated bodies horrified the Americans bringing some to tears while other vomited. Few could control their rage. The boxcars were packed with more than 5,000 Hungarian and Polish Jews, children among them. 

Their journey began at Buchenwald Concentration camp four weeks earlier. With few provisions, almost 2,000 inmates died during the circuitous route that took them from Thuringia through Saxony to Czechoslovakia and into Bavaria. Their bodies were left behind in various locations throughout Germany. They had died of hunger, of thirst, of suffocation from too many people in each small boxcar or being beaten by the guards. There were even evidence of cannibalism. There was also evidence that some of the prisoners had died when the train was strafed by American planes enroute to Dachau.

 

Four unfortunate SS men near one of the boxcars surrender to Lt. William Walsh, commander of I Company, 157th Regiment. Walsh shot them dead. Pvt. Albert Pruitt performed the coup de grace. 

When the advance scouts of the 45th Division and other Allied soldiers entered the compound, one of the German SS officers came forward to surrender with what he believed would be the usual military protocol. He emerged in full regalia, wearing all his decorations. He had only recently been billeted to Dachau from the Russian front. He saluted and barked "Heil Hitler." An American officer looked down and around at mounds of rotting corpses, at thousands of prisoners shrouded in their own filth. He hesitated only a moment, then spat in the Nazi's face, snapping out "Schweinehund" (Swine hound) before ordering him taken away. Moments later a shot rang out and the American officer was informed that there was no further need for protocol.

When the main body of American soldiers first entered the camp, eight SS men descended from Tower G, the one closest to the gatehouse, and then surrendered with their hands in the air. Near the base of the tower, all were shot and killed.

About seven SS guards in Tower B also surrendered to the American liberators and lined up a few steps from the tower when for reasons unknown an American guard started shooting and others followed suit.

Upon moving deeper into the camp's prison area, Americans found more bodies. Some had been dead for hours and days before the camp's was captured and laid where they had died. Cement structures contained rooms full of hundreds of naked and barely clothed dead bodies piled floor to ceiling. The stench of death was overpowering. 

After Lt. Walsh and his Native American executive officer, Lt. Jack Bushyhead, entered the camp, they segregated the German prisoners into two groups: Wehrmacht soldiers, who were in the regular German army, and Waffen-SS. The sixty or so SS were marched into a coal yard in the SS complex and lined up against a wall, guarded by an I Company machine gun crew. 

Lt. Col. Felix Sparks, commander of the 3rd Battalion, 157th Regiment, which included I Company, observed the guarded German SS prisoners for a minute or two, then turned to head towards the center of the camp where there were SS who had not yet surrendered; he had only gone a short distance when he heard a soldier frantically yelling and then machine gunfire. He immediately ran back firing his pistol in the air while holding up his arm to signal stop firing. He then kicked the gunner off the machine gun with his boot, grabbing his by his collar, shouting, "What the hell are you doing?" The gunner, 19-year-old Pvt. William Curtin, cried hysterically, "They were trying to get away." About 12-15 Germans lay dead with several others wounded. Sparks, doubting the story, placed an NCO on the gun before resuming his journey towards the center of the camp. 

Following the freeing of inmates, some U.S. soldiers gave handguns and their implicit blessings as they stood around watching as 25-50 captured Germans were killed in retaliation for their horrific and deadly treatment in the camp. Many of the German soldiers beaten or killed by the inmates were done so with clubs, shovels, stones and bare fists. Some guards who had changed their uniforms for camp clothing were lynched on the spot along with former Kapos (fellow inmates who collaborated with the SS).

The irony in all this was most of the camp's regular guards had already left the camp with SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer Martin Gottfried Weiss the day before.The Waffen-SS men who had outranged the Americans had just been transferred from the Russian front only days before to assist in the surrender of the camp to the western Allies. But they didn't have anything to do with Dachau's horrors and their deaths in an unthinkable bloodlust. Their deaths only served to disgrace their American executioner.

Immediately after Dachau's liberation, U.S. Army authorities and other Allied representatives began treating the sick prisoners, implementing health and sanitary measures to curb the typhus epidemic, and bringing in tons of food to feed the starving prisoners. The local townspeople were brought in to give the dead prisoners a proper burial.

Some of the bodies of the SS soldiers who were killed during the liberation of Dachau are believed to have been buried on the grounds of the SS garrison. Other bodies were burned in the crematorium at Dachau. 

Following the liberation of Dachau, Lt. Col. Joseph Whitaker, the Seventh Army's Assistant Inspector General, was ordered to conduct an investigation of what was now being called the "Dachau massacre." The lengthy investigation resulted in much confusion as eye witnesses being questioned had seen things from different perspectives and from separate parts of the large camp. While some of the Americans responsible for the killings were identified, most others were not.

Principle among the unanswered question were the exact number of SS guards killed during the liberation of Dachau or by whom. Investigators attributed this to the chaos during the liberation and the enormous euphoria afterwards, making it near impossible for those present to give a uniform description of the events. The fact that the accounts of U.S. eye witnesses differ is apparent in the difference between the 560 victims that Col. Howard A. Buechner, the chief medical officer of the 45th Infantry Division, mentioned and the 30 to 50 according to Lt. Col. Sparks. There is ample evidence which proves that guards were killed, a fact that never was denied by the American soldiers that were involved. However, it was certainly never proved that 560 guards were murdered in cold blood. 

Col. Charles Decker, Acting Deputy Judge Advocate, concluded that while there had probably been a violation of international law wrote "In light of the conditions which greeting the eyes of the first combat troops, it is not believed that justice or equity demand that the difficult and perhaps impossible task of fixing individual responsibility now be undertaken." He further wrote that many U.S. soldiers may have been set on edge by warnings of potential fake-surrender gambits and then went off the rails with the discovery of emaciated dead bodies around the place, particularly the 39 boxcar "death train." 

No U.S. soldiers were prosecuted for the war crimes committed at Dachau, including the 3rd Battalion, 157th Regiment Commander, Lt. Col. Sparks who had been accused of dereliction of duty. The affair had been "swept under the carpet" by General George S. Patton, much in the same way he had tried to do with the war crimes in Sicily in 1943. Certainly, this was not a wise decision, for it contributed to the large controversy around this subject.

One unexpected finding of the investigation had to do with 2nd Lt. Wicker. It was his heroic act in accepting responsibility for surrendering the Dachau camp to the American Army, that the liberation of Dachau could have been even more of a bloody disaster than it was. The Commandant and the regular guards had abandoned the camp the day before, and if Wicker had not stayed behind to post his group as replacement guards to keep the prisoners inside until the Americans arrived to take charge, there might have been even more carnage with the prisoners roaming the countryside and taking revenge on innocent German citizens. 

The guards and staff who survived the massacre at the liberation of Dachau were put on trial by the American Military Tribunal held at Dachau. All were convicted of participating in a common design to violate the Laws and Usages of War under the Geneva Convention of 1929. 

SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer (Lieutenant Colonel) Martin Gottfried Weiss was tried during the Dachau Trials beginning November 13, 1945. After being found guilty of "violating the laws and usages of war," he was executed by hanging at Landsberg prison on May 29, 1946. SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer Wilhelm Eduard Weiter did not face trial as he fled Dachau immediately before its liberation and made it to Austria where he died in mysterious circumstances, possibly being killed by a fellow SS member angry at his lack of ideological convictions. 

The investigation report on the slaughter of the German soldiers at Dachau was marked SECRET on June 8, 1945, which has since been made public (1991) and is included in the Appendix of a book written by Col. John H. Linden, the son of Brig. Gen. Henning Linden who accepted the surrender of the camp.