Chapter 52: Apr 1945 U.S. Seventh Army Enters Dachau Death Camp

“The first days of January 1942 brought enormous amounts of snow. The reader already knows what snow meant for the clergy. But this time the torture surpassed the bounds of the endurable. At the same time the thermometer hovered between 5 and 15 degrees below zero. From morning till night we scraped, shoveled, and pushed wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of snow to the brook. The work detail consisted of more than 1,000 clergymen, forced to keep moving by SS men and Capos who kicked us and beat us with truncheons.

We had to make rounds with the wheelbarrows from the assembly square to the brook and back. Not a moment of rest was allowed, and much of the time we were forced to run.

At one point I tripped over my barrow and fell, and it took me a while to get up again. An SS man dashed over and ordered me to turn with the full load. He ran beside me, beating me constantly with a leather strap. When I got to the brook I was not allowed to dump out the heavy snow, but had to make a second complete round with it instead.

When the guard finally went off and I tried to let go of the wheelbarrow, I found that one of my hands was frozen fast to it. I had to blow on it with warm breath to get it free.” ― Jean Bernard, Priestblock 25487: a Memoir of Dachau

Dachau death camp was probably the most infamous Nazi concentration camp in Europe. The sheer numbers of victims that processed through the camp was astonishing. Even the guards and the dogs were possessed by the ultimate evil that permeated the atmosphere inside the camp. Violent death was so commonplace that it seldom drew even a curious glance from any bystander. Most of the SS guards were undeniably insane but their lack of sanity was not an excuse for their actions. The day-to-day operations inside the camp were supervised primarily by the appointed “capos” who were prisoners themselves and did their evil duties with the selfishness of individuals obsessed with the spirit of survival at all costs even the loss of their own immortal soul in the process. The Dachau concentration camp was established in March 1933. It was the first regular concentration camp established by the National Socialist (Nazi) government. Heinrich Himmler, as police president of Munich, officially described the camp as “the first concentration camp for political prisoners.” As the war dragged on, the prisoner mix expanded. In addition to the political prisoners, ordinary criminals were sent to Dachau along with a large number of Catholic priests reported for anti-Nazi sentiments. Gypsies, homosexuals and Jehovah Witnesses were included as well as the “weak minded” civilians with the badge of an idiot. Later in the war, Poles and Russians were sent to Dachau and even a woman’s detachment was opened as they were transferred from other camps. Dachau had over one hundred sub-camps that were run by the SS throughout Bavaria and they all followed the rules and regulations established by the main camp. They were all liberated at the same time as Dachau and the inmates were accorded the same assistance from the U.S. Army as the main camp. There were instances of swift justice being meted out to the SS guards by the recently released inmates but no investigation was ever instituted because of the emotional tidal wave of revulsion at the horrors of the death camps now revealed for the first time by actual inmate survivors. Many of the SS guards questioned after the war about their activities in the concentration camp gave as their excuse, “I was only following orders”. When the order came down to most of the camps in late 1944 to erase all traces of the horrors in the camps, the SS staff were overwhelmed with the logistics of getting rid of the bodies of the already dead, killing those that were still alive and cleaning up any other items that could be used as evidence of criminal behavior. In point of fact, the swiftness of the allied advances precluded any success in hiding the facts of Nazi brutality in the camps and countless documentary newsreels of the era highlight the horror of the “Final Solution” to the Jewish problem as practiced by the minions of Hitler and the Third Reich. The truth of the matter was that the sheer number of camps and the hundreds of thousands of survivors to attest to the genocidal program of the Thousand Year Reich was not going to go quietly into the night and be forgotten by future mankind. One of the interesting features of the Nazi regime’s use of concentration camps to get rid of its critics and unwanted segments of society was the astonishing number of little known sub-camps that were well over a thousand scattered all over Europe and inside of Germany. These camps were a guarded secret of the local inhabitants and made it even more difficult after the war to accept the German civilian response that they were ignorant of their existence. Some of the sub-camps specialized in certain hidden areas of operational control scanning all the corners from military style brothels to medical experimentation using the live subjects recruited from the concentration camps. The brothels were for both heterosexual couplings as well as homosexual acts that were being severely punished in the civilian world by incarceration in one of the many camps. Some of the brothels were just for officers and others were for the lower ranks using the Russian and the Polish females sent to the camps for opposing the Nazi rule or being all or even partially Jewish in their heritage. The Waffen SS invariably had one of the sub-camps close to their training bases to reduce their stress at committing evil acts in blind obedience to the Fuhrer’s orders. If one of the girls became sick or pregnant, they would be sent to one of the extermination camps for the purpose of silencing their mouths forever. A number of the sub-camps were for labor that distasteful to a normal civilian. Some of these were related to the production of new weapons and in the construction of munitions that caused their hair to fall out or a jaundiced look to their skin tone. The medical experiments were well documented with the infamous Dr. Mengerle and others of his ilk using the inmates for their control subjects. In many cases, the documentation and files were destroyed before the final surrender and it required oral records to describe the exact details of the experimentation. Still, it was recorded and was exposed in all of its horror to the eyes of the world.