Dachau massacre
he Dachau massacre took place in the
Dachau concentration camp, near
Dachau,
Germany, on April 29, 1945 during
World War II. It is an example of Allied war crimes.
The incident happened following the surrender of Dachau concentration camp to soldiers of the
45th Infantry Division of the
US Seventh Army.
The last leader of the camp's prisoners was Oskar M?ller , who later became minister of labor for
Hesse. According to the report of
Father Johannes Maria Lenz, M?ller sent two prisoners to bring the U.S. Army to free the camp, because orders had come to kill all the prisoners.
Encyclopedia
The
Dachau massacre took place in the
Dachau concentration camp, near
Dachau,
Germany, on April 29, 1945 during
World War II. It is an example of Allied war crimes.
The incident happened following the surrender of Dachau concentration camp to soldiers of the
45th Infantry Division of the
US Seventh Army.
The last leader of the camp's prisoners was Oskar Müller , who later became minister of labor for
Hesse. According to the report of
Father Johannes Maria Lenz, Müller sent two prisoners to bring the U.S. Army to free the camp, because orders had come to kill all the prisoners.
US soldiers, shocked at what they discovered in the concentration camp, randomly murdered an estimated 50 to 120 German soldiers whom they had taken prisoner. A nearby
Red Cross hospital housed wounded soldiers from the Eastern front who had been found unfit for duty. US soldiers entered the hospital and ordered everyone out. The American GIs decided to separate the
SS prison guards from
Wehrmacht soldiers; however, this was not done carefully. It is alleged that those killed included members of the regular
Wehrmacht and the
Waffen SS, as well as Axis Army volunteers from Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands and Denmark. As soon as the shooting started, the battalion commander, Colonel Felix L. Sparks, was alerted by the sound of gunfire and ran over to stop the shooting.
According to the testimony of a German survivor, those only wounded were given razor blades by US medics to
"finish themselves off". After killing off these prisoners, the US soldiers gave weapons to the now liberated inmates, and it has been claimed by witnesses that they tortured and killed an estimated 40 more German soldiers, either SS guard-staff or those ordered out of the hospital, who were normal German soldiers without any link to Nazi cruelties in the Dachau camp. The same witnesses claim that many of the German soldiers killed by the inmates were beaten to death with shovels and other tools.
Lt. Col. Joseph Whitaker, the Seventh Army's Assistant Inspector General, was subsequently ordered to investigate after witnesses came forward testifying about the massacre. The soldiers involved in shooting the POWs were court-martialed. However, General
George Patton ordered that they receive no further punishment. Many of the documents and name tags of the German POWs were subsequently lost or deliberately destroyed and the bodies buried in unmarked mass graves. Because of this it has been impossible to determine the exact number of German POWs murdered that day.
References
- Goodell, Stephen, Kevin A Mahoney; Sybil Milton . "1945: The Year of Liberation". Washington, D.C., U.S.A.: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. ISBN 0-89604-700-8
- Buechner, Howard A. . Dachau - The Hour of the Avenger: An Eyewitness Account. Metairie, La., U.S.A: Thunderbird Press. ISBN 0-913159-04-2
- Marcuse, Harold . "Legacies of Dachau : The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, 1933-2001". Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-55204-4
See also
External links
