The air was cold and wet over the Bavarian fields, and the men of the 45th Infantry Division—the “Thunderbirds”— moved forward through a mist that obscured the horizon but not the smell. It reached them long before the gates did. It was a stench of burnt flesh, of death rendered not into a single casualty but into a statistic.
In the mid-morning hours of April 29th, 1945, as they approached the outskirts of the town of Dachau, they found the boxcars.
The railroad siding on the western edge of the concentration camp complex held a transport train that had arrived from the east days earlier. As the veteran infantrymen, hardened by the fight from Anzio to the Vosges, approached the rolling stock, they encountered a scene that suspended their comprehension of war. The cars were unloaded in parts, and stacked inside and around them were the decaying corpses of over two thousand prisoners, survivors of the evacuation marches who had died of starvation, typhus, or suffocation in transit.
They were skeletal, frozen in the postures of agony, wearing the defiled stripes of the camp uniform. The men of the 157th Infantry had dealt in violence and seen gruesome death for years; they had cleared houses and dug men from wreckage with their bare hands. But this was not war, and the scale of it did not compute.
Beyond the train sat the compound: a series of bleak, low-lying barracks surrounded by a concrete-banked moat and an electrified wire fence. This was the Dachau concentration camp, the dreaded Führerschule of the SS Totenkopfverbände, the SS Death’s Head unit, the first camp of the Third Reich. It was eleven days before the official end of the war in Europe, and the camp, initially designed to house perhaps six thousand men, was now pressing close to thirty thousand in fevers of dysentery, typhus, and starvation.
Inside the perimeter, the machine had begun to jitter. The commandant had fled north, leaving the nominal command to an SS-Untersturmführer, a 25-year-old officer named Heinrich Wicker, an Eastern front veteran who had only arrived at Dachau days before the American spearhead. He was the senior rank left in the collapsing edifice, a man with the authority to surrender but the lack of authority to control the chaos that was about to descend.
As the 157th Infantry Regiment of the 45th Division, having been paving the final kilometers, reached the guard towers and the administrative complex, the perimeter guards ran. Some fired desperate, futile bursts before being cut down. Others were found dead, shot by their own hands.
The dominant dynamic was one of total collapse and the repulsion of the German command structure. When the enlisted soldiers pushed through the barbed wire and past the outer gates, they did not meet truck formation of German soldiers offering surrender. They met the Stars and Stripes hoisted over the gate, the way barred by SS, but the inmates were being let out.
The chaos balanced on a knife’s edge.
Valideted by the 42nd Infantry Division, the Rainbow Division, approaching from a different axis, Lt. Col. Felix Sparks of the 157th Battalion was one of the first senior officers inside the camp.
He was a thorough, disciplined commander who had been in combat since Sicily, the type of professional soldier who kept his composure under heavy artillery. The composition of this moment broke through the standard compartment that regulated his stoicism. Sparks gave the order to clear the complex.
The men moved forward, passing through SS barracks which were decorated with such civilian amenities as ruthlessness. They passed gas chambers and crematoriums; they passed the living dead of the barracks, still in their bunks, staggering at the sudden arrival of light. And then they encountered the SS prisoners, those who had not escaped and who had been gathered, many of them unarmed, in the complex of the coal yard.
The calm snapped when the shooting began. American rifles turned on the disarmed SS guards. These were not executions planned by a court; they were on-the-spot retributions, a sudden, violent accounting of the scales.
Sparks, witnessing the break in discipline, later recalled in his account how he physically drew his pistol and fired a shot into the air, screaming orders to cease fire. He recalled pulling men off the line of prisoners. He recalled an SS officer sitting on the ground, bleeding from a gash in his head, and the fury and the shock was a palpable substance in the air, and the process of detention turned into a 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 count.
By the time the shooting stopped, between seventeen and thirty-seven SS guards lay dead in the yard, an official investigation would come later. Despite the panic, these men had been disarmed and put into custody, and then mowed down by the American troops who did not care for the Geneva Convention at that precise moment. Sparks would later describe it as one of the worst moments of his career, a war crime arising from an atrocity.
Within a matter of time, the camp was officially secured. The International Red Cross delegate, Victor Maurer, had been at the camp since late April, trying to liquidate the administrative pretext of a man like Wicker, the SS officer who was acting as the last commander. That morning, Marquand Wicker walked out to meet the Allied officers and formally handed the camp.
They went to the main gates, engaged in a quiet, bureaucratic exchange of a dozen lines; the camp was now the world’s possession. Beyond the walls, the interior became a frenzy of institutionalization, a frantic operation to save the living from the medical catastrophe that had been unleashed. And in the days that followed, the rumors of Dachau’s liberation, the stories of the boxcars and the mass graves of the courtyard, spread through the headquarters of the Third Army.
Patton’s officers arrived at the camp on May 3rd, not to liberate again, but to witness, to have the evidence of the proscriptions in the briefings mapped into their minds so that there could be no “reasonable doubt” in history. In the company of General Walton Walker, General George Smith Patton, Jr. stepped out of the caravan of staff cars to see what his command had captured.
He was a man of calculated violence, a man of the faint, a man who had walked through the waist of the European war to the far shore. The first sight of Dachau hit him like a blow. He moved through the wreck of the camp, the pit of emaciated bodies, the crematorium, where the overloaded ovens had collapsed, the gas chamber, the bleak, mute barracks with all the hope drained out of them.
He didn’t deliver a grand monologue. He vomited. He stood aside, bent his frame, and lost the contents of his stomach on the ground.
He said it was “beyond description,” that no amount of reportage could convey the loss.
General Patton walked through the administrative wing of the SS. They were holding the surviving SS men, the guard staff, the commandants in a separate area, those not killed in the fires of liberation. The general moved past them until he was stopped by the presence of a specific officer, a man who watched him pass.
The officer, seeing the stars on Patton’s collar, the famous general, the ten-mussared figure of American power and prestige, made his plea. He protested his innocence, perhaps invoking his service record, perhaps claiming his orders came from above, perhaps stating he was just a soldier who had a duty to follow orders. But the underlying thread of the appeal was that he was a professional soldier, that the laws of war must treat him as an honored combatant, that he was worthy of mercy and the protection of the military arts.
When Patton turned to face him, the Mississippi Ranger born in California, a man who had seen the unvarnished face of combat from Morocco to Sicily to the Vosges, looked at the SS officer, at his clean uniform contrasting with the graveyard he commanded, and then at the towers of the camp, the boxcars and the stench, made the connection clear. He told him that no, he was not a comrade; he was a killer and a master of a system of brutality and concentration, governed by no law of the assembled. That he would not be given mercy under the soldier’s code because he had, in the operation of this camp, removed himself from the universe of soldiers.
He was the very opposite of a soldier. He was a guard of a crime, an accessory to the rat hole of history.
The exact wording in the accounts found in the archives of the death, histories, and interviews varies. Direct quotations from a battlefield of this sort rarely maintain perfect fidelity. However, the substance documented by the men of the 45th and 42nd division who recorded their experiences reaches a consistent point.
Patton refused the appeal, told him that his crime was not of war but of against the entire army; that he would be held accountable for a grave compound with the death of innocents that has no place in any war to be fought. He addressed the SS man’s illegal intern. He told him that he had no place to hide behind the soldierly mantle, for what he was a member of was an organization of murder.
Patton did not become an executioner of the man. he was discretion, and a prisoner who was to face the legal justice of the Nuremberg process decisions.
That night, Patton wrote in his diary with the unsparing honesty he reserved only for himself, that the Dachau camp was beyond any nightmare he had conceived in his nightmares. He wrote that his decision to see it was the right decision, because for those of the nation to refuse to see it in a sense equal of torture of the truth. He did not record the exact sentences he exchanged with the SS officer, but he noted his total lack of contrition, the feeling that these men had surrendered any claim to the ordinary leniency of war.
He went further in the command council, he reviewed the aftermath of the altercation in the coal yard, the fact that the soldiers of his division had executed those that they had captured. An investigation by the army’s Inspector General into the killings of April 29 found that there were no battlefield state of honor, they had waged a typed execution. They have been compelled to absorb scenes of the starvation with industrial murder.
Patton consulted the army inspector’s, the rear echelon reports. He ordered that the investigation of the killers not proceed to court martial.
He closed the book; he refused to sanction any of the men of the 45th and 42nd Divisions who had taken the law into their own hands. He stated that it was a justifiable, a necessary feeling of the moral operation, and that he would not have the defenders of civilization placed in the dock for crushing the head of the snake that was still wiping its venom at them. He saw no distinction between the process of killing the SS who surrendered and the narrative of the war itself, they had averted a threat, they had acted in the heat of a scene that cognitive daylight would not allow.
Germany surrendered on the 8th of May. The war against the regime of the men in the striped pajamas, the hope of the survivors of the deepest harrowing places of Dachau, was not formally concluded. The camp was rebuilt as a memorial in 1965 on the 20th anniversary of the liberation, establishment features turning the barracks into museum halls and exposing the fields of suffering.
The workers of this destruction were, in the years that followed, charged at the Dachau trials, conducted the U. S. Army, from 1945 through 1948, which processed the 1,600 defendants, ranging from the lowliest guards to the commandant Martin Weiss, who was found and executed in 1946.
The 25-year-old officers, the actions navy of the last days, were also captured and placed in the process. The appeal that was told to Patton could not override the legal structure of war crimes; the law grew to reflect the wider system of liability, and the higher the influence of the government in supporting the murder was, they stated at Nuremberg, that individuals, military commands, and even the regimes that command them are bound by the laws of humanity. “Following orders” was not a defense.
The story of Patton and his refusal of mercy to the SS officer at the gates of liberation is tied up in the myth and the history of the Third Reich’s destruction. It is not the story of dark mercy; the story of the futility of the plea of pity from the architects of the Holocaust; the story of a professional soldier looking at the world of the death camp yet which a clean Frenchman can no longer plead by the law of arms. He saw a rack filled with corpses, and he made sure the law would not be reduced to a technicality.
He was their commander, and he refused to see the perpetrator as a fellow soldier. He saw him as a horror that stymied the entire concept of the war, and he left him to the justice system that would come in the bitter aftermath. The SS officer was not forgiven by the axiom of his fellow man; he was left to face his judgment, in a steel court-room, with the wire fences surrounding the stands.
