Liberating Dachau 1945

[Music] at the end of April 1945 a Dachau concentration camp near Munich over 30,000 people were barely clinging to life and a brutal SS guards time was fast running out for the prisoners as the war situation continued to deteriorate for Germany action had to be taken and taken fast but who would take that action on the 25th of April 1945 Germany had been cut in two when American and Soviet troops linked up at the town of torgul on the Elbe River the following day US forces had crossed the Danube at Newburgh Ingolstadt and kelheim a Dachau concentration camp was was severely overcrowded due to the Nazi policy of evacuating West inmates from camps in danger of being overrun by the Red Army the commandant SS obersturmbannführer Edouard vita' had written to Heinrich Himmler requesting permission to turn the camp over to the Americans Himmler had angrily written back forbidding any such action he added at the end of his letter quote no prisoners shall be allowed to fall into the hands of the enemy alive unquote the prisoners at Dachau were ordered to be evacuated south into the Tyrolean Alps as part of German preparations for the Alpine read out there semi-mythical last stand in the mountains the SS were also busily burning files and documents at the camp in the hope of covering their tracks Dachau was the very first concentration camp opened shortly after Hitler came to power in 1933 it held political prisoners Jews ordinary German and Austrian criminals and foreign nationals of almost all of the countries attacked by Germany the installation spawned over 100 sub camps to house prisoners being used for forced labor well over 30,000 people died at Dachau including many who perished in a program of medical experimentation by SS doctors Kommandant vitae made efforts to follow him TLAs evacuation order on the 26th of april vitae most of his officers and a stronger detailed left Dachau escorting a death march consisting of six to seven thousand inmates to tag anze during the six-day March thousands were executed or died of exhaustion hunger and exposure one mass grave was later found to contain 1071 bodies vitae then made himself scarce going on the run in the Austrian mountains SS untersturmfuhrer Heinrich vicar an extremely junior officer was left in command at Dachau with about a hundred and fifty guards there were still tens of thousands of starving prisoners inside the camp and the supply situation had by now completely broken down adjacent to the camp was several hundred waffen-ss troops who would probably be used to exterminate the surviving prisoners at an appointed moment meanwhile the Americans were fast approaching nearby Munich the cradle of Nazism the situation at the concentration camp was confused since the Commandant vitala the officers and most of the guards had absconded on the 26th of April escorting a large party of prisoners south the tolls scar-faced ss-untersturmführer vicar had been left in charge though only a very junior officer vicar had come up through the ranks there was an experienced and decorated combat veteran due to wounds received in battle he had been assigned to concentration camps there was still over 30,000 prisoners inside the camp and the food and water had run out some days previously Vickers orders were unclear he knew that Himmler did not want the camp surrendered but he lacked the manpower to kill all the prisoners and so vicar awaited orders that did not come on the 29th of April Red Cross official Victor Mara convinced vicar not to attempt to evacuate the camp which would have killed thousands and instead to surrender the facility and its inmates to the Americans Mara promised that if Vicar did this then he and his men would be allowed to flee unmolested of course the Americans had no idea of this agreement the Americans did however have some inkling of the possible horrors that they would find the Dachau from an escaped inmate on the 28th of April Karima had managed to get out of the camp and walk through the night to the town of Farfan - US forces had already reached the settlement and Reimer briefed them about conditions of the camp and the desperate plight of the remaining prisoners lieutenant-colonel Felix sparks commanding officer of the 3rd battalion 150 7th Infantry Regiment 45th Infantry Division was ordered to relieve Dachau he wasn't impressed by the job considering the camp to be a non-military target at 9:22 on the morning of the 29th of April sparks received a message from the 157th Infantry's s3 intelligence officer sent to all companies that upon the capture of Dachau they would oppose guards around the camp and touch nothing and also ensure that no one left the compound sparks commanded a small task force consisting of his own battalion from the 157th infantry and the 191st tank battalion he split the task force into two prongs advancing on parallel roads towards Dachau the first column under his personal command the second and a major George Kessler the problem for the Americans was at units from two of its infantry divisions were converging on backup sparks 157th infantry from the 45th division would arrive around the same time as elements of the two 22nd Infantry Regiment 42nd Infantry Division creating severe jurisdictional confrontations at 10:00 a.m. Lieutenant Colonel Donald Downard commanding the 2nd battalion to 22nd infantry reported a skirmish at a roadblock near the camp and captured several Germans an hour later Colonel sparks Minh also had a brief firefight with retreating German forces at noon inmates inside the camp saw American soldiers for the first time outside the perimeter they rushed cheering and crying towards the perimeter fences with the SS opened fire shooting down one man 15 minutes later sparks briefly conferred with Lieutenant William Walsh commanding company I 157th infantry ordering him to secure the camp and to keep the prisoners inside don't let them out ordered sparks we've got all kinds of food medicine and what have you coming in behind us and we're going to take good care of them sparks ordered company Em's machine gun platoon to accompany aye simultaneously sparks sent company L to secure Dachau town [Music] well those sparks did not know it Vica and many Germans had gathered unarmed at the camp's main gate awaiting the arrival of the Americans fearing heavy resistance sparks ordered company I to advance up the railway line to the spur instead of through the main gate on the railway line company I discovered an abandoned engineless train they counted 39 wooden wagons sprawled on the track and around the fields bordering the line were many bodies most showing signs of gunshot wounds when the GIS hauled open one of the wagon doors they were dumbfounded by what they discovered he was eventually established that there were two thousand three hundred and ten bodies of men women and children on or near the Train some naked some wearing striped concentration camp uniforms they were all severely thin and many appeared to have died of starvation or thirst inside the locked carriages callously left to die by the fleeing SS while others showed evidence of execution by gunfire the GIS were furious many also sought immediate vengeance on any Germans that they managed to capture shortly afterwards company I commanding officer lieutenant Walsh shot for surrendering SS inside a wooden railway wagon private Albert Pruett then climbed inside and finished off each of the Germans with a shot to the head Walsh's men took Colonel sparks to see the SS dog kennels where the Germans kept Alsatian guard dogs most of the animals were already lying in pools of blood after enraged G is shot dead 25 to 30 of them while Sparks and his men from the 45th Infantry Division move deeper into the camp units from the US 42nd Infantry Division began entering Dachau town at 1:00 p.m. the assistant divisional commander Brigadier General Henning Linden quickly put together a small task force in five jeeps led by Lyndon the group also included Brigadier General Charles Banville deputy commander operations u.s. 8th Army Air Force several staff officers and a handful of wor correspond and photographers Linden's group raced off to the camp's main entrance by way of the abandoned train and it's gruesome human cargo after ducking from the burst of incoming small arms fire Linden's party dismounted from their jeeps and cautiously approached the gate house its large wooden gates topped with a huge Nazi eagle and swastika ss understand Fuhrer Vika accompanied by an unarmed aide and Red Cross representative Victor Maura went out to meet Linden's party they found general Linden and his soldiers in a very dark frame of mind linden actually struck Vika with a swagger stick that he carried British style forcing the German officer to raise his hands on Linden's order vicar was taken to see the evidence shortly after the last Commandant of Dachau was killed in mysterious circumstances subsequent investigations suggest that inmates used the rifle of a young American GI to execute vicar and his aide a court-martial of this private first class was begun but later abandoned vicar although an SS officer and a concentration camp veteran had nonetheless stayed behind to surrender the camp to the Americans and should have been treated as a prisoner of war the atmosphere on that day of liberation was very ugly as US troops confronted what men from Vickers arm of service had done to the prisoners at Dachau troops from Company H to 22nd Infantry Regiment caught up with general Linden's party before the main gate by now a huge mob of prisoners cheering hysterically surged towards the American soldiers 25-year old war correspondent Marguerite Higgins wanted to enter the camp and get a big scoop the liberation of Dachau the colonel sparks and men from the 157th Infantry Regiment arrived arguments between the officers of the two competing divisions broke out against the backdrop of the cheering prisoners sparks categorically refused to permit Higgins entry to the camp as per his orders Lyndon outranking sparks attempted to overrule him but Higgins managed to get inside only to be mobbed and nearly trampled to death by hundreds of inmates soldiers from the 222nd and 157th infantry both fired their weapons into the air to disperse the out-of-control inmates and rescue Higgins it appears that General Lyndon took offense at one of sparks soldiers who was swinging from a bottle and wrapped him on the helmet with his swagger stick sparks in an outrageous display of gross insubordination perhaps fueled by the grim and emotional sights in the camp drew his colt 45 pistol and leveled it at general lyndon saying if you don't get the F out of here I'm going to blow your brains out another version of this story has sparks yell if you ever touch one of my men again I'll kill you either way the two men almost came to blows before Lieutenant Colonel Walter felons on Linden staff jumped between them but a fresh confrontation developed between sparks and villains I'll see you after the war threatened for let's use son of a [ __ ] yelled back sparks what's the matter with right now fortunately Linden's group left before things became any worse the meantime troops from both the 222nd and 157th infantry regiments entered the camp [Music] [Applause] one unit machine gun to death 16 SS where their hands raised in a coal yard they were part of a larger group that included vormax troops from the nearby hospital captured by company I 157th regiment company i executive officer lieutenant jack bushy head sue native american segregated the SS from the other prisoners and marched them into the coal yard the young GI Manning the machine gun shouted that the prisoners were trying to run away and open fire an officer kicked the teenager away from the weapon that he and his squad have managed to kill or wound many of the prisoners between 25 and 50 SS and prisoner Capo's were summarily dispatched by enraged prisoners the American soldiers standing back and watching in some cases GIS handed the prisoners weapons her further 17 SS were executed outside guard tower B while many more was shot by sickened American troops horrified and deeply traumatized by the piles of rotting skeletal bodies that lay unburied throughout the facility eventually their officers brought US troops under control an order was restored though understandable the American reprisals constituted a war crime a potentially deeply embarrassing situation for the Allies there was serious talk for a time of bringing some officers before courts-martial however General George S Patton the newly appointed military governor of Bavaria dismissed all charges for many of the perpetrators of the horrors of Dachau death caught up with them soon enough the former Commandant of Dachau Edward vita' tried to hide out in the Austrian mountains ironically he was probably murdered at itter by a fellow SS officer on the 2nd of May 1945 for the Americans there now began the long and difficult task of trying to save as many lives as possible amongst the emaciated and diseased prisoners at Dachau thanks for watching please subscribe and share you can also support my channel at PayPal and patreon details in the description box below for some really great audio stories please visit my new channel war stories with mark Felton details below [Music]

Channel: Mark Felton Productions

Views: 3,983,826

Rating: 4.8790207 out of 5

Keywords: Mark Felton Productions, Dachau

Id: aRk2FZbsMxw

Length: 16min 6sec (966 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 28 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/einarfridgeirs]

Felix Sparks had one hell of a war, literally and figuratively, and one hell of a life in general in fact. At one point in Italy he was one of only two men in his entire company alive and in condition to fight, and on more than one occasion he heavily criticized his superior officers in an official way for making bad decisions that cost many men their lives. He was recommended for a Medal of Honor but the paperwork got lost, possibly because of his tendency to hold the men above him in the chain of command to the same standards he expected of himself and his men.

https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/2016/07/02/a-fighting-foot-soldier-of-the-45th/

[u/LtDannyboi]

They'd just been brought face to face with the greatest horror of the 20th century, i imagine emotions were running pretty high

[u/TheRiverInEgypt]

Growing up in the US - I learned about the Holocaust from my Jewish community, my family & specifically my grandfather, the only member of his extended family who managed to escape the Nazis & make it to America. My first memory on the subject is as a small child asking about the numbers on his arm, the unfathomable silence that followed, that feeling like I had done something wrong by asking but not understanding why. The man who I grew up with as my grandfather (was actually my mother’s stepfather but to me he was really the only grandfather that I ever had) was unable to save any of the more than 70 members of his extended family.

The memory of the Holocaust was a distant but ever present shadow lurking throughout my childhood. While that first instance, I did not know what I did not know, & it wouldn’t be explained to me until years later, we children saw, listened & recognized that there was a void there, something which we were not yet allowed to know.

Strands of commonality linked these fragments of things we were not meant to see, things we were not meant to hear. Phrases like “in the war” & “Ha Shoah” (the Hebrew word by which Jews call the Holocaust) whispered past & were absorbed without understanding by the children of my generation.

As we grew older, slowly & with no small amount of regret, the adults of our community undertook the grim task of educating us to the horrors of what was done to our people. At first, our minds just understood it as some very horrible thing that killed an unimaginable number of people, & hurt many more. The fragments of shadow slowly started to coalesce into an image, a story, that I didn’t really have the ability to grasp. There were so many things it would take me years to identify & decades to even begin to comprehend.

Whether in quiet stares off into the distance when any decent person would have had the decency to look away, the odd hollowness to a smile, a guarded way of walking, a furtive habitual glance over the shoulder. The many ways that scars, emotional, psychological, & physical can simultaneously be obvious & camouflaged - depending on if you know how to read between the lines. As a child, you first notice the physical, a limp, a missing finger, a dramatic scar & the glimpse of numbers tattooed in the crevices of skin on a wrinkled arm.

Each passing year, we would learn about the Shoah in more detail as our families, teachers & communities grappled with the question of how to pass on a story of such inhumanity without wounding & scarring us in the process. By the time high school came about, we were expected to be prepared to handle the full & unvarnished horror, as if anyone really ever can. In those years, I read books & studied on my own - trying to grapple with not only how people could commit such purely evil acts but also how people could let it happen to them.

My brash adolescent mind reassuring myself that I would never let that happen to me, to my friends, to my family. I would be one of those who fought back, I told myself trying to find a way to feel safe in a world that now contained horrors previously unimaginable to me.

When I was 18, I left for the Middle East to complete my military service & it was those next few years which sadly gave me my first glimmer of true comprehension. It would take another 18 years, the last five years of which I spent in Northern Iraq & Syria. Watching the rise of ISIL from a vantage point close enough to get blood on my clothes earned me my own set of gruesome nightmares to haunt the dark side of my eyelids.

It took me almost forty years to have enough wisdom, experience & trauma of my own to deeply grok the enormity of what the Holocaust was & realize that I’ll never ever truly comprehend what happened in those places in those years & perhaps most importantly, to admit that the price for that understanding is not a price any human should ever have to bear.

”Never forget, Never again”

We were taught to remember & charged with making sure history never had the opportunity to repeat itself. For a while, I naively believed that the horrors & evils of that war were so resoundingly repugnant to all people that humanity would not tread that dark path again.

Of course, in those adolescent years, I had not yet learned about:

• The great purges of the Soviet state or of Mao’s China.

• Nor was I aware of the ravages of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

• Nor was I aware of the slaughter of the Hutu by the Tutsi in 1972’s Burundi.

When I first heard of the war(s) in the former Yugoslavian territories, what would get the most attention as the NATO mission to Bosnia - It seemed like the world had learned its lesson & wasn’t going to stand idly by when crimes against humanity & genocide were committed. Unfortunately, that impression was short-lived as I become increasingly aware that (I had entirely missed the Hutu slaughter of the Tutsi in Burundi in 1993) of the events in (only this time it was back to Tutsi slaughtering Hutu) Rwanda in 1996.

Disappointingly, the world didn’t seem much interested is stopping that one. Although, my disillusionment would turn to anger & cynicism as I came to realize that wasn’t an exception but rather par for the course of human history.

The 90’s were closed out (& a new century begun) by successive Chechnyan wars, next Sri Lanka picked up the torch of slaughter & carried it through the first decade of the 21st century by slaughtering the Tamil. Then we heard about the mass slaughters in South Sudan, the rise of ISIL & the literal hell on earth that they sought to create before my eyes. Next we had Myanmar step in for a turn with their persecution of the Rohingya - it was all the usual genocidal greatest hits:

• Displacement of people
• Looting & burning of villages
• Gang rapes
• Mass killings

If that wasn’t horrific enough, it was an ethnic cleansing perpetrated by freaking Buddhists of all people.

When Zen motherfucking Buddhists are committing Genocide you know the world has gone off the rails.

• The only thing more depressing & outrageous than the list I just provided is the fact that it is woefully incomplete - it is a highlight reel of the worst inhumanity & misery perpetrated by our species in the recent history.

It seems like the only propensity among human beings greater than the systematic racial, ethnic, or religious based slaughter of our fellow man, is the ability of the rest of our species to look the other way & pretend it isn’t happening. God forbid, we feel guilty for changing the channel on our televisions so that we don’t have to feel uncomfortable (and I'm just as guilty of this as anyone).

Now we are in 2020, there is a global plague that has killed 986 thousand people, a global recession threatening to dive into a “Greater Depression”, civil unrest & outright rioting on US streets & in 40% of the rest of the countries in the world. The US is closer to a civil war than any time since 1877 (you thought I was going to refer to the US Civil War in 1861 didn’t you, but nope, go read about the election crisis of 1877 which resulted in a horrific compromise & which set the stage for the Jim Crow era & Segregation) & the election of Rutherford B. Hayes.

China has (starting in 2019) brazenly violated the terms of the “* Sino-British Joint Declaration on the Question of Hong Kong” under which the UK agreed to return HK to China & is brutally cracking down on political rights & the protesters there. At the same time, they are employing *literally** Orwellian technologies & techniques to crackdown on anything resembling dissent. Not to mention that they are intent on spreading those technologies to empower authoritarian despots & tyrants around the globe - a move which is setting back the idea of (not even the reality, it is assaulting the notions underpinning) human rights globally by decades; actions which represent the single most clear & present danger to the civil, humanitarian & democratic foundations of the (sadly) brightest societal pinnacle our species has yet achieved.

• Not to mention that while we've all been distracted, history has circled back where this comment started with China building a highly organized network of concentration camps the likes of which the world hasn’t seem since the famed German efficiency of the SS in WW2.

Of course, with the world in a pandemic led economic crisis & forty percent of the countries on the planet undergoing civil disorder at the same time - who has any spoons left to worry about the plight of the poor Uighur (China recognizes the opportunity while the world is otherwise preoccupied to renew their campaign of crimes against humanity in Tibet, a place where they’ve been able to have their fun because of loud & outspoken global criticism) - the world is just too busy dealing with their own anxieties & preoccupations to have any spoons for what is honestly the usual & routine litany of global atrocities.

Then again, I just came here to say that even growing up with learning about the Holocaust, & feeling like I had pretty much heard it all, I was surprised to learn that in the middle of retreating from the onslaught of the Russian counterattack that the Nazis were so hellbent & determined to kill every last Jew & other undesirables that they organized, evacuated & transported prisoners in camps which were about to be overrun by the Russians to camps inside of Germany so they’d have more time to kill them all before they lost the war.

If you had asked me this morning when I woke up, “If there was anything about the Holocaust, or hell even the modern history of Genocide that I thought could surprise me?”

My answer would have been “Maybe, but I doubt it...”

This wasn’t the first, nor will it be the last thing I fail to predict this year as the only constant truth of 2020 seems to be that every day is better than the next...

[u/whthfck]

He was a mentor to me in the early 70's. Great man. Go the 157 th.

[u/whthfck]

He was the ground commander for the army national guard and new my grandfather. Long time ago, but the relationship had to do with water rights on the western slope of Colorado.

[u/whthfck]

I believe cherry creek reservoir and perhaps the idea for lake Dillion?