The Liberators

by Michael Hirsh

  The crematorium building was actually outside the prison camp walls. Nearby were two types of gas chambers, one used to fumigate clothing and a second, which could have been used to murder inmates, but Holocaust scholars don’t believe it was ever put into operation. Nevertheless, mass murder was a daily occurrence at Dachau. Some prisoners, mostly Russians, were used as moving rifle range targets, others were killed in experiments, still others were tortured and hanged, and more were euthanized.

  If you visit Dachau today and pass through the Jourhaus gate archway, you’ll find a plaque provided by the 42nd Infantry Division commemorating its liberation of the camp on April 29, 1945. There’s also a plaque honoring the 20th Armored Division. What’s missing, in part because the German organization that runs the Dachau museum didn’t want to get into the middle of a dispute between U.S. Army veterans, is any remembrance of the role played by the 45th Infantry Division in the liberation of Dachau.

  Both the 45th “Thunderbird” and the 42nd “Rainbow” Divisions had troops inside the outer walls of the camp by midday on the twenty-ninth. Who got there first has been disputed for sixty-five years, but it is a pointless dispute whose resolution will bring no additional honor to the unit declared the winner. Dee Eberhart, in his role as chairman of the board of trustees of the Rainbow Division Veterans Memorial Foundation, wrote a letter about the situation to the U.S. Army Center of Military History. In it, he said, “Bill Clayton [one of the first Rainbow Division soldiers to enter the Dachau prisoner compound] sets the tone that it would be well for all of us to follow. There was no glory for anyone during the liberation. A major battle did not take place…. For those present, probably no other single event of the war made such a profound impression as seeing or hearing the firsthand accounts of the condition of those 32,000 victims of Nazi brutality imprisoned there.”

  One memory that weighed heavily on Eberhart’s mind as he wrote that letter was what the GIs saw even before they entered through any of several gates into Dachau. It was a sight that previously couldn’t have been imagined, even by hardened infantrymen who had been through multiple hells in their fight to liberate Europe. They called it the death train, thirty-nine railcars of dead bodies parked on a siding mostly outside the boundaries of the camp.

  Had Russel Weiskircher known that his combat tour was going to end with the sight of the death train and Dachau burned into his brain, he might not have tried so hard to get into the Army. In 1942, he volunteered for the draft but flunked the physical four times because his urine test results were off due to a hereditary condition. Finally, he says, he cheated. “I slipped a guy a fin—that was big money—and he filled the bottle, and I got to wear a uniform.”

  His five bucks would eventually buy the Pittsburgh native three Purple Hearts and a Silver Star, as well as a ticket to Dachau and the lifelong nightmares that went with it. Of course, after the war he might not have become an ordained minister, a PhD, a retired brigadier general, and the vice chair of the Georgia Commission on the Holocaust, a state agency that runs a public institution wholly devoted to training teachers to teach the Holocaust.

  Weiskircher had carried a flamethrower and been a sniper and an assistant squad leader with the 157th Infantry Regiment. Wounded for the third time, he came back from the hospital just before spring and was assigned to 3rd Battalion headquarters as the acting operations sergeant, working for Lieutenant Colonel Felix Sparks, at age twenty-seven one of the youngest battalion commanders in the entire Army. On the morning of April 29 the job was pursuit: catch the fleeing Germans in Bavaria. They had a feeling that by the time they got to Munich, the war would be over. They were chasing along in trucks when they got an ops order from the regiment that said, in effect, “Somewhere up there is a concentration camp. The first unit that gets there should seal it.”

  “The reaction was nil,” he says. “We didn’t know about a concentration camp because Eisenhower had deliberately downplayed a lot of it up until that time because he had a control problem with men going nuts and reacting like assassins, to put it bluntly. And nobody believed anybody could be that inhumane.”

  Weiskircher was in a jeep from the HQ motor pool with two or three other soldiers; they stayed close to Sparks, who was in the command jeep with his driver, radio operator, and runner. “We got to the town of Dachau,” recalls Weiskircher. “It was a little old Bohemian artist’s colony; at one time it was the Greenwich Village of Europe. Nobody knew anything about a war. It was all Hitler’s fault. You know the story. Until we met an old guy who pointed to his nose and told us to follow it. So we went about two kilometers following our nose, and the smell is indescribable.” The source of the odor was a field full of bodies alongside boxcars and open-top gondola cars loaded with corpses. They had started out alive but had been locked in the railcars without food, sanitation, or water. “And the irony of it,” notes Weiskircher, “is they were being taken to Dachau to be done away with while Hitler was trying to hide the evidence.”

  The train was parked on tracks that led into the camp. The SS had marched the survivors into the camp across a small bridge over a canal. Some of the survivors, dying of thirst, dived into the canal and drowned.

  Sparks’s battalion broke up into three sections, each approaching the camp at a different entry point. Weiskircher, who has done significant postwar research on the subject, thinks of capturing Dachau as like trying to occupy a golf course. Others have described it as taking a sprawling college campus. No matter the metaphor, the upshot is that each man’s Dachau experience was different, depending on his time and place of entry. So what was Russ Weiskircher’s experience as he approached the train of thirty-nine cars somewhere in the middle?

  “Well, first of all, the smell would gag you. Then you realize these are bodies, and after you get through vomiting, you start looking in the boxcars and ripping them open to see what you’ve got. You think, ‘Oh, my God.’ We don’t know what a concentration camp is, and one of those people had an old Army OD [fatigue] shirt on. Now, this was a DP who picked it up somewhere, but immediately [one of the soldiers] said, ‘My God, these are GIs.’ You know what the reaction was? Chaos. I mean, absolutely almost uncontrollable chaos.”

  Some of the soldiers had leaped to the conclusion that the bodies were those of American POWs, a not unreasonable conclusion considering that none of them had ever seen a concentration camp and most didn’t know about them. They were well aware, however, of the German stalags, the notorious POW camps. Weiskircher explains the confusion this way: “We did not know what to expect about a concentration camp. Now, clearly, Sparks was no fool and we weren’t fools either, but you just don’t read the paper every day. You don’t get The New York Times in a foxhole, and the Stars and Stripes, when we did get it, could be a week, maybe a month old. We’d get our news mostly from Axis Sally, and we also got news from the tankers from their radios—they’d pick up some broadcasts, both British and American.”

  With his soldiers going crazy, at about noontime Lieutenant Colonel Sparks ordered the commander of I Company to lead his men into the camp. Weiskircher went with the battalion commander to a gate, where some of the troops scaled the wall, then removed the four-by-fours on the inside and opened the gate. At that point, there was no shooting going on.

  Among the soldiers moving with Sparks was PFC Karl Mann, his interpreter. Mann had been born in Königsberg, the capital of East Prussia. He moved to Cologne when he was two and at age eleven moved with his family to Chevy Chase, Maryland, where his father worked at nearby American University. He finished two years of college before being drafted at age eighteen and became a citizen during basic training in Alabama. After the war, he would get his doctorate in industrial labor relations at Cornell, eventually teaching at Rider University near his home in Yardley, Pennsylvania, until he retired in 1994.

  In early 1943, he was sent to Europe as a replacement and wound up in Sparks’s 3rd Battalion. Mann recalls Sparks as being an exceptional person, highly intelli
gent and an outstanding soldier who was very highly regarded by all his men.

  Mann remembers that Sparks had been given a heads-up about a day earlier that they were going to be sent from the town of Dachau to the concentration camp, but that information wasn’t widely shared. On the morning of the twenty-ninth, Sparks’s command group was walking with I Company. “I noticed some commotion ahead of us, and it turned out that here was this German in a black SS uniform. I think he had a red cross armband. And he was getting pushed along by the GIs, and all of a sudden, he seemed to be running off to the side, and I heard a bunch of shots. They shot him, and that took care of him. A little later, in the sequence of things, we saw this train that carried all those dead bodies.”

  The story of what’s become known as the Buchenwald-Dachau Death Train is important not only because of the impact it had on the hundreds of American soldiers who were confronted by it but because it is an example of what the Nazis did to their prisoners even when they knew the war was lost.

  That particular train is the one that left Buchenwald—more precisely, Weimar—on April 7, just days before that camp was liberated. It carried 4,500 inmates and was supposed to go to the concentration camp at Flossenbürg, a distance of about 125 miles. Instead, it ended its journey at Dachau, roughly 250 miles due south. The actual trip covered 471 miles over twenty-two days as the train meandered north to Leipzig, then east through Dresden and south into Czechoslovakia, passing through Pilsen, then into Austria, and back west through Munich, all to avoid bomb-damaged tracks and advancing Allied forces.

  The details of that particular Nazi atrocity are known because of a vast amount of research done by a former political prisoner at Buchenwald, Pierre C. T. Verheye. Now an American citizen living in Tucson, Verheye is no longer willing to talk about the concentration camp years, but in a phone call he did say that it took him twenty-five or thirty years of painstaking research, mostly by mail in pre-Internet years, to come up with the full story of the death of 2,310 prisoners.

  In 1999, he provided his complete manuscript to 157th Infantry/Dachau veteran Dan Dougherty, who published an edited version in his newsletter Second Platoon. What follows is a summary of Verheye’s work.

  At 2 P.M. on April 7, 1945, the 4,500 Buchenwald inmates who had been rounded up for the special transport to Flossenbürg left the camp escorted by 130 SS enlisted men. An additional 90 SS accompanied them to the train station in Weimar, a march of just under six miles, during which 60 weak, sick, or handicapped inmates were shot to death. Each inmate had been issued fifteen small boiled potatoes, 5⅔ ounces of bread, and less than an ounce of sausage.

  When the train left Weimar, it consisted of fifty-nine open and closed freight cars, each jam-packed with as many as 80 prisoners. In the early hours of April 19, after twelve days of meandering, the train arrived at Nammering, about 110 miles east-northeast of Dachau, with only fifty-four cars. Verheye writes, “It appears that, as the number of survivors decreased, some of the freight cars were abandoned.” At Nammering, Verheye determined, a mass killing of about 900 inmates took place. More would die during the remaining days of the horrible odyssey. “Most of the victims died from exhaustion, exposure, disease, dehydration and hunger, the latter two causes being the major ones.”

  Verheye’s interviews with survivors determined that “some inmates [were] drinking their own urine, others lapping water from rain puddles on the floor of the railroad cars—floors which were the resting place of dead bodies, bodily wastes, and dirty clothes crawling with lice—and still others who, upon arrival at KL Dachau and due to their eagerness to quench their thirst, fell into and drowned in the canal that ran along the fence of the ‘Schutzhaftlager’ (Protective Custody Camp).”

  Verheye’s report concluded with two questions:

  Why did these atrocities happen and how could these barbaric crimes against humanity have been approved—sometimes tacitly but often enthusiastically—by the people of Germany, a nation which had achieved such great advances in cultural, artistic and scientific fields?

  Why were these infernal “Death Trains” sent on their way at a time when the Third Reich was already on its knees and the end of the war only a few weeks or even a few days away and why did the Germans carry on with their extermination programs and mass executions until the very last minute?

  “These questions have never been answered,” he states.

  While the men of the 157th were still going through the train cars, four German soldiers wearing medic insignia, which, under the circumstances, did not necessarily mean they were medics but could have been SS posing as such, attempted to surrender to Lieutenant William P. Walsh, who was commanding I Company. According to a report of the investigation conducted by the Seventh Army inspector general, Walsh ordered the four into a boxcar, “where he personally shot them.” Private Albert C. Pruitt “then climbed into the boxcar where these Germans were on the floor moaning and apparently still alive, and finished them off with his rifle.” Witnesses say that before shooting the men, Walsh had screamed at them about being medical personnel and allowing the horrible things he’d just witnessed along the train tracks. The IG recommended that the two men be tried for murder, but his report was “lost” and never acted upon.

  Amid the horror along the length of the death train, there was one, just one, positive moment. It involved Tech Sergeant Tony Cardinale, Jr., from Pittsburg, California, who was a month shy of his twenty-fifth birthday when his outfit, the 222nd Regiment of the 42nd, got to Dachau. The rail-thin soldier, who would entertain his buddies with his Italian tenor voice, was the radio operator for the unit’s commanding officer, Colonel Henry J. Luongo. He was riding in the backseat of his jeep, communicating to HQ on the radiophone or in Morse code, as they drove past the death train. The colonel ordered his driver to stop so they could get out and take a closer look.

  Cardinale, who now lives with his son in Royal Palm Beach, Florida, remembers walking alongside the train. “We’d peer into each car, just disgusted with all the dead bodies. And as I’m walking along, I see something move, see a hand waving like this, back and forth, like that. The boxcar was open, and he was towards the end.”

  The nearest officer happened to be a battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Donald Downard. Cardinale called out, “Hey, Colonel, we got a live one here.” Downard and another officer ran back to the car, more of a gondola with no roof and sides that swung open, jumped into the pile of bodies, lifted the survivor out, and handed him to Cardinale. The man, a Polish prisoner, said only one word to Tony. “Frei?” The American soldier responded, “Ja, du bist frei” (You are free). A French photographer caught the moment on film, just before the survivor was placed on a stretcher and driven away as rifle shots could be heard coming from inside the walls.

  42nd Infantry Division soldiers rescue one of the few survivors they discovered in the Dachau Death Train on April 29, 1945. Carrying the emaciated Polish man is Sergeant Tony Cardinale, who spotted movement amid corpses in one of the railcars.

  Cardinale, now approaching ninety, says, “That particular scene is embedded in my mind all these sixty years. The sun never sets on any day that I don’t think about when I found that man. But at that particular time, what was going through my mind, you know, that we had to stop this. Somebody had to be there to stop all this crap that these Nazis were doing.”

  It’s possible the rifle fire Cardinale heard came from members of the 157th Infantry, 45th Division, who had walked past the death train on the way into the camp just before noon. The late Ralph Fink of Hershey, Pennsylvania, who was active in the 157th Infantry Association, sent a letter to the membership in 1994, describing that afternoon. As they walked past the train, he recalls, the reaction of the men varied. “A few cried, some cursed in anger, but most seemed almost in a trance-like state.”

  They moved through the Jourhaus gate into “a bedlam type situation. The prisoners were milling about, shouting and obviously expecting to be given freedom imme
diately…. I would say hundreds and possibly a thousand or more. I do remember two ranks of bodies, mostly unclothed, piled near the entranceway, as if placed there earlier to be hauled away.”

  Once inside the prisoner compound, they learned that their assignment was to work their way from front to back, down the road that would take them past sixteen or seventeen barracks on either side. Fink wrote:

  I think we went down the center roadway, clinging to the left side and using the barracks for protection from any possible sniper fire or any other resistance we might encounter. We were trailing the riflemen who were cautiously leap-frogging ahead, two or three at a time, always using the next barracks for immediate cover.

  As this was going on slowly, there were no prisoners to be seen outside but we did notice emaciated people peering out at us from doorways, with those haunting, deep-set eyes. We were later to learn that these captives were so weak and non-functional that they could not work their way up to the Jourhaus entrance area prior to our arrival.

  About half way to the rear, this one brave man came forth with the intention of coming down the street toward us, but he would fall down, crawl, regain his feet, fall down again, and so on. When he finally reached us he was hysterical—laughing, crying, hugging, kissing. This prompted others to come out, many just able to crawl along the ground, others clinging to each other for a bit of support.

  This was easily the most poignant experience of my life and to this day the scene plays out in my mind as in slow motion, probably because of the extreme and total weakness of the people.