The Liberator

by Alex Kershaw

  “Uh, oh. I think we’ve gone too far.”

  Turk pulled up. Sparks realized that he had not only caught up with his companies but had in fact overshot them. Once more, he looked at his map, which he usually spread out on the hood of the jeep in front of him. Then, from the high dome of the Opera House, a German machine gunner fired a burst at Sparks and his group. The rounds passed between Sparks and his driver and between the legs of the men in the backseat. They abandoned the jeep, which also carried the command radio and the radio code. Incredibly, no one had been hit. The burst had gone under Sparks’s arm before putting a big hole in the jeep.

  Sparks and the other men ran for cover in the nearest shell-holed buildings. Then they made their way back until they met up with Sparks’s lead rifle company.

  “Move it!” Sparks ordered his men. “Move it! Move it! We gotta get my jeep.”

  It was too late. The Germans had pulled out of the Opera House in the meantime, taking Sparks’s jeep with them.

  “Goddamn it. It had all my personal gear in there, letters from my wife. The sons of bitches got away with my jeep.”

  Sparks had put his photographs of Mary and his year-old son, Kirk, in the glove compartment, not wanting to keep them on his body in case he was wounded and the photos got damaged. Now his only mementos of them were the pictures he had placed on the butt of his lucky Colt .45, holstered at his waist.

  THE THIRD REICH, APRIL 20, 1945

  BY DUSK ON April 20, 1945—Hitler’s fifty-sixth birthday—all of Nuremberg was in American hands. “The ruined city was a present from the Thunderbirds,” recalled Sparks. The regiment had lost twenty-three men, the highest one-day total since Aschaffenburg. But there was some consolation. That night, G Company’s Cranston Rogers and fellow Thunderbirds discovered a six-story cold storage warehouse that had miraculously not been bombed. It was full of frozen food. Many men treated themselves to a celebratory feast of strawberries and ice cream.

  In Berlin, the Royal Air Force had already left its own gift for the Führer in the early hours: thousands of tons of yet more incendiary bombs. It had not been a good day in Hitler’s final lair, fifty feet beneath the ground at Number 77 Wilhelmstrasse—the Isle of the Departed—as forty-year-old Albert Speer described it. Speer himself had been shocked to see how far his idol had now fallen: “His complexion was sallow, his face swollen, his uniform, which had been scrupulously neat, was neglected and stained by the food he had eaten with a shaking hand.”

  There had been no foreign dignitaries to celebrate Hitler’s fifty-sixth birthday. No honor guard of supermen to present arms. For once, however, Hitler had ventured, albeit briefly, into the Chancellery garden, where pallid teenage boys—Hitler Youth who had fought heroically—had been presented to him. Hitler had patted a few on the cheek and then shuffled back belowground. “Probably he sensed that his only convincing role,” recalled Speer, “was as an object of pity.”

  The Slavic hordes Hitler so despised, and now feared, were almost at his doorstep. A Soviet force of 2.5 million men and women, backed by 42,000 artillery pieces and mortars, was storming toward him, smashing through Berlin’s outer suburbs, accompanied by an incredible 6,250 tanks—the greatest attacking armored force in history.

  NUREMBERG, GERMANY, APRIL 21, 1945

  THE TOP BRASS was in the mood to celebrate. To Sparks’s irritation, the 45th Division decided to hold a parade. Selected men from the 157th gathered the next day, April 21, in the ruins of the city where Hitler had bewitched his followers at massive annual rallies. For newsreel cameras, a huge concrete Nazi eagle, atop the stadium where Hitler had ranted and mesmerized, was blown up and then the Stars and Stripes was shown fluttering in the sky above the famous parade ground. Fittingly, the men given the honor of destroying the emblem belonged to a Thunderbird unit that had been booed in public before the war for wearing the 45th Division’s old patch—a swastika.

  The parade commenced that April 21 with columns of men marching across Nuremberg’s massive central square, Adolf Hitler Plaza. Sparks thought the whole spectacle a waste of time, but in any case he had sent his Third Battalion’s L Company. After the parade, as the company returned to its assembly area, one of Sparks’s men fell dead from a single sniper shot. The sniper died not long after, hunted down by enraged Thunderbirds. What Sparks regarded as unnecessary grandstanding by General Frederick and others for the world’s press had cost a good man’s life.

  BERLIN, APRIL 22, 1945

  THE END WAS close. In Berlin, the Soviets were drawing nearer to the Chancellery and history’s greatest criminal, Adolf Hitler. The yellow-brown stone of the L-shaped building contrasted with the piles of dark rubble that surrounded it. The golden eagles above its entrances, clutching swastikas in their talons, looked sad and pathetic. A pall of black smoke rose above the famous Unter der Linden, where the trees were bare—firebombing had seared spring buds to the soot-stained branches. The Brandenburg Gate stood defiant, however, its twelve massive Doric columns pockmarked by shrapnel and bullet holes. Children in cellars were dying in ever greater numbers from starvation. Between bombing raids and barrages, the old could be seen eating new grass like foraging animals. Yet it was a glorious spring. “Clouds of lilac perfume drift over from untended gardens,” one Berliner noted in her diary, “and waft through the charred ruins of apartment houses.”

  That afternoon, with the Soviet front lines just a few miles away, the Führer held a final conference with his most senior generals. It would be the last time many would see Hitler alive. The news he relayed was, for the first time, stripped of all fantasy and optimism. The Reich was almost at an end. Berlin would be encircled in a matter of hours. Defeat was inevitable. But it was not Hitler’s fault. Then began a wild stream of invective and crude abuse. His generals, his people, and his soldiers had failed him.

  The generals reassured Hitler that the war was not yet lost. He was needed more than ever. Among the most morally repugnant of them, sixty-three-year-old field marshal Wilhelm Keitel, insisted his Führer leave on a plane for the Alpine redoubt of Berchtesgaden, some 150 miles southeast of Munich.

  “I shall not leave Berlin,” said Hitler. “I shall defend the city to the end. Either I win this battle for the Reich’s capital or I shall fall as a symbol of the Reich.”

  Keitel thought Hitler had totally lost his senses. The German Army could not be commanded effectively from Berlin. Millions of men would be abandoned to chaos and anarchy if Hitler did not leave Berlin and set up his headquarters elsewhere.

  “I must insist,” Keitel told Hitler, “that you leave for Berchtesgaden this very night.”

  Hitler ignored him.

  “In seven years,” Keitel blustered, “I have never refused to carry out an order from you … You can’t leave the Wehrmacht in the lurch.”

  “I’m staying here,” said Hitler. “That is certain.”

  NUREMBERG, GERMANY, APRIL 23, 1945

  ONCE NUREMBERG HAD fallen, the route to Munich ninety miles farther south was wide open. The end of the Thunderbirds’ two-thousand-odd-mile odyssey across enemy-occupied Europe was tantalizingly close, just over the horizon. The exultant rat race, as some GIs now called the advance, began once more, the men’s actions and mood increasingly those of conquerors eager to pick up booty and get to the end with minimal loss of life.

  Beyond Munich, there loomed the Bavarian Alps and, for Sparks and his men, he discovered, a fitting final mission. Designated a task force commander, Sparks was to lead his men to Munich and then push on to Hitler’s mountain residence, the Berghof, near Berchtesgaden. Once again, when the division had to achieve crucial objectives, Sparks was the man senior commanders turned to. Clearly, General Frederick had not harbored a lasting grudge toward Sparks for his actions following Reipertswiller. As the war progressed, the animosity between them had cooled, perhaps as each had grown to respect the other.

  Allied intelligence believed that Hitler was about to flee for the Berghof, where he would make
a last stand. Sparks was given a whole battalion of tanks, fifty-four in total, two battalions of artillery, and two engineer companies. He was to seize bridges and move as fast as he could toward the Alpine redoubt, smashing through all obstacles. The race was on to get to Berchtesgaden before Hitler could turn it into the ultimate Nazi fortress.

  “Move as rapidly as possible,” Sparks was ordered. “Bypass opposition if serious.”

  He made excellent progress, as much as fifty miles on some days. Finally, he was on the last straight. “Smiles returned to the faces of soldiers who had lived through a second winter of war,” remembered one of Sparks’s men, “and animated conversation replaced the dry humor for which veteran Thunderbirds were everywhere known.” The task force encountered some small-arms fire but no real opposition, according to G Company’s Cranston Rogers. But now he and others were more cautious than ever as they flushed out mostly teenagers and old men from hastily prepared defenses. No one wanted to be the last man to get killed.

  The advance sped up as Sparks’s task force then took to one of Hitler’s famous autobahns. Me-262 jets and other planes had been hidden in woods along the straight four-lane highway leading to the Alps—there were no airstrips left to land on. Occasionally, what remained of the Luftwaffe managed to stall the task force but only for a few hours at most. At one crossroads, the Thunderbirds encountered a particularly ugly scene. A bomb had exploded close to an antiaircraft position nearby. “Men or parts of men were lying on the highway,” remembered one eyewitness, “and on terraces built up by stone walls men’s bodies, stripped naked by concussion, were hanging with their bleeding heads downward.”

  GANSHEIM, BAVARIA, APRIL 25, 1945

  SPARKS WAS WITHIN striking distance of the Danube River. But his task force was moving too far, too fast, and beginning to outrun supply lines; his tanks were low on fuel. It was getting dark when he halted his column. After refueling, Sparks ordered his men to seize a bridge near the town of Gansheim. As he neared the bridge later that evening, there was a massive explosion. The sky turned red. The Germans had blown the bridge. But by dawn he had his men moving again. Several platoons crossed over in boats. Engineers then quickly built a pontoon bridge, enabling Sparks to get the rest of the Third Battalion across.

  The following day, April 27, Sparks spotted a group of American tank destroyers some three hundred yards in the distance. Two rifle companies from his battalion were moving ahead of him, behind his tanks. Suddenly, one of the distant tank destroyers fired at one of Sparks’s tanks and it went up in flames, its crew killed instantly. He was incensed. Five good men died a horrible and senseless death. He raced over to the tank destroyer. There followed a short, one-sided conversation with a lieutenant from the 42nd Infantry Division.

  Sparks’s impression of the division did not improve later that day when he came across a battalion that had strayed into his task force’s assigned sector. The battalion was sprawled along a highway and looked totally disorganized. He managed to find its commander resting under a tree, waiting for further orders. He pulled out a map and showed the officer that he was far from his division’s assigned sector. The officer didn’t appear to care. In disgust, Sparks moved ahead, leaving the men from the 42nd Division sitting around as though they were taking a lunch break on a weekend hike back in the States.

  It was late on April 28, 1945, when he finally ordered his men to stop and dig in for the night less than forty miles from Munich. Once Munich fell, they would roll up into the Alps to take on Hitler himself. He was looking forward to what would surely be the war’s last act. While he felt no enmity toward the German people, he loathed Nazism with a passion, having seen its unprecedented destruction. If he managed to get to Hitler first, he would gladly “cut his throat slowly with a knife.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  THE DAY OF THE AMERICANS

  Medics examine bodies found in boxcars at Dachau. [National Archives]

  BAVARIA, APRIL 29, 1945

  UNDER GRAY SKIES, Sparks was moving south again. At 9:22 A.M., he received a message from division level ordering him to secure what was described as a “concentration camp.” It was located on the outskirts of a town called Dachau, some ten miles north of Munich.

  “S-3 to all battalions,” read the message. “Upon capture of Dachau, post air-tight guard and allow no one to enter or leave.”

  The order was infuriating. Sparks would not be able to get to Munich as soon as he had hoped. He had “absolutely no idea” what a concentration camp was, but in any case he would have bypassed it. Even though it was in his zone of attack, he didn’t consider it a military objective.

  The weather was unusually cold as he looked at his map and then reluctantly split his task force in two. He would lead one half into Dachau, utilizing his battalion’s reserve, while the remainder of his force pushed on toward Munich. If either group ran into serious opposition, there would be no spare rifle company for him to call in as backup. That worried him. It was not good tactics. It was asking for trouble.

  Sparks set out for the camp, figuring it probably contained Allied POWs. There was sporadic small-arms fire as he and his men neared Dachau but otherwise very little resistance.

  HE COULD SEE a pale dawn through a window as he lay on a bunk. Twenty-eight-year-old French writer and resistance worker Robert Antelme looked around him. The daylight washed across the barrack full of dying and terribly malnourished men. The lice had sucked on him all night but no longer. Did they know something was about to happen? Two days ago, on April 27, he had seen the silhouettes of SS guards in watchtowers, manning MG42 machine guns. But this morning there was no sign of the SS near his barrack. There was no roll call.

  Time has stopped dead. No orders. No forecasts. Not free.

  Everything is ripe: ripe for dying, ripe for freeing … ripe for the end.

  IT WAS ALSO early that morning when the reporter Marguerite Higgins arrived at the 42nd Division’s 222nd Regiment’s headquarters. Unlike Sparks, she knew what a concentration camp was; Buchenwald had already been liberated by the Americans on April 11 and made international headlines. Determined to get the first report on the liberation of Dachau, she had arranged to accompany the 42nd Division’s assistant commander, Brigadier General Linden, and his men as they moved into the camp that day.

  Since its opening as Nazi Germany’s first concentration camp on March 22, 1933, just fifty-one days after Hitler took power, more than two hundred thousand “undesirable elements” had passed through Dachau and at least thirty thousand had died inside, more than thirteen thousand in 1945 alone. As Higgins set out for the camp with General Linden and a group of his men, Robert Antelme and some thirty-two thousand inmates waited inside anxiously, hoping the SS would not massacre them.

  IT WAS AROUND noon when Sparks radioed I Company commander Lieutenant Bill Walsh and gave him the coordinates for a nearby road junction. Soon after, twenty-five-year-old Walsh, a tall and imposing figure with a chowder-thick accent from Newton, Massachusetts, arrived at the junction with I Company, which had earned the presidential unit citation for its actions at Anzio. Most men in the unit were now replacements, desperate for it all to end.

  Sparks consulted a map he kept in his jacket pocket. The camp was around a mile to his east, on the edge of the city of Dachau, which had a stated population of around thirty thousand. On the map, Sparks could see that a river, the Amper, ran through the town.

  “I don’t know what the hell we’re running into,” Sparks told Walsh. “I’ll give you an extra machine gun platoon. A heavy weapons company will go with you.”

  I Company set off with its attached firepower. Sparks followed behind in his jeep. On the outskirts of the town of Dachau, scouts engaged in a brief firefight with a small group of Germans defending a bridge leading into the town. They were also slowed by friendly fire from the 42nd “Rainbow” Division on their right flank.

  Sparks and I Company moved forward cautiously into the town itself, on the lookout
for booby traps and snipers. The sky was overcast. Snow threatened. There were some white sheets hanging from windows, signaling surrender. It was eerily quiet, as if the entire town were holding its breath in anticipation of their arrival. Dachau was as pretty as any other town the Thunderbirds had seen in Bavaria: cobbled streets skirted by timber-framed homes with brightly painted shutters. There were fresh beds of spring flowers.

  I Company arrived at some railroad tracks. The tracks led toward the southern perimeter of the sprawling Dachau complex, which included the concentration camp as well as several barracks and factories. Sparks still followed I Company in his jeep. His interpreter, Karl Mann, seated in the back of the jeep, noticed that some I Company men had captured a tall and burly German who was wearing an SS uniform with a Red Cross armband. He was being pushed around by some GIs and, finally, made a break for it. Several shots were fired and he fell to the ground, dead.

  Sparks then caught sight of the Dachau complex for the first time. It resembled some kind of garrison surrounded by a ten-foot-high brick wall. He did not know that the actual concentration camp, Konzentrationslager [KZ] Dachau, was relatively small, around five acres, compared to the much larger SS barracks and complex, which was around twenty.

  Sparks could see a street, called “Avenue of the SS,” that led to the Dachau complex’s main entrance, marked by a large gate that was closed. A giant concrete eagle with Nazi insignia at its base towered above the gate. If the SS were going to put up a fight, they would do so as Sparks and his men approached this main entrance, which they were certain to have guarded. Sparks decided to split his men into two groups and enter the complex from two different directions.