The Liberator

by Alex Kershaw

  He conferred with Walsh.

  “Don’t let anyone out,” stressed Sparks. “We got all kinds of food and medicine and what-have-you coming in here behind us.”

  “Okay,” said Walsh.

  “Go down these railroad tracks,” added Sparks.

  He pointed to a nearby rail track that led into the Dachau complex from the southwest.

  “It’s a concentration camp.”

  Walsh had no idea what Sparks meant by “concentration camp.” He had once seen a POW camp in upstate New York that had housed fit, well-fed, and happy German prisoners. Perhaps Dachau would be the same kind of place.

  Walsh and his men set out along the tracks, Sparks again following not far behind.

  It was the smell they noticed first. There was a nauseatingly sweet odor in the air. Someone said it reminded him of the Chicago stockyards.

  There was a stationary train in the distance.

  “What’s a freight train doing here?” a soldier asked.

  The first men to get to the train were I Company’s lead scouts, among them John Degro from Newbury, Massachusetts. Degro was in fact thought to be the first American to reach the Dachau complex that day. He had been in combat since the previous fall, when he had joined the regiment as a replacement in France.

  Degro looked inside the first boxcar. There were bodies on top of bodies, waist-deep, stacked like cordwood. The corpses were skin and bones. Human excrement was all around.

  Nearby, Private John Lee looked into another boxcar and saw corpses riddled with bullets from strafing, no doubt from Allied planes. The open boxcars were not marked with the POW sign to indicate they carried prisoners.

  I Company’s scouts stood and stared in utter disbelief. Several of the dead had open eyes. Their last moments of agony were etched on their faces.

  It was as if others were staring at the Thunderbirds, remembered one scout, and with accusing looks asking: “What took you so long?”

  Many of the victims were naked. Some had been whipped. In one car, a dead man lay on bodies, his face frozen in agony, having cut off his gangrenous leg with his own hands. The stump was covered in dirty paper.

  There were thirty-nine boxcars in all, containing some two thousand corpses. The train had left Buchenwald with around forty-eight hundred prisoners some three weeks earlier. It had first stopped so that hundreds could be shot. The SS that cruelest of springs had been overwhelmed, confused, and exasperated by the sheer numbers of their victims and, under orders not to let any prisoners fall into the hands of the Allies, had killed with clinical efficiency. On April 21, when the train halted for the second time, thirty-one hundred severely malnourished and dehydrated people on board were still alive. Six days later, when the train pulled into Dachau at night, there were just eight hundred. The dead were left to rot on the train.

  I Company commander Bill Walsh arrived at the boxcars. At first, he thought the skeletal people were sleeping.

  What the hell is this?

  Sparks was next on the scene, having left his jeep in a nearby side street, along with his shotgun and radio. His only weapon now was his Colt .45, holstered at his hip. At first, as were many of his men, he was paralyzed by what he saw. The sights and smells robbed the mind of reason.

  Then Sparks saw a girl. He would never forget her face. She lay on top of a pile of bodies, her eyes wide open, imploring. It was as if she were looking into the skies, searching for an answer: “Why?”

  Sparks spotted two dead inmates on the ground nearby. They had been killed in the most bestial way. All he could do was stand and stare. Then he vomited. One of the victims had had enough strength to crawl out of one of the boxcars. But then a German had crushed his skull with a rifle butt. His brains were splattered over the ground.

  Sparks’s men also saw the corpse with the crushed skull. Some began to cry. Others cussed. Most were dumbstruck. They couldn’t believe what they were seeing. It was unreal. Maggots. The smell. Naked people stacked in heaps.

  What place was this? What had happened at Dachau? How could human beings commit such evil?

  Disbelief and shock turned to rage.

  “Take no prisoners,” someone said.

  “Let’s kill every one of these bastards.”

  “Don’t take any SS alive!”

  Sparks ordered his men to check to see if any people were alive. None were. Then he told them to keep going toward the camp, a hundred yards in the distance.

  Bill Walsh still looked stunned.

  “Okay, move!” Sparks ordered Walsh.

  Walsh and I Company began to move past more railroad cars, down the tracks that led into the Dachau complex.

  Sparks followed behind, passing more open boxcars filled with bodies, boxcars like the ones he had ridden in across America ten years before. Ahead of him, some of his men were boiling with rage, eager to avenge the SS crimes. I Company scout Private John Lee had never seen his fellow Thunderbirds so unhinged.

  Sparks heard men screaming and cursing.

  “Let’s get these Nazi dogs.”

  It was all too much. His men were losing their minds. Lieutenant Walsh set the tone, ranting and raving about SS sons of bitches. He and others had been pushed past the breaking point. The army had trained them to fight. It had not prepared them for this kind of psychological shock. Nothing could. They had come across a tragedy beyond comprehension. “Every man in the outfit who saw those boxcars,” recalled one of Sparks’s men, “felt [like] meting out death as punishment to the Germans who were responsible.”

  Sparks snapped commands and tried to regain control of his men. It took several minutes.

  “Okay,” he finally said when I Company had calmed down enough for him to make himself clearly understood. “We’re going in the camp.”

  Sparks led the way over a perimeter wall with one group of men while Lieutenant Walsh advanced with another group from I Company. On the other side of the wall, Sparks found himself in the neat garden of a pleasant home, one of several used by families of the SS officers within the Dachau complex.

  Roses were blooming. It was all so utterly surreal. Sparks was in a daze, barely thinking straight. He struggled for a few moments to clear his head and get a grip on his emotions. Then he entered the back door of the brick house and walked into a kitchen. He told his men to be careful—there might be booby traps. He and others quickly looked around the house. There were three or four bedrooms. He walked into a child’s room. Wooden toys were scattered on the floor. The child and its family had clearly left in a hurry.

  KZ Dachau had been guarded by several hundred SS but most had fled in the last few days. Commandant Eduard Weiter had also tried to disappear before the Americans arrived, knowing he would be tried, convicted, and hanged for crimes against humanity. Before he could be brought to justice, he would shoot himself to death on May 6 at Schloss Itter, one of the more than two hundred sub-camps in the Dachau gulag in Bavaria.

  MEANWHILE, WALSH AND his party came across four SS men who had their hands on their heads. Walsh took them into one of the boxcars and called for a machine gun. Then he changed his mind and fired his pistol at them. But he did not kill them all. Other I Company men could hear the survivors’ cries of pain. A private called Pruitt entered the boxcar and lifted his M1 rifle and fired, killing the wounded men with eight or nine clinical shots. “They were suffering and taking on and I figured there was no use letting them suffer, so I finished them off,” Pruitt later testified. “I never like to see anybody suffer.”

  Walsh’s men carried on, moving beyond the rail tracks into the Dachau complex itself.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  THE HOUNDS OF HELL

  The effect of it just opened up a flood of raw emotions.

  —FELIX SPARKS

  The kennels at Dachau on April 29, 1945. [National Archives]

  SPARKS SAW MANICURED LAWNS and rosebushes in full bloom, clearly well tended. To his left there was the sound of firing. He and his men carried
on, keeping close to doorways in case of snipers, not bunching. He reached a central building with a large lobby. At one end were glass cases containing antique firearms. He again heard firing. He left the building but could not see where the shots were coming from. Poplar trees in spring bud and buildings obscured his view. Then he saw Lieutenant Bill Walsh emerge from between a couple of buildings. He was chasing a German.

  “You sons of bitches,” Walsh was screaming repeatedly.

  Walsh began to beat the German over the head with the barrel of his carbine.

  “Bastards. Bastards. Bastards.”

  Sparks ordered Walsh to stop, but Walsh ignored him. So Sparks pulled out his .45 and clubbed Walsh on the head with its butt, stunning him and knocking him to the ground.

  Walsh lay there, crying hysterically.

  “I’m taking over command of the company,” yelled Sparks.

  One of Walsh’s men, Sidney C. Horn, recalled that seven men were needed to take a hysterical Walsh into a room and “get him quieted down. He really lost it there.” Walsh had gone “crazy,” as Sparks would later put it, overwhelmed like many of his men by the scenes of atrocity. Walsh later confessed: “I’ll be honest with you. I broke down. I started crying. The whole thing was getting to me. This was the culmination of something that I had never been trained for.”

  A FEW HUNDRED yards away, Robert Antelme, the courageous French writer and resistance worker, still lay in his lice-infested cot, close to death. His barrack, one of thirty-four in KZ Dachau, had been designed for around two hundred and fifty people but now contained more than a thousand. He had been at the mercy of the Gestapo and then the SS since July 1944, having arrived at Dachau from Buchenwald on the same train, it is thought, that the Thunderbirds had just discovered.

  There was the sound of gunfire not far from his barrack.

  “They’re here!” someone cried.

  Antelme found the strength to sit up. He glimpsed a green helmet out of the window. An American was walking past. Antelme propped himself up on his elbows. His internal organs were visible through his parchment-thin skin. He listened to his fellow inmates as they figured out what was happening.

  The barrack soon filled with mad voices.

  A man screamed.

  Another clutched his head.

  “Don’t you understand?” he cried. “We’re free! We’re free!”

  Over and over, the man clutching his head shouted that they were free. Then he screamed and stamped his feet on the floor. Antelme saw more American helmets pass by outside. There was an old man lying beside him. Antelme was determined that he should glimpse freedom—an American helmet—before he died.

  Antelme kicked at the old man’s feet.

  “We’re free! Look, will you! Look!”

  Antelme hit the man’s foot again, this time as hard as he could. The old dying man had to see freedom. He must see the Americans’ green helmets.

  The man managed to move his head and turn toward the window. But it was too late. Sparks’s men had passed by.

  Antelme fell back on his bunk. He knew he was dying. He had no strength, nothing left in reserve now. He was too weak to sing like the others, too emaciated to even crawl toward his liberators and embrace them. But at least he had seen it. He had seen freedom. He had glimpsed the green helmets of Felix Sparks’s men.

  SCOUTS FROM I COMPANY discovered a building at the center of the Dachau complex. It was a hospital of some kind. A red cross had been painted on its roof. The scouts pushed their way into the building and discovered it was an infirmary for SS guards and soldiers, not for camp inmates. It was maddening to see well-cared-for SS men lying on clean white sheets.

  Lead scout John Degro and others ordered the Germans lying in beds to get outside, where many soon cowered, hands in the air, some still bandaged. Then Degro and others hustled the SS men toward a nearby coal yard. “We kicked all the Germans into the yard,” recalled Degro. One of the men taken from the infirmary was Hans Linberger, a Waffen-SS veteran who had been wounded in a battle near Kiev when an anti-tank gun shell had exploded and blown off his left arm. He had also suffered shrapnel wounds, his fourth serious injury in combat, before arriving at the Dachau infirmary on March 9, six weeks before.

  After hearing gunshots, Linberger would later claim, he had taken a Red Cross flag and gone to the infirmary’s entrance to tell the Americans it was undefended. A GI had stuck a gun to his chest, Linberger would also tell the German Red Cross, and then hit him in the face. Then the Americans had emptied the hospital and separated the SS from other Germans.

  Linberger now stood with other SS against a stucco wall in the coal yard, adjacent to the Dachau complex’s heating plant. The men rounded up with Linberger were indeed SS, but few, if any, had served in a concentration camp—they did not belong to the SS-Totenkopfverbande (SS-TV) that administered camps in the Third Reich. In fact, very few of KZ Dachau’s actual guards were now in the Dachau complex—the vast majority had fled the day before, leaving other SS men quartered nearby to surrender the camp.

  As far as I Company’s men were concerned, Linberger and the young men holding their hands above their heads were SS-Schutzstaffel, the “Protection Squadron,” their insignia of two lightning bolts indicating they were Hitler’s most fanatical troops. That was all that mattered. They had massacred defenseless GIs at Malmédy. They had ruthlessly employed flamethrowers to scorch the men’s fellow Thunderbirds to death at Reipertswiller that January. Always, they had fought hardest to kill the Americans, to slow their advance, most recently in Aschaffenburg and Nuremberg. They had, it appeared to the Thunderbirds, also overseen the unimaginable atrocities at Dachau.

  SPARKS MOVED DEEPER into the Dachau complex. He and the platoon with him were “extremely cautious,” he recalled, as they searched every building. He heard rifle shots punctuating the strained silence with an almost reassuring familiarity. Then he discovered the source of the firing: His men were shooting guard dogs in a nearby kennel, which had at one time held as many as 122 “hounds from hell.” Other than Alsatians and Dobermans, there were Great Danes, boxers, and wolfhounds. Sparks’s men killed two dozen of the dogs that a former camp commandant, Egon Zill, had trained to attack inmates tied to metal poles. The SS had made prisoners strip at gunpoint, tied them to the poles, and then tapped the men’s testicles with sticks and urged the dogs to jump up and rip them off. When the victims had been neutered, the SS roared with laughter and rewarded their hounds with red meat.

  The dogs died quickly, howling and whimpering as the Thunderbirds gunned them down. A soldier apparently used a dagger to cut a dog’s throat after it had been shot but stubbornly did not die. Just one of the dogs would survive, to be found a week later with a bullet wound, hiding in an SS barracks.

  The dogs’ corpses now joined human ones littering the camp. Due to a shortage of coal, the SS had not been able to cremate the recent dead. So blue- and green-tinged carcasses lay piled in their scores outside barracks and, to Sparks’s utter horror, stacked to the ceilings in rooms near a crematorium. Hundreds had died in the last few days. “Since all the many bodies were in various stages of decomposition,” recalled Sparks, “the stench of death was overpowering.”

  AGAIN THERE WAS a haunting silence. There were no more gunshots. Finally, the tens of thousands of inmates realized that the Americans had liberated the camp. The SS had clearly been dealt with. At last, it was safe to venture from their barracks. A prisoner called Kupfer-Koberwitz lay wounded in the inmates’ sick quarters and noted the reactions of his fellow survivors in a secret diary: “Everyone starts to move—the sick leave their beds, the nearly well and [others] jump out of the windows, climb over the wooden walls. Everyone runs to the roll-call place. One hears yelling and cheers of hooray.…”

  The camp then erupted. Inmates began to shout and scream, producing a spine-chilling roar, a sound Sparks would never forget.

  Inmates soon surrounded some of Sparks’s men. A Pole called Walenty Lenarczyk
, inmate no. 39272 at Dachau, helped others grab Thunderbirds and lift them up. There were soon more than a hundred prisoners clustered around the Americans, trying to kiss their hands and their uniforms with the soft felt Thunderbird patches on their shoulders. “All we could think about were Americans,” recalled Walenty. “For the past six years we had waited for the Americans, and at this moment the SS were nothing. It was truly our second birthday.”

  Lenarczyk saw four German SS guards making a run for it. The Americans could not open fire because prisoners surrounded them. Other inmates swarmed around the fleeing SS men, one of whom elbowed a prisoner out of his way. The inmates then attacked en masse and the SS men were killed, in all likelihood stamped to death.

  Elsewhere in the camp, victims suddenly became victimizers and in several instances beat other SS men, their Kapos and informers, to pulps with fists, sticks, and shovels. It was as if with every stabbing action, every limb broken, every punch and kick, they were repaying each day of suffering. The Thunderbirds did little to intervene, turning their backs on two inmates beating a German guard to death with a shovel. The German, it was later learned, had castrated a prisoner. In another incident, Russian prisoners grabbed a German by his legs and tore him apart, his bones cracking loudly.

  TWENTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD MARGUERITE HIGGINS and men from the 42nd Rainbow Division arrived that afternoon from a different direction to the Thunderbirds’. At the main entrance to the Dachau complex, they encountered tall and slim SS Second Lieutenant Heinrich Wicker of the Totenkopfverbande. Twenty-three-year-old Wicker had earlier that morning met with his mother, sister, fiancée, and two-year-old son inside the Dachau complex. They would never see him again.

  Accompanied by Victor Maurer, a Red Cross representative, Wicker formally surrendered the Dachau complex to Brigadier General Henning Linden, the 42nd Infantry Division’s assistant division commander. It is assumed that Wicker was killed later that afternoon, either by inmates or by the liberators he had surrendered to.