The Liberator

by Alex Kershaw

  As Linden and Sparks shouted at each other, Higgins seized her chance. She ran toward the gate and then started to pull it open.

  There was pandemonium. Prisoners surged forward.

  “Shoot over their heads!” Sparks ordered his men. “Shoot over their heads!”

  They did so.

  “Charge the gate and close it!” added Sparks.

  Again his men did as ordered.

  Higgins ran back to her jeep in fear.

  Sparks turned to Linden.

  “General, collect your party and get out of here.”

  “I’m relieving you,” replied Linden.

  “No, you’re not,” said Sparks. “You don’t have the authority to relieve me. I’m in my territory.”

  At a loss for words, Linden apparently then shook his fist at Sparks.

  Sparks turned to one of his privates. “Escort the general and his party out of here.”

  The private hesitated before he stepped forward and then raised his rifle.

  Linden was understandably outraged. As Sparks recalled: “[He] had this little riding crop, carried I guess as his badge of authority. He whacked the kid over his helmet with it. Didn’t hurt the kid, rang his bell a little bit.” The blow was more than enough, however, to send Sparks over the edge: “That did it, I just exploded.”

  Sparks drew his .45 and pointed it at Linden.

  “You son of a bitch! You touch another one of my men, I’ll kill you right here.”

  Sparks aimed at Linden’s head.

  “If you don’t get the fuck out of here,” said Sparks, “I’m going to blow your brains out.”

  Linden sat down in his jeep.

  “All right,” he seethed. “I’ll leave, but I’ll see you before a general court-martial.”

  “Go ahead.”

  Linden left with Higgins.

  An officer in Linden’s party, Lieutenant Colonel Walter Fellenz, then approached Sparks and began to argue with him.

  “I’ll see you after the war,” threatened Fellenz.

  “You son of a bitch,” Sparks shot back. “What’s the matter with right now?”

  Fellenz backed off, returned to his jeep, and left, following behind Linden and Higgins.

  Once Sparks had regained his composure, he issued further orders and made certain the concentration camp was secure as he had been ordered. Then he walked with Mann and Johnson to where his driver, Turk, was waiting nearby in their jeep.

  Sparks got on the radio.

  “We need food and medicine up here quick,” Sparks said. “Quick. Quick.”

  At 4:35 P.M., Sparks also contacted his regiment and informed Colonel O’Brien that he had set up a command post in an administrative building inside the camp. Not long after, one of Sparks’s men entered the command post and said an officer was requesting Sparks’s presence. Sparks left his command post and in a nearby room met with a lieutenant colonel who told Sparks he was from the inspector general’s office with the Seventh Army. He wanted to question Sparks about his altercation with Linden.

  There was a large crash. A soldier from an artillery unit attached to Sparks’s regiment had smashed a glass case holding antique weapons nearby.

  Sparks angrily turned on the man.

  “Get your ass out of here!” shouted Sparks.

  “Can’t you control your own men?” said the officer.

  Sparks said the man wasn’t under his direct command.

  “Colonel, I want you to explain to me what happened with General Linden.”

  “I don’t have time to sit around here,” Sparks shot back, “and gossip with you.”

  Sparks returned to his command post. Later that afternoon, he met with General Frederick and Colonel O’Brien. Frederick was dressed in a winter combat jacket with a fur-lined collar. The sky was still gray. There was a chill in the air as Sparks gave his commanding officers a tour of Dachau. A Polish inmate explained some of the more notable sights.

  The first stop was the dog pen. In an adjacent kitchen, guards had prepared meals for the camp’s canines. The meals were of far greater nutritional value than the thin cabbage soup and lumps of sawdust bread given to the inmates.

  The Thunderbird commanders moved on to the next sight—the crematorium.

  “Here, about one hundred to one hundred and fifty men were put to death each day,” the Pole explained. “Workers with grappling hooks dragged them into a waiting room next to the furnaces. There they waited to be cremated.”

  The Pole then moved on to some gravel pits. Countless enemies of the Reich had been shot here, he explained. Not far away was an embankment, and along its base was a ditch covered by a wooden grating.

  “Men were forced to kneel like this,” said the Pole as he knelt down to demonstrate, “and then be shot. Their blood drained into the ditch.”

  Some of the victims that spring had been German officers suspected of plotting against Hitler. They had been dispatched with a single shot in the back of the head.

  As they toured the camp, Sparks explained to Frederick what had happened earlier that day at the coal yard. He also told him about the confrontation with General Linden.

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Frederick. “I’ll take care of that.”

  Sparks took Frederick at his word.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  THE LONG DAY CLOSES

  We live in a free world today because in 1945 the forces of imperfect goodness defeated the forces of near-perfect evil.

  —MICHAEL DIPAULO, FRENCH CONSULATE STAFF MEMBER, ADDRESSING U.S. VETERANS IN 2001

  Dachau inmates celebrate their liberation. [National Archives]

  DARKNESS FELL ON DACHAU. At 7.03 P.M., Sparks learned that other companies from the regiment were moving toward the camp. He and his men would soon be relieved, and he would then be able to re-form his task force and push on to Munich.

  Later that same evening, General Frederick’s chief of staff, Kenneth Wickham, heard mention of Dachau at a briefing.

  “What is Dachau?” Wickham asked Frederick.

  Frederick didn’t reply.

  “Well, what did you see?” Wickham persisted.

  Frederick did not answer because to describe what had happened there might lead to him breaking down. He did not want that, not after seeing so much. There was nothing that could excuse what the Germans had done there. That was all that could be said.

  Back at Dachau, as the long day finally drew to a close, nineteen-year-old Dan Dougherty of C Company was one of many Thunderbirds who struggled to make sense of the horrors that day: “We knew we had seen something mind-boggling.” That afternoon, Dougherty had entered the coal yard and discovered the bodies of the SS men who had been killed. One of the sergeants in his platoon had crawled over a “mound of corpses two or three feet high and fifteen feet across” and whipped out a hunting knife and cut off a finger. “He wanted an SS ring for a souvenir.”

  It would be a cold and sleepless night for other Thunderbirds, “the most sickening and devastating we had ever experienced,” remembered Private John Lee. “The stench, the smell of death … permeated the air to the point that no one could eat his rations.”

  Lee’s squad was assigned that night to guarding the camp’s bakery to prevent any hunger-crazed inmates from raiding it. He was sick all night. “I don’t think there was a guy who slept that night,” he recalled, “and I don’t think there was a guy who didn’t cry openly that night.”

  Now, at least, Lee and his fellow Thunderbirds knew what they had been fighting for. As the 45th Infantry Division News would soon declare in a headline above gruesome pictures: THIS IS WHY WE FOUGHT. Unlike thousands of others who had died on the long journey to Germany, Sparks and his men had seen why the sacrifice had been necessary. “I’ve been in the army for 39 months,” a Thunderbird would tell a reporter. “I’ve been overseas in combat for 23. I’d gladly go through it all again if I knew that things like this would be stopped.”

  DACHAU, APRIL 30,
1945

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING, trucks loaded with food and medical supplies entered the camp, sent from Seventh Army supply depots. The piles of dead bodies had not been removed and were green- and yellow-skinned, rotting in the crisp spring air. Tears flowed from many who saw the camp that day. “We cried not merely tears of sorrow,” recalled rabbi David Eichhorn, who also arrived that morning. “We cried tears of hate. Combat-hardened soldiers, Gentile and Jew, black and white, cried tears of hate.”

  By midmorning, Sparks had left Dachau and was again leading his task force toward Munich. On a narrow trail through a dense forest, he came across a group of German forward observers. They pointed their rifles at him and the other men in Sparks’s jeep.

  “Don’t move,” Sparks told his men.

  Sparks had to think fast.

  “Hands haut!” ordered Sparks.

  A German lieutenant stared at Sparks.

  Anxious moments passed.

  The Germans put their bolt-action guns down. “They knew it was over,” recalled Sparks. “Turned out they were lost.”

  Sparks and his men pressed on, past orchards where the first buds appeared on fruit trees, the Tyrol Mountains looming to the south, the first flowers showing in pastures, the peaks a jagged white, far higher than Webster Mountain and others to the north of Miami, Arizona, when Sparks was a boy. Then it was on into the suburbs of Munich.

  Jack Hallowell, traveling with the regimental headquarters staff, recalled how many Thunderbirds now felt as they entered the birthplace of Nazism: “They wanted to kill. Probably for the first time they realized the full evil of the thing they were fighting.… The urge for revenge was in each man’s trigger finger.” It was just as well that Munich was not fiercely defended, as Aschaffenburg and Nuremberg had been, “for the resulting slaughter would have been historic if the feelings of the riflemen were any guide.”

  BERLIN, 3:30 P.M., APRIL 30, 1945

  ADOLF HITLER TOOK one of his two Walther PPK pistols, sat down at a table, placed the barrel to his right temple, and squeezed the trigger. On the wall behind him was an oil painting of Frederick the Great, whose great military feats Hitler had invoked to inspire his generals in the last months of the war. The air was heavy with the scent of bitter almond—cyanide that Hitler’s wife of just a day, Eva Braun, had just swallowed. She lay dead on a couch a few feet from her husband, her eyes open, wearing a blue dress with white collar and cuff.

  Throughout the bunker, the news soon spread:

  “Der Chef ist tot!” (“The chief is dead!”)

  MUNICH, APRIL 30, 1945

  IN CENTRAL MUNICH that evening, the Thunderbirds finally reached the end of their long, bloody march across Nazi-occupied Europe. Sparks commandeered an apartment building for his last command post of the war. It began to snow as the guns fell silent that evening. Soon, a three-inch blanket covered the fields of rubble in the city where Nazism had been conceived. With an eye to history, Captain Anse Speairs, the regiment’s roving adjutant, managed to find an apt place for a headquarters that night of April 30: the famous Munich beer hall, the Hofbräuhaus, scene of Hitler’s failed attempt at revolution, the “Beer Hall Putsch,” that had occurred in November 1923.

  A white sign was jauntily daubed above the Hofbräuhaus in large letters so all could see: CP—157TH INFANTRY.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  THE LAST DAYS

  German civilians in Munich loot warehouses on the second day of the Allied occupation, May 1, 1945. [National Archives]

  DACHAU, MAY 1, 1945

  IT WAS UNUSUALLY COLD that spring of 1945 in southern Germany. Marcus J. Smith, an American doctor working at Dachau, wrote in his diary on May 1: “Snow falling. Trying to keep warm, ambulatory inmates huddle over small fires on which they heat pots and bowls filled with scraps of food.”

  Later that day, the future French president, twenty-nine-year-old François Mitterrand, who had worked with Robert Antelme in the French resistance, arrived in Dachau with a group of French observers and politicians. Mitterrand later claimed that he was crossing between barracks when he heard someone call out his name. It was Antelme.

  Mitterrand rushed to his friend’s side and helped him to stand up. With the voice of a dying man, Antelme begged Mitterrand to get him out of the camp, but the American officers accompanying Mitterrand’s group forbade it. They were still under strict orders, as Sparks had been, not to let any of the inmates out, for fear of spreading typhus and other rampant diseases.

  Mitterrand had no option but to return to Paris, leaving Antelme to surely die. It was an agonizing farewell, one never to be forgotten by any of those present. Antelme somehow summoned the strength to write a moving note to his wife back in Paris, the writer Marguerite Duras: “My darling, a stolen letter. Stolen from time, from the misery of the world, from suffering. A love letter.… Goodbye, Marguerite, you can’t imagine how painful your name is to me.”

  As soon as he could, Mitterrand found a working telephone and managed to put a call through to Duras in Paris.

  “Listen carefully,” said Mitterrand. “Robert’s alive.”

  Duras was stunned.

  “Now keep calm,” said Mitterrand. “He’s in Dachau.”

  Duras had received news a fortnight before that Antelme had been seen alive, but then there had been no further word.

  “Listen very, very carefully,” stressed Mitterrand. “Robert is very weak, so weak you can’t imagine.”

  Mitterrand had held a man weighing less than eighty pounds in his arms.

  “It’s a question of hours,” Mitterrand added. “He may live for another three days but no more.”

  Mitterrand told Duras that two of his most trusted contacts were about to set out from Paris and try to spring Antelme from the camp. There was no knowing if her husband would be alive by the time they got there.

  MUNICH, MAY 1, 1945

  THE AMERICAN COMMAND car maneuvered past MPs and roadblocks, through shell-holed streets and past bullet-riddled buildings plastered with the insignia of the Thunderbirds and other liberating American units. General Frederick was headed from his division command post to the Haufbräuhaus in the center of the city. On one wall, someone had scrawled: “I AM ASHAMED TO BE A GERMAN.”

  Long lines of German POWs now streamed out of Germany’s third largest city toward massive holding areas, the “cages.”

  “Where are we supposed to put them all?” asked Frederick.

  Other Thunderbirds, by contrast, smiled as they watched Hitler’s fabled “supermen” trudge by, en route to join some 125,000 POWs held in 45th Division enclosures at the war’s end. Frederick’s men were in good spirits, enjoying the spring sunshine as they flirted with local fräuleins looking for food, chocolate, and cigarettes. “Someone remarked that the German women seemed to have even better looking legs than the French women,” recalled Jack Hallowell. “Then someone said there wasn’t supposed to be any fraternizing. Then everyone laughed.”

  General Frederick arrived at the Hofbräuhaus, where he met with his maverick field commander, Colonel Felix Sparks. It was a grand setting. High vaulted windows flooded the 157th’s new headquarters with bright spring light. Much of the building had been destroyed in intensive bombing on April 25, 1944, but several hundred beer steins had been found intact in the cellars. Before long, they would be put to good use.

  “Things are heating up for you,” said Frederick. “General Linden is causing a big stink. I’m going to send you on back home. Our division has been selected to make the invasion of Japan. We’re going to re-equip and retrain and then we’ll invade. You go on ahead, take a leave. You can rejoin us in the States.”

  The stink had in fact nothing to do with Linden, who did not press court-martial charges. It was about the shootings in the coal yard. Two Signal Corps men, Arland Musser, a stills photographer, and Henry Gerzen, a film cameraman, had recorded the massacre. Their images had been developed and reviewed on April 30, the day after the liberation of the
camp, and had been so shocking that they had been quickly sent up the chain of command to Seventh Army’s chief of staff, Major General Arthur A. White. He was now considering an investigation into the shootings.

  But Sparks knew none of this. As he saw the situation, Frederick was trying to protect him from court-martial because he had snapped and pointed his gun at Linden, not because some of his men had killed unarmed SS prisoners.

  “I’m going to send a command car down in the morning to pick you up and take you to Le Havre, France,” added Frederick. “There will be orders for you there to go home.”

  The next day, May 2, Sparks gathered his Third Battalion’s company commanders at the Hofbräuhaus and informed them he was being sent back to the United States. It must have been a wrenching experience for him. He had fought all the way from the beaches of Sicily only to be relieved of his command with the war almost at an end. Sparks asked his three company commanders to tell his men he was leaving. In a log, one of his men noted later that day with deadpan understatement: “[Sparks] feels badly about leaving this unit.”

  As promised, a command car was put at Sparks’s disposal. Three men left Munich with Sparks—his most trusted soldiers: Albert Turk, his driver; Karl Mann, his interpreter; and his runner, Carlton Johnson. By two o’clock that afternoon, they were motoring toward the French border.

  DACHAU, MAY 3, 1945

  WHILE SPARKS HEADED for home, friends of Robert Antelme drove in the exact opposite direction—toward Dachau—perhaps even passing Sparks’s car on the way. One of the rescuers, a man called Beauchamp, recalled that when they arrived at the camp it was a beautiful spring day. They spent several hours searching for Antelme before finding him in an alley between barracks.