The Liberator

by Alex Kershaw

  They dressed him in a French officer’s uniform, propped him up, and walked him out of the camp. “As we passed the SS huts,” one of his rescuers recalled, “Robert wanted to raise his cap and salute as he’d done as a detainee. We waited for [a] patrol to pass, then ran to the car with Robert in our arms.” As they drove toward the French border, Antelme could not stop talking: “Death itself was quite obviously no longer important because of the urgent necessity it imposed to say everything.”

  They stopped in Pforzheim and tried to have something to eat in a French mess. The officers there looked away from Antelme, little more than a shuffling skeleton. They continued, driving across the border into France at night. “Although he thought he was going to die,” recalled one of his rescuers, “there was no despair. He was happy to have this moment of freedom.” In Verdun, a doctor examined Antelme and told the rescuers to drive slowly because a single jolt might cause his heart to fail.

  A call was put through to Marguerite Duras: “I’m ringing to warn you that it’s more terrible than anything we’ve imagined.” They finally arrived in Paris and pulled up outside Duras’s apartment in the rue Saint Benoit. Neighbors and the building’s concierge were there to welcome Antelme. Duras rushed to the landing on her first floor, but at the sight of him she ran horrified back into her apartment, screaming.

  It would be many hours before Duras was able to find the courage to look at her husband. Then she began to valiantly nurse Antelme, spoonfeeding him every few hours, terrified to sleep in case he died when she was unconscious. He had been a big man, over two hundred pounds in his prime, before the Gestapo and the SS had gone to work on him. Now he weighed just seventy-seven pounds. “The fight with death started very soon,” recalled Duras in the most moving of all her many books, a memoir called The War. His temperature was soon 104.5 degrees, then 106. Through his wafer-thin chest, Duras could see his heart vibrate like a violin string. But it did not stop. It kept beating, defying the predictions of several doctors. “For seventeen days,” wrote Duras, who nursed Antelme around the clock, “we hid from him his own legs and feet and whole unbelievable body.”

  Duras dared not tell Antelme she had fallen in love with another man—the news would kill him. Antelme’s mind was as fragile as his body, which could not process anything but the thinnest soup: “We gave him gruel that was golden yellow, gruel for infants, and it came out of him dark green like slime from a swamp.”

  LE HAVRE, FRANCE, MAY 1945

  IT TOOK SPARKS several days to get to Le Havre. After possibly stopping in Aschaffenburg to pick up bottles from the “Nazi liquor warehouse” that he had buried, Sparks crossed the border into France. He ordered Mann and Turk back to Munich and continued on with Johnson in the command car, through a devastated country where more than six hundred thousand had died during the war, four hundred thousand of them civilians. In retreat, the Germans had callously felled the long avenues of elms and ash that had once elegantly shaded most main roads, leaving countless ugly stumps. Some villages and crossroads were clogged with POWs and displaced people. The advancing Allies and retreating Germans had blown up many bridges. “It was a long way, six to seven hundred miles to Le Havre,” recalled Sparks. “We went by Paris and got drunk one night. I wasn’t in any hurry.”

  In Le Havre, Sparks reported at an office on a dockside.

  An MP wearing a white helmet approached.

  “Sergeant, I’m Colonel Sparks. I have orders to report here and I understand there are orders here for me to get on a ship to go back to the United States.”

  “Yes, Colonel, we’re expecting you. I’ll call my commander.”

  That sounded odd to Sparks.

  What the hell is he calling his lieutenant for? he thought.

  It wasn’t long before an MP lieutenant arrived.

  “Sorry, Colonel,” said the MP politely, “I have orders to take you back to Seventh Army headquarters in Munich.”

  General Frederick had not been able to smooth things over after all. Had he even tried? Who had tipped off the military police?

  “Well, I’ll go back,” said Sparks, “but you’re not gonna take me.”

  Sparks’s runner, Carlton Johnson, stood menacingly nearby.

  The MP hesitated.

  “You give me your word, Colonel?”

  “Yes, I give you my word.”

  “Okay.”

  Sparks returned to his command car and headed back the way he had come.

  PULLACH, MUNICH, MAY 4, 1945

  IN BAVARIA, A Lieutenant Colonel Joseph M. Whitaker had begun a painstaking investigation into the shootings at Dachau. Twenty-three officers and enlisted men would soon give sworn testimony. On May 4, Lieutenant Bill Walsh found himself sitting in an office in Pullach, a suburb to the south of Munich, opposite Whitaker, the Seventh Army’s assistant inspector general. Walsh had killed several defenseless SS men in Dachau, but he wasn’t about to admit it. He’d fought too long and hard, seen too much, to go home with his head hung in shame.

  What did Whitaker know? What had others said? Had any of his men talked?

  “Please state your name, rank, serial number and organization.”

  “Lt. William P. Walsh, 0-414901, Company I, 157th Infantry.”

  Walsh was fully advised of his rights under the 24th Article of War.

  “Did you have any serious fight in taking this camp?”

  “There was a fight, yes, sir. Scattered resistance all through it.”

  After answering several more questions, Walsh explained what had happened in the coal yard: “I segregated the SS troopers from the regular army soldiers, put them in a yard. I ordered a machine gun [squad] to come inside and hold them back.… If they didn’t stay back, fire at them.… I told the machine gun to fire to hold them back.”

  “How many were shot in the yard?

  “I don’t know, sir. There weren’t many because we only fired one burst.”

  “With what weapon were you armed that day?”

  “A carbine. I had a forty-five also.”

  Whitaker then picked up a photograph and handed it to Walsh. It showed his men in the coal yard and a machine gun pointing at SS guards lined up against a wall. It was one of several photographs taken by the Signal Corps that day which Whitaker had obtained. Walsh could not have known what else had been captured in stills or on film—there had also been a newsreel cameraman in the coal yard.

  “Where were you when this picture was taken?”

  “I am not in that that I can see. I am quite sure I am not in the picture.”

  “You were present when this picture was taken?”

  “I will be frank, I don’t know who took it or when it was taken, but I was around there when the shooting started.”

  “Were there any of your superior officers present when this shooting took place?”

  “No, sir.”

  Had Walsh consulted Sparks or any other superior before the shooting “about what to do with the SS troopers”?

  “No, sir.”

  “Did you intend to execute these SS men when you put them in the yard?”

  “No, sir.”

  Over the next few days, Whitaker interviewed more than a dozen of Walsh’s men in I Company. “Rumor had it that we were going to be sent to Leavenworth [a maximum security prison],” recalled one of them. Whitaker also went to the camp and examined the coal yard. Very little had changed. The bodies of the SS had not even been removed. Whitaker later reported finding seventeen dead Germans and dozens of brass casings from spent bullets in the coal dust. He found blood and pieces of flesh splattered onto the coal yard’s wall, and counted twelve bullet holes.

  Whitaker called more men to testify. When nineteen-year-old Private John Lee entered Whitaker’s office, he saw to his shock that Whitaker had photographs of the shooting. Lee’s name was written in pencil on the back of one of the photographs. “Somebody had already identified me,” he recalled. “I was scared to death.”

  Whitaker
quickly got down to business.

  “Did the prisoners make any effort to move away from the wall?”

  “When [we] got ready to fire a lot started to move forward toward us,” said Lee.

  “After the firing stopped were some of the men still standing?”

  “Most of them I don’t believe were shot at all but fell to the ground and hid under each other or tried to hide. That is why I believe they moved forward—so that they would have room to fall on their face.”

  “When I examined some of these bodies I observed that some had their skulls crushed in, the foreheads smashed back. Did you see any of that?”

  “No, sir. I didn’t see any of that.”

  Lee was also asked if Sparks was present during the shooting.

  “No, I don’t believe he was present.”

  Whitaker also asked another eyewitness, Private Harry Crouse, where Sparks had been during the shooting.

  “By the railroad.”

  “Did he see this shooting?”

  “I wouldn’t say that he saw it. It might have been that his back was to it, but he certainly heard it.”

  “Did you see Colonel Sparks shoot any Germans that day?”

  “No, sir.”

  So far, not one of Sparks’s men had said anything that could incriminate him. But then Whitaker questioned a Private Fred Randolph, a rifleman in I Company.

  “Did you see SS men and other Germans killed by American soldiers?”

  “Yes, sir. I did.”

  “What was the first such incident you saw?”

  “When we first entered. Four Jerries came walking down with their hands on their heads and surrendered to Lieutenant Walsh. Walsh was quite angry and upset and took them into one of those wagons and called for a machine gun, then he changed his mind and took them into a boxcar and fired his pistol at them, and one of the GIs climbed in after Lieutenant Walsh got through and fired his gun at bodies of half dead Germans I guess. Fired about eight or nine shots.”

  “Do you know the name of that GI?”

  “Pruitt.”

  “After the incident with Walsh at the boxcar when next did you see some Germans shot?”

  Randolph’s answer was explosive.

  “At about the same time one German was already shot once I think, and was lying near the railroad tracks, and Colonel Sparks fired at him with his pistol, about two or three shots.”

  If Randolph’s statement could be supported, Sparks would possibly face court-martial. And if he could be linked to the coal yard killings too, then he would without doubt be held responsible for his men’s actions at Dachau. Lieutenant Walsh was the key to a prosecution if there was to be one. Under further questioning, would he incriminate Sparks, his commanding officer?

  Walsh was called back. He did not implicate Sparks. He did, however, admit that he himself had given the order to open fire, but only after the SS had made a move toward his men. Whitaker did not believe that the SS had done so. He concluded that seventeen SS men had in fact been “summarily executed” on Walsh’s orders and that Walsh and others “participated in the execution of the seventeen.”

  PARIS, MAY 1945

  PARIS HAD LOST none of its charms. After navigating the appalling roads from Le Havre to the capital, Sparks could not resist sampling the delights of the City of Light for another couple of days, probably visiting the hugely popular “Pig Alley,” the Place Pigalle, where thousands of rowdy GIs congregated in search of booze and a good time. Sparks got drunk again and then set out for Germany, crossing pontoon bridges, now-silent mountains in the Vosges, and endless streams of displaced people. He finally found Seventh Army headquarters not far from Munich, in a small town.

  Sparks reported to the Seventh Army’s chief of personnel.

  “Well, Colonel,” the chief said, “General Patton’s Third Army has taken over these headquarters as of today and we’re being shipped to Austria.”

  “Well, where’s General Patton’s headquarters?”

  “Bad Tölz, fifteen or twenty miles outside of Munich.”

  “Okay, I’ll go there.”

  Sparks set off once more with Johnson in the command car, headed for Patton’s headquarters. Patton was now the newly appointed military governor of Bavaria. He was tired after three years of war, needed a long rest, and was impatient to get back to the United States to bask in the glory he knew was his. Under his leadership, the Third Army had captured more enemy prisoners, liberated more territory, and advanced farther in less time than any other American armored force.

  The war was just days from ending and Patton was far from happy about it. “This business of not having to fight is rather an inglorious ending for a great experience,” Patton wrote. He was hopeful, however, of getting an opportunity to fight the Japanese.

  It was late afternoon when Sparks arrived at Third Army headquarters, a grim-looking Waffen-SS barracks with some nine hundred rooms, in the foothills of the Alps. He reported to the Third Army’s chief of staff, who was rude and angry. He told Sparks that he was facing court-martial for allowing German prisoners to be killed unlawfully.

  The charges were so serious that General Patton himself was going to handle the matter.

  “General Patton’s out now,” the chief of staff added, “but he’ll be back in the morning. Come and report to him at nine o’clock tomorrow morning.”

  The next morning, a worried Sparks arrived for his meeting.

  “Colonel, sit here,” a captain told Sparks and then left to find Patton, who was staying in a nearby mansion once owned by the wealthy publisher of Mein Kampf.

  Sparks sat waiting for an hour, he later recalled, growing increasingly anxious and impatient.

  “When’s the captain coming back?” he asked.

  “I don’t think he’s coming back today.”

  “When he comes back,” an exasperated Sparks snapped, “you tell him to go to hell.”

  Sparks was asked to wait just a little longer. Finally, he was shown into a small office, no more than ten feet square, just big enough for two chairs and a desk.

  Behind the desk sat the four-star legend, George S. Patton.

  Sparks saluted.

  “Sir, I’m Colonel Sparks. I have orders to report to you.”

  “Oh, yes, Colonel Sparks,” said Patton in his strangely high-pitched voice. “I have some serious court-martial charges against you and some of your men here on my desk.”

  Sparks looked over at the papers on Patton’s desk.

  “Didn’t you serve under me in Africa and Sicily?”

  “Yes, sir, I did. I would like to explain about what happened at Dachau.”

  “There is no point in an explanation. I have already had these charges investigated, and they are a bunch of crap. I’m going to tear up these goddamn papers on you and your men.”

  Sparks would later remember that it was with a characteristically dramatic flourish that Patton did indeed tear up the papers on his desk before dumping them in a wastebasket.

  “You have been a damn fine soldier,” added Patton. “Now go home.”

  The interview had lasted less than two minutes.

  Sparks saluted and left.

  GEORGE PATTON WAS happy to sweep the whole incident at Dachau under the carpet, just as he had done with other unsavory episodes concerning the Thunderbirds, whom he had once praised as the “Killer Division.” According to biographer Carlo D’Este: “Patton was soft on those who achieved great deeds in battle, and the petty charges against Sparks fell under the heading of ‘chickenshit.’ Unless their crimes were heinous, such men who served under him received medals and praise, not court-martials.”

  An army judge advocate had read Whitaker’s report on the shootings and believed there were grounds to bring murder charges against Lieutenants Walsh and Busheyhead, and Private Pruitt, who had finished off Walsh’s victims. But the commander of the Seventh Army, Wade Haislip, decided not to carry out the recommended court-martial because the initial investig
ation had, he argued, not taken into account the emotional state of the men. Besides, no one wanted an American atrocity, a “war crime” in SS veteran Johann Voss’s words, reported at the end of the war, when the victors were understandably at their most morally self-righteous.

  The crimes of the Nazis, not American heroes, were what the top brass were keen to investigate and publicize. According to the 45th Division’s chief of staff, Kenneth Wickham: “General Patton, who had taken over the Army area, kind of said, ‘To hell with it [the I.G. investigation],’ and that was it. We didn’t go further into it and General Frederick wasn’t concerned much one way or the other. He was just kind of annoyed by it.”

  After a lengthy investigation of the treatment of all German POWs, in late 1945 Colonel Charles L. Decker, an acting deputy judge advocate, concluded that at Dachau there had probably been a violation of international law because the SS had been shot without trial. “But in the light of the conditions which greeted the eyes of the first combat troops,” he added, “it is not believed that justice or equity demand that the difficult and perhaps impossible task of fixing individual responsibility now be undertaken.”

  IN A LATER WAR, Lieutenant Walsh might have been tried for murder. But after helping defeat Hitler, he returned as a hero to Massachusetts, attended Northeastern University on the GI Bill, enjoyed a long and successful career as an engineer, and was honored at several Holocaust commemoration events in his final years. At the dedication of the U.S. Holocaust Museum in 1993, he was a “special honoree,” and at the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day, a year later, he was again treated as a “VIP hero” at the Capitol, where he was helped to stand during the televised ceremony, because of weakening legs, by none other than Senator Bob Dole from Kansas, who had been badly wounded while serving with the 10th Mountain Division in Italy in April 1945.

  A proud Thunderbird to his last breath, Bill Walsh died aged seventy-eight in July 1998. He was remembered, according to the Boston Globe, as a gentle and kind man who loved to play golf and be with his children. There is no evidence that Walsh had ever expressed or felt any guilt, let alone regret, about his actions at Dachau.