Five Days That Shocked the World: Eyewitness Accounts from Europe at the End of World War II

by Nicholas Best

  I’d go to the station with my mother to take a train and I’d see cattle trucks filled with Jews … families with little children, with babies, herded into meat wagons—trains of big wooden vans with just a little slat open at the top and all those faces peering out. On the platform, soldiers herding more Jewish families with their poor little bundles and small children. They would separate them, saying “The men go there and the women go there.” Then they would take the babies and put them in another van. We did not yet know that they were going to their death. We’d been told they were going to be taken to special camps.9

  Audrey’s own uncle had been executed by the Germans, shot in reprisal for a sabotage attack by the Resistance. She herself had lived in fear of being kidnapped and taken to a military brothel, as so many other girls had been. She had indeed been picked up once by the Wehrmacht, who were looking for women to work in their kitchens, but had escaped immediately, running away and remaining hidden indoors for the next few weeks.

  She had also worked for the Resistance, tripping past German sentries with messages concealed in her shoe. During Operation Market Garden, the Allies’ attempt to force a passage across the Rhine at Arnhem, she had made contact with a British paratrooper stranded in the woods and put him in touch with Resistance members in the town. With so many friendly troops around, the Dutch had assumed that liberation was at hand, only to be bitterly disappointed when the Allies withdrew and the Germans evicted them from their homes in retaliation. Audrey and her mother had gone to her grandfather’s large house at Velp, three miles from Arnhem, but others had had nowhere to go at such short notice. Audrey had watched them with horror:

  I still feel sick when I remember the scenes. It was human misery at its starkest: masses of refugees on the move, some carrying their dead babies, born on the roadside, hundreds collapsing of hunger … 90,000 people looking for a place to live. We took in forty for a while, but there was literally nothing to eat, so they had to move on.10

  The situation had worsened as winter arrived. Audrey’s mother advised her to drink plenty of water to make herself feel full, and to lie in bed to conserve energy. So many Dutch people had starved to death by the spring of 1945 that there weren’t enough coffins to bury them all. And then one day, in the middle of April, the moment they had all been waiting for had arrived at last:

  We were in our cellar, where we’d been for weeks. Our area was being liberated practically house to house, and there was lots of shooting and shelling from over the river and constant bombing: explosions going on all night … Once in a while you’d go up and see how much of your house was left, and then you’d go back under again. Then early in the morning all of a sudden there was total silence. Everybody said, “My God, now what’s happening?” We listened for a while, and strangely enough, I thought I could hear voices and some singing—and I smelt English cigarettes.11

  Audrey and her family crept to the front door. The house was surrounded by British soldiers with guns at the ready. Audrey screamed with delight. Speaking in a gentle English voice, so different from the shouting of the Germans that they were all used to, the NCO in charge explained that they had come to collect a German radio transmitter that was stationed in the house.

  “We’re sorry to disturb you,” he added.

  “Go right on disturbing us,” Audrey told them cheerfully. She and her family didn’t mind a bit.

  9

  DACHAU

  WHILE THE BRITISH WERE CLEANING up at Belsen and the RAF dropping food over Holland, the Americans were advancing into Bavaria. After all the fighting that had gone before, they were beginning to enjoy themselves at last as German resistance crumbled and village after village surrendered to them without a fight.

  Desperately short of men and equipment, the German army was in retreat all along the line. The retreat was led by the Nazis: Gauleiters and high party officials fleeing with their families and as much loot as they could carry, hoping to slip across the border into Switzerland or else hide anonymously in some country place until the danger had passed and they could reemerge after a few months with a new identity and total amnesia about the past. Nazi officials had never hesitated to throw their weight around during the good years, bullying their own people almost as much as they bullied the rest of Europe. They were a lot more subdued as they joined the columns of refugees fleeing the American advance. No longer did they hoot at everyone else to get out of the way, forcing ordinary people off the road while they roared past in their staff cars. The Nazis rarely had the fuel, for one thing. And the people might have turned on them, for another.

  Many Nazis had their womenfolk with them, wives and mistresses who had done well out of the war years and were bedecked with fur and jewelry, often looted from occupied countries. Diamonds that had been swallowed by Jews just before they were taken away, to be recovered later and bartered for a few more days of life, had been swallowed again as their new owners became fugitives in their turn. Nazi wives were often fatter than other German women, because they had eaten better during the war. This had proved to be a disadvantage when the Russians came, because the Russians preferred women with flesh on them. Nazi wives were often the first to be raped, an irony not lost on other women who had had to go without while the Nazis continued to enjoy the best of whatever was available.

  Resistance to the Nazis was growing apace as their regime began to collapse. Germans who had never found the courage before were finding it now as the Nazis shed their uniforms and the Americans appeared on the horizon. Some of the resisters were genuinely anti-Nazi, but others were merely fed up with the war, not impressed by rumors of a proposed last stand in the mountains around Berchtesgaden, where all Germans would be expected to fight to the death in defense of their Führer. Many were simply opportunistic, seeing which way the wind blew and hurrying to establish their anti-Nazi credentials before the war ended. It could surely do them no harm to be in charge of their town or village when the Americans arrived, demonstrating that they had overthrown the Nazis of their own accord, without help from anyone else.

  Accordingly, many small towns and villages sported a prominent display of white flags when the Americans appeared, sheets and pillowcases hanging from upstairs windows as the occupants put up their hands and offered no resistance to the invaders. The Americans encouraged them by sending burgomasters ahead from villages already captured to make it clear to the inhabitants that only a mass display of white flags would save their village from destruction. With so much firepower at the Allies’ disposal, the Germans had no reason to doubt it. They swiftly got the message and surrendered without a fight.

  The Americans bowled straight through if they had no reason to stop, racing from one village to the next, across some of the prettiest countryside they had ever seen. After the horrors of the Normandy bocage and winter in the Ardennes, it was good to sit at the wheel of a Jeep in the Bavarian spring, with no one shooting at them and the sun glinting off the Alps in the distance. Like the Russians in the east, the Americans kept asking themselves why the Germans had wanted to invade so many other countries, when their own was so rich and beautiful. To farm boys from Idaho and Kentucky, it made no sense at all.

  The Americans were on their way to Munich. It was the last great city in southern Germany that hadn’t already fallen to them. The city was particularly important because it was the birthplace of Nazism: “the cradle of the beast,” as General Eisenhower liked to call it. At the rate they were going, the Americans were scheduled to reach the outskirts either that evening or very early next morning.

  After Munich, they would continue southeast, toward Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s private retreat in the mountains near the old border with Austria. Hitler hadn’t been seen in public for weeks, so there was every chance he might be holed up in Berchtesgaden somewhere, just waiting for the Americans to come dig him out. More than one GI nursed a fantasy of being the man who did exactly that, dragging the Führer from his hiding place and parading him in front o
f the world’s cameras while millions cheered.

  First, though, the Americans had another task. A dozen miles north of Munich lay the little town of Dachau. There was a concentration camp at Dachau, the first the Nazis had ever built. It was in a dreadful mess, according to reports reaching the front-line troops. Thousands had already died of typhus, and the remainder were due to be killed that day, executed in cold blood before the Americans could arrive to save them. The Americans knew all about Dachau and had been planning to begin relief operations in due course. But the reports of imminent mass murder galvanized them into action. They went that way at once.

  They were held up by sniper fire as they advanced, then by a blown bridge over a railway line. By midmorning, however, their tanks had found other ways forward and were fast approaching Dachau, aiming to secure the town first before turning their attention to the camp on the outskirts.

  The Germans in Dachau were of two minds about how to respond. Civilians in the town were all for raising the white flag, but had been threatened with severe reprisals by their newly appointed burgomaster … just before he fled. The military commander had already withdrawn his headquarters across the river, effectively surrendering half the town to the Americans.

  The Americans advanced cautiously and were in the town square sometime before midday. From there, their tanks set off for the Amper Bridge that led across the river toward the camp on the outskirts.

  The Germans put up a token resistance, blowing the bridge just as the first tank was about to cross. They killed several of their own troops in the process, but didn’t delay the Americans for long. The railway bridge remained intact, allowing the infantry to flood across. By early afternoon, one company of Americans was securing the town of Dachau, while another headed along the railway line toward the camp, its huts and barbed-wire fencing a kilometer away behind the trees.

  The rail’s main line led to Munich, with a spur branching off toward the camp. Following it along, the Americans came to a row of rail wagons abandoned at the entrance to the camp. There were thirty-nine of them, freight cars normally used for transporting coal or cattle. Moving closer, the Americans saw to their horror that each one was packed full of dead prisoners, all in pitiful condition. Their bodies, at least five hundred in all and perhaps as many as two thousand, had been lying there for two days. Estimates on their number varied because no one had the stomach for an accurate count. A Red Cross man reckoned five hundred, but Time magazine’s Sidney Olson counted fifty-three bodies in one car and sixty-four in another, which suggested a lot more in total.

  The prisoners had come from Buchenwald. The journey had taken more than two weeks, because of Allied attacks on the line, including at least one on their train. Packed tight into every car, some in open-top gondolas, others in enclosed boxcars with the doors locked, the prisoners had died like flies on the way, some of thirst, some of hunger, some of cold, and some simply of disease or exhaustion. The Germans had done nothing for them. As at Belsen, they had just washed their hands of the whole business and left the prisoners to get on with it by themselves. A few prisoners had managed to survive the journey, a very few, but the SS had shot them as soon as they arrived, or else clubbed them to death to save ammunition.

  For the Americans who arrived to find their bodies, the smell was the worst of it. That, and the dreadful state of the corpses. Some naked, some in striped prison garb, but all skeletal, all parchment white, all sprawling helplessly in their own blood and filth. Some lay with their eyes still open, staring accusingly at the Americans who had failed to save them, others with their teeth bared and their arms protectively over their faces to ward off the blows that had killed them.

  “They were spilled out of the boxcar as if you had taken it and just turned it over and poured the people out onto the side of the tracks,” recalled Private Jimmy Gentry.

  Some of the bodies were still in the train, some were hanging out over the tops of the piles of people outside, and that’s when I saw for the first time that they were not soldiers. We were used to seeing soldiers, both American and German soldiers who had been killed, but we’d never seen anything like this. They were striped, dressed in striped clothes, their head was the largest part of their body, their eyes all sunken back. They were ashen white, almost a blue colour also, their ribs would protrude, their arms the size of broomsticks, their legs the same.1

  “I saw two prisoners lying on the pavement with their brains squashed,” remembered Lieutenant-Colonel Felix Sparks, commanding the battalion of the Forty-fifth Thunderbird Division, tasked with capturing the camp. “We didn’t do a detailed examination of the bodies in the cars. We looked in to see if anyone was alive and then continued on. I heard later that there might have been a couple of people still alive, but I doubt it very much.”2

  Like the British at Belsen, the Americans thought they had seen it all in the fight across Europe. But what they found in the boxcars filled them with a blind, incandescent rage as they pushed past the train cars and continued into the SS barracks. Almost at once, four soldiers emerged from hiding and surrendered to Lieutenant Bill Walsh, the commander of I Company. But Walsh wasn’t having it. Outraged, he ordered the men into one of the boxcars and shot them immediately with his pistol, one after another. Private Albert Pruitt joined him, finishing the men off with his rifle as they lay moaning on the floor. The Americans were in no mood to take prisoners after what they had just seen. It was immediately understood among them that none of the Germans in the camp should get out of there alive. None deserved to live.

  Ironically, most of the Germans responsible for the atrocities had already fled the camp. Almost a thousand had left Dachau the previous day, hastily putting a safe distance between themselves and the approaching enemy. Only a few hundred remained behind, some convalescents newly arrived from the front, others too wounded in the hospital to move. The distinction between the fighting soldiers of the Waffen-SS, billeted in the adjoining barracks, and the prison guards of the SS-Totenkopf was lost on Walsh. After six months of more or less continuous combat, he had reached his breaking point. He ran amok after shooting the SS men, chasing after every German he found, waving his gun and shouting, “You sons of bitches, you sons of bitches!” He had to be knocked to the ground by Colonel Sparks and held down by seven of his men until he stopped crying and came to his senses.

  Later, pulling himself together, Walsh rejoined his company as they advanced through the SS barracks, methodically clearing each building of the enemy. When they reached the infirmary, Walsh ordered all the Germans outside, regardless of their condition. Private John Lee helped to bundle them out:

  Our platoon entered the hospital and searched room to room to clear everyone out. Several were in hospital beds with bandages on their arms and legs. Some were on crutches, feigning injury. These were German Wehrmacht, and SS guards dressed as Wehrmacht soldiers. They were moved outside and lined up with the doctors, nurses, and medics. There were also four or five inmates working in the hospital who became very helpful in picking out the real SS men, as well as those faking injury.3

  Lee was helping to separate the SS from the other prisoners when he and his friend Bob McDonnell heard screaming from outside. Rushing out to investigate, they found two prisoners with shovels attacking a medic in a white coat. “By the time we got there, he was a bloody mess. We ordered them to halt. They said they were Poles, and one of them dropped his pants to show he had been castrated in the hospital and this German was somehow involved in the operation.”

  While Lee’s platoon cleared the hospital, Walsh lined up sixty of the SS against a wall in the adjoining coal yard. Although they had been disarmed, the SS easily outnumbered the Americans nervously guarding them. Ordering them to keep their hands up, Walsh told Private William Curtin, a machine gunner from M Company, to shoot if the SS refused to stay back. Curtin cocked his weapon obediently. Assuming the worst, the SS allegedly began to run. Curtin and four others immediately opened fire. Colonel Sparks
, a few yards away, twisted around to see what was happening:

  I ran back and kicked the gunner in the back and knocked him forward onto the gun, then grabbed him by the collar and yelled: “What the hell are you doing?” He said they were trying to get away, and then he started crying. I pulled out my .45 and fired several shots into the air and said there would be no more firing unless I gave the order. I told them I was taking over command of the company, and I ordered them to get the wounded into the infirmary.4

  But it was too late for the SS. Seventeen had been killed, perhaps deliberately murdered. All but three of the remainder lay in a tangled heap at the base of the wall, some wounded, others feigning death. The last three were still on their feet, two with their hands in the air, the third with his arms folded, defiantly awaiting the inevitable.

  By some accounts, there was a similar incident later, when a further 346 Waffen-SS were lined up against the same wall and machine-gunned at the order of I Company’s executive officer, Lieutenant Jack Bushyhead. A Cherokee from Oklahoma, Bushyhead was said to have directed the fire from the flat roof of a bicycle shed. Afterward, three or four prisoners were given pistols and went down the line finishing off the wounded.

  Whatever the truth, nobody wanted to discuss the killings in the days that followed. There was talk of courts martial at first, almost certainly scotched by General Patton’s refusal to proceed. Stories changed later and accounts grew in the telling, once the threat of legal proceedings had receded. Some soldiers told their stories of Dachau at once, others not for fifty years. A handful left graphic eyewitness accounts even though they had been nowhere near Dachau at the time. And the official history told a different story again. All that could be said for sure was that it had been a proud day for the Thunderbird Division when it liberated the camp at Dachau … and for a few chaotic minutes, a shameful day as well.