The original purpose of the camp was to detain politically undesirable persons, mainly political dissidents and those seen as potential threats to Hitler’s regime. While Jews were among those brought to Dachau during the first five years of its existence, it was in their role as communists, socialists, or other opponents of National Socialism. Jews as Jews were not detained at Dachau until the immediate aftermath of Kristallnacht in November 1938, when thousands of Jewish men were arrested in Germany and sent to various concentration camps including Dachau.
Dachau was not a killing center in the same sense as Auschwitz, Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, and Majdanek were. Unlike those camps in German-occupied Poland where most, if not almost all, persons brought there were immediately murdered, persons brought to Dachau were detained for hard labor and brutal exercise. In another sense, however, Dachau was a more brutal killing center. Though not as efficient, its inmates were overworked, overcrowded, and underfed, resulting in a slow death for thousands through starvation and disease. As the war was coming to an end, the Germans began evacuating camps about to be overrun by the Allies. As a consequence, they funneled inmates of those camps to camps in Germany proper, including Dachau. This resulted in even more overcrowding and the further spread of disease. Incredibly, on cross-examination of one of the prosecution witnesses, counsel for the defendants suggested that the Allies should be blamed for the overcrowding since successful Allied advances, liberating other camps, exacerbated the suffering of inmates at Dachau.2
Once the Second World War began in 1939, and certainly after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Dachau’s inmate population took on an international face. At the time of liberation, about half the total population came from Eastern Europe; the balance comprised persons from central and southern European countries such as Italy and Germany. Jews were a plurality, constituting slightly over a third of the total.3 Generally speaking, Jews were confined in Dachau’s satellite camps, mainly camps named after the nearby town of Kaufering, where the conditions “were considered the worse from the standpoint of overcrowding, malnutrition, disease and brutality.”4 For example, the beds at Dachau eventually held three men to a bed, while housing, if it could be called that, at the Kaufering subcamps was even more crowded.5 The allocation of food, well below the caloric and nutritional minimum at Dachau, was even less in the Kaufering subcamps. Thus, it is not surprising that more Jews were murdered at Dachau than any other group of prisoners.
Civilians constituted over 90 percent of the Dachau population. Most of the military inmates were Soviet POWs sent to Dachau in the year after the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. A majority of these men were executed by shooting; some were hanged. The unfortunate Soviet men brought to Dachau were singled out and suffered a higher murder rate than any other group. Nevertheless, because their numbers were smaller, the total killed did not approach the number of Jews killed. This mix of civilian and military inmates was of legal significance in the proceedings that followed because the principles of international law that apply to civilian populations—the vast bulk of Dachau inmates—differ from those that apply to prisoners of war.
The Liberation of Dachau and Summary Executions
Dachau’s liberation was a foregone conclusion to the Nazi hierarchy. With Soviet troops advancing from the east and the Americans and British from the west, it was just a question of time before German control of Dachau and its inmates would fall into Allied hands. Consequently, on April 14, 1945, Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, directed that Dachau be destroyed and its 30,000-plus surviving inmates be murdered to preclude the survival of witnesses to its horrors. Fortunately, by mid-April 1945, the administrative machinery of the Third Reich was sufficiently disrupted and chaotic so that this directive was not carried out to completion. Jews, however, were singled out and constituted the bulk of the 7,000 Dachau inmates selected, on April 26, for a death march to the Tegernsee to the south. Those not able to walk, either at the inception of the march or during the march, were shot on the spot. Others died of exposure and starvation along the way. Survivors were liberated at the Tegernsee a week after leaving Dachau.6
American troops liberated Dachau on April 29, 1945. As the American troops arrived at Dachau,7 they passed an abandoned train on the tracks leading to the main camp. The train contained over 2,000 bodies of emaciated, skeletonlike victims who had been sent from Buchenwald to Dachau in the days before. Most died from starvation and disease; on some the eyes were open, even in death; all contributed to a mosaic of pure horror.8 It was ghastly even for the American liberators; battle-tested soldiers who had lived with death for weeks, if not months or years. As one account of the introduction by American liberators to Dachau observed:
If ever the American soldier needed confirmation of the reasons why he was in uniform, why he was at war, why he was required to put his life on the line day after day, enduring all hardships and discomfort and danger, it was contained in these thirty-nine railroad cars. Here was the very embodiment of the evil Nazi regime that he had sworn to vanquish. As they cautiously approached, the familiar, sickening stench of death greeted them…. In each railroad car were piles of rotting human corpses—a total of 2,310 men, women and children, to be exact, either totally naked or partially clad in blue and white striped concentration camp uniforms. Mainly Poles, most of them had starved to death while being moved from Buchenwald in an effort to keep them from falling into the hands of the approaching Allies. Many others had been killed by their sadistic guards; still others had died while fighting among themselves during the trip. A few with enough strength to attempt escape had been shot down by the SS guards or brutally beaten with file butts, their brains oozing from shaved, emaciated skulls. An order from SS head Heinrich Himmler to destroy evidence of atrocities had gone unfulfilled.9
The gruesome scene that prefaced the U.S. Army entry into Dachau set in motion the events that followed. Nothing inside the camp mitigated the initial reaction provided by the train; indeed, seeing thousands upon thousands of living persons emaciated almost to the point of death augmented the anger of the liberating soldiers.
Accounts of what happened on entry to Dachau and its surrender vary, and an attempt to resolve these conflicting accounts is beyond the purview of this chapter. It is clear, however, that the four SS men who came to the American liberators with a white flag of surrender were shot and, if not killed immediately, shot again in the head to ensure their deaths. Other SS men were rounded up and lined up against a wall where they were machine-gunned. Once again, those who survived the machine-gunning were shot in the head, perhaps by Dachau inmates who had been given access to guns. Some SS men were turned over to the inmates. For example, one SS medic, who reportedly had castrated an inmate, was shot in the leg to immobilize him and then left to inmates who pummeled him to death with shovels. One of these inmates was the castration victim.10 Others were handed to inmates who literally tore them apart. Estimates as to the number of SS men killed following liberation range from a few dozen11 to about 550.12 There is some evidence that among the SS killed in this manner, several had just been assigned to Dachau and thus could not, under any conceivable theory of criminal liability, be responsible for its horrors.13
On May 2, 1945, shortly after the liberation of Dachau, the assistant inspector general of the Seventh Army, Lieutenant Colonel James Whittaker, at the direction of the Seventh Army’s commanding general, conducted an inquiry into the events surrounding Dachau’s liberation. In his June 8, 1945, report, he found that SS men at Dachau had indeed been killed without justification by named members of the liberating troops. He also noted that Lieutenant Howard Buechner “violated his duty both as a physician and a soldier [by] … ignoring the possibility of saving the wounded but still living prisoners who had been shot.”14 Whittaker’s report was filed with General George S. Patton, the head of the Seventh Army and the military governor of Bavaria (where Dachau was located), who simply ignored the report and took no action.15 Forty years later, Buechner wrote a book about the killing of the SS men by the American military16 and in 1992, forty-seven years after