Dachau: The Harrowing of Hell

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION At the end of April 1945, American troops of the 42nd and 45th Divisions entered the concentration camp at Dachau, near Munich, liberating its 30,000 inmates and the some 40,000 other prisoners at nearby Nebenlager, or auxiliary camps, who had been working at forced labor in German war-related industries. In operation since March 1933, Dachau was the oldest of the camps the Nazis had established for the concentration and extermination of those the Reich considered undesirable politically, socially , or racially. Designed to hold 5,000 prisoners, Dachau had become hideously overcrowded. By early 1945, hundreds of inmates were dying every day of starvation and disease, particularly typhus. And the places of the dying were being quickly filled by contingents arriving from other camps, including Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Flossenburg. The Nazis were struggling to obliterate evidence of the genocidal purposes of the camps as the Allies advanced from the west and the east deep into German territory. The first soldiers who entered Dachau found some forty boxcars on the railway line just inside the camp gate, filled with the bodies of men, women, and children who had died of hunger, thirst, disease, and exposure during a death trip, most likely from Buchenwald or Birkenau. Not every camp was liberated. The Nazis had liquidated several of the extermination centers, including Treblinka and Sobibor, in late 1943; in the winter of 1944-45, Soviet troops entered several of the remaining death camps in eastern Poland, including Majdanek and Auschwitz, but nearly all the inmates had already been exterminated or sent on forced marches toward camps in the west. The images of liberation familiar to the western world-piles of emaciated corpses, mass burials in vast pits, soldiers handing XVll out their own rations to ragged inmates, survivors dressed in striped pajamas staring blankly out of dark, sunken eyes-have come through photographs taken in Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, and other camps in Germany. Yet, there is relatively little scholarship about the liberation of the camps located in Germany in the major Holocaust histories , war crimes transcripts, and military histories, and even in studies of individual camps. The record of the endings of the concentration and extermination camps between 1943 and the close of the war, particularly of the liberations by the Allies, has been less well documented by historians than many other aspects of the Holocaust. More documentary evidence and historical record, especially of its liberation, exist for Dachau than for perhaps any of the other camps. Dachau has the dual distinction of being the first of the Nazi camps, established the year Hitler came to power, and of being the camp liberated within hours of the Fuhrer's suicide in Berlin twelve years later. It was at Dachau that the system of torture, terror, and ultimately extermination that became the "univers concentrationnaire" was tested and refined. But even for Dachau, many details remain sketchy. According to Barbara Distel, who is director of the concentration camp memorial site at Dachau and keeper of its archive, although the Nazis maintained meticulous records almost until the end of April 1945, many important documents were hastily destroyed as the Allied forces approached. She is convinced that the most important source of information is to be found in the reports of surviving prisoners, written largely in the initial years after their liberation. Unfortunately, many have not been published or are now out of print. Some accounts of personal experiences in Dachau are available ; for example, The Beasts of the Earth by George Karst (a pseudonym), published during the war, is a minor classic about the experiences of a political prisoner who spent a little over a year in the camp in the late 1930s. And there are some highly personal memoirs of the time of liberation, such as Nerin Gun's The Day of the Americans. Michael Selzer's popular account, Deliverance Day: The Last Hours at Dachau, is based on interviews and perXVlll Introduction sonal narratives collected long after liberation. While rich in its details and its immediacy, the book was not intended to be viewed as a scholarly/historical account. Instead, it is almost collage-like, providing a somewhat impressionistic sense of the days of liberation. In the only recent general study of liberation, The End of the Holocaust: The Liberation of the Camps, a work that offers a very useful synthesis of basic facts about the end of each camp plus an annotated bibliography and recommendations for filling certain gaps...