The Liberators: America's Witnesses to the Holocaust (31 page)

And on this April 29, the same day as the U.S. Army units at Landsberg were moving out, some to continue chasing the Germans across Bavaria and into Austria, others reversing course in preparation for occupation duty in cities and towns already captured, men of three other American divisions were about to come face
-
to
-
face with Holocaust horrors that would stay with them for a lifetime. Just forty miles to the northeast in the suburbs of Munich, they would discover Dachau.

CHAPTER 13

DACHAU

SHOCK BEYOND BELIEF

KZ DACHAU
By Dee R. Eberhart

Company I, 242nd Infantry, 42nd Infantry Division (Rainbow)
Written four decades after the liberation

Nazi dawn—Dachau’s gate opened wide,
Swallowing prisoners for a dozen years,
Incubator for the Holocaust.
Long hard roads and a collision course;
For victims in their gray/blue stripes;
For gray SS; and American soldiers,
Rainbow 42nd; Thunderbird 45th,
All of their dead pointing the way
.

Explosion for the world to see.
Skeletons, alive and dead
.
Liberators’ tears of rage
.
SS sprawled, in the coal yard, in the moat
.
unmourned by those behind the wire
.
Grill iron work gate swung open
.
Crematorium doors clanged shut
.
Nazi twilight at the end of April
.
One final plume of oily smoke
,
in the outer yard of the Berlin bunker
,
pilot beacon for the fires of hell
.

APRIL 29, 1945
DACHAU, GERMANY
    
12 miles northwest of Munich
    41 miles northeast of Landsberg

“A
ll of their dead pointing the way,” wrote Dee Eberhart, but he could have written
“our
dead.” Five months earlier, he’d come over with them as part of a task force named after Henning Linden, the Rainbow Division’s assistant division commander, on the USS
General Black
. In less than a month, the three infantry regiments, the 222nd, 232nd, and 242nd, found themselves in the middle of a tank battle near Gambsheim, France, where entire rifle platoons ceased to exist. At Hatten in Alsace, along the Maginot Line, they faced the tanks of the 25th Panzer Grenadier Division and the 21st Panzer Division as well as the German 7th Parachute Division.

“I had three foxhole buddies picked off right beside me,” recalls Eberhart, “one after the other.” They took heavy casualties, from 88s, mortars, from a huge railroad gun, and from the Nebelwerfers, the “Screaming Meemies” that sounded like a freight train going overhead, which were firing high explosives. Their squads were reduced from ten and twelve men down to four.”

Eberhart says, “I didn’t know how bad it was. I didn’t know how bleak it was. I thought this was the way it always was. Well, it wasn’t. After things turned around, it was a totally different war. We had not been trained for defensive warfare; yet we were on the defense. The Germans were on the offense, and so, psychologically and tactically, none of us had any training. From all that infantry basic [training, what I learned was] fire and movement and lay down a field of fire and try to do a flank attack. And we were good, or we thought we were, at least in training. Later on, we were good at it.”

Scout and sniper Dee Eberhart of the 42nd Infantry Division
.

Later on, when the war was going the Americans’ way and everyone could see an end to it, they were headed for the supposed redoubt where the Nazi dead enders were to hole up and fight to the last man. His outfit crossed the Danube in assault boats and became part of the great race for the glory of capturing Munich. But on April 29, a bright and sunny morning, at a point past Augsburg on the Autobahn, they were diverted onto secondary roads and eventually were ordered to “detruck and go in this direction.”

“We kind of fanned out, and we’d been through this so many times it was nothing new. We moved toward what I thought were a bunch of factories, an industrial area of some German town.” He was about to discover Dachau, first built of the German concentration camps, ostensibly for political prisoners.

Dee Eberhart of Ellensburg, Washington, has published two volumes of World War II poetry. He was instrumental in organizing the 2008 reunion of the 42nd Infantry Division (Rainbow) Association in Mobile, Alabama
.

Dachau was opened by the Nazis in March 1933 on the grounds of a former munitions factory about ten miles northwest of Munich. Over the life of the camp, more than 200,000 prisoners from more than thirty countries were sent to Dachau, a third of them Jews. More than 25,000 died in the camp, and at least another 10,000 died in the many Dachau subcamps. Alongside the prisoner compound, the Nazis built a training center for SS concentration camp guards.

The prison camp, which is actually inside a larger area that is also part of the concentration camp, consisted of thirty-two barracks, including one reserved for medical experiments. On the western side of the prisoner compound there was an electrified barbed-wire fence, outside of which was the water-filled Wurm Canal, which joined the Amper River just north of the complex. On the northern, eastern, and southern sides of the prisoner enclosure the barrier was a masonry wall about twelve feet high. About ten feet inside the outer wall and fence were two dry moats, about three feet deep and ten feet wide, and on the outer side of the moats was a grid of tanglefoot barbed wire about a foot off the ground.

The crematorium building was actually outside the prison camp walls. Nearby were two types of gas chambers, one used to fumigate clothing and a second, which could have been used to murder inmates, but Holocaust scholars don’t believe it was ever put into operation. Nevertheless, mass murder was a daily occurrence at Dachau. Some prisoners, mostly Russians, were used as moving rifle range targets, others were killed in experiments, still others were tortured and hanged, and more were euthanized.

If you visit Dachau today and pass through the Jourhaus gate archway, you’ll find a plaque provided by the 42nd Infantry Division commemorating its liberation of the camp on April 29, 1945. There’s also a plaque honoring the 20th Armored Division. What’s missing, in part because the German organization that runs the Dachau museum didn’t want to get into the middle of a dispute between U.S. Army veterans, is any remembrance of the role played by the 45th Infantry Division in the liberation of Dachau.

Both the 45th “Thunderbird” and the 42nd “Rainbow” Divisions had troops inside the outer walls of the camp by midday on the twenty-ninth. Who got there first has been disputed for sixty-five years, but it is a pointless dispute whose resolution will bring no additional honor to the unit declared the winner. Dee Eberhart, in his role as chairman of the board of trustees of the Rainbow Division Veterans Memorial Foundation, wrote a letter about the situation to the U.S. Army Center of Military History. In it, he said, “Bill Clayton [one of the first Rainbow Division soldiers to enter the Dachau prisoner compound] sets the tone that it would be well for all of us to follow. There was no glory for anyone during the liberation. A major battle did not take place…. For those present, probably no other single event of the war made such a profound impression as seeing or hearing the firsthand accounts of the condition of those 32,000 victims of Nazi brutality imprisoned there.”

One memory that weighed heavily on Eberhart’s mind as he wrote that letter was what the GIs saw even before they entered through any of several gates into Dachau. It was a sight that previously couldn’t have been imagined, even by hardened infantrymen who had been through multiple hells in their fight to liberate Europe. They called it the death train, thirty-nine railcars of dead bodies parked on a siding mostly outside the boundaries of the camp.

Had Russel Weiskircher known that his combat tour was going to end with the sight of the death train and Dachau burned into his brain, he might not have tried so hard to get into the Army. In 1942, he volunteered for the draft but flunked the physical four times because his urine test results were off due to a hereditary condition. Finally, he says, he cheated. “I slipped a guy a fin—that was big money—and he filled the bottle, and I got to wear a uniform.”

His five bucks would eventually buy the Pittsburgh native three Purple Hearts and a Silver Star, as well as a ticket to Dachau and the lifelong nightmares that went with it. Of course, after the war he might not have become an ordained minister, a PhD, a retired brigadier general, and the vice chair of the Georgia Commission on the Holocaust, a state agency that runs a public institution wholly devoted to training teachers to teach the Holocaust.

Weiskircher had carried a flamethrower and been a sniper and an assistant squad leader with the 157th Infantry Regiment. Wounded for the third time, he came back from the hospital just before spring and was assigned to 3rd Battalion headquarters as the acting operations sergeant, working for Lieutenant Colonel Felix Sparks, at age twenty-seven one of the youngest battalion commanders in the entire Army. On the morning of April 29 the job was pursuit: catch the fleeing Germans in Bavaria. They had a feeling that by the time they got to Munich, the war would be over. They were chasing along in trucks when they got an ops order from the regiment that said, in effect, “Somewhere up there is a concentration camp. The first unit that gets there should seal it.”