Liberation of Dachau

Text

Content Warning: This story includes descriptions of dead bodies and other disturbing sensory details encountered during the liberation of Dachau.

"Okay. You know, we had captured a number of cities and towns such as Wurzburg, Schweinfurt, Nuremberg, and after Nuremberg, the next military objective was Munich. Early Sunday morning April 29th, 1945, we were riding on a two-lane road, country road, towards Munich. We were eight or ten miles north of Munich.  We knew where we were at only because we saw the road sign, which stated Dachau at the top. Below that, were different arrows like one pointing to Munich, stating how many kilometers away it was. So that's how we knew where we were at.  Shortly thereafter we got orders to pull over to the right side of the road, a wooded area, with just enough of a clearing to accommodate our four Howitzers.  This was the closest our four Howitzers had ever been in combat. Well, everybody smelled a very strong odor. One of our jeep drivers came over and said, there must be a chemical factory in the woods on the left side of the road.  My brother Howard, being very close, came over to me and said he didn't think it was a chemical factory; the odor reminded him of when we were young children. Our mother would go to a kosher meat market to buy a freshly killed chicken, take it home, hold it over the gas flame of the stove in the kitchen to burn off any remaining pin feathers.  And so doing, it would burn some of the skin and the fat of the chicken.  He said that's the odor that reminds him of.  

So, I asked my gun sergeant for permission for Howard and I to go through the woods, to find out the source of this very strong odor. He said, go ahead, but don’t stay long, because we had a lull in on firing missions.  He said, we don't know how long we're going to be here, before we pull out towards Munich. It only took us about 15 minutes through the woods, and there was a clearing, the first thing we saw was a line of railroad boxcars. We crawled over between two boxcars.  We got on the other side and on our right was an open boxcar with a leg of a person hanging out. We looked and there were other boxcars that the doors were open, but this was the only one that had a leg hanging out, so that was a distinction of one particular boxcar. A couple weeks earlier we had liberated a little brownie box camera. The only film was the film that was inside the camera.  So, we were very careful taking any pictures. But we took a picture of that particular boxcar because it was different than the others that we could see. Then we noticed other 42nd Division soldiers going through the gate, there was a building there with the gate.  And we followed them through the gate. Of course, the gate said, the famous German words, that meant work makes you free, Arbeit macht frei.  

First of all, there was a very large open area.  Then we saw buildings on the right, and on the road, and there was a lot of buildings that sort of looked like barracks to me. Similar to what  buildings in camps in the U. S.  Different, but similar.  Everything was quiet. Soldiers were just walking around, we saw different areas, we saw a stack of dead bodies in different areas. That made us realize that’s where the odor was coming from because there were not only the dead bodies in the railroad boxcars, but there were bodies lying in different areas. This is what we were witnessing. Now, we didn’t realize at the moment. We didn't uderstand what we were seeing. What caused all of this? We had no idea. We didn't know. So, we knew we had to get back to our gun position, so maybe we were inside the camp, maybe 20, 25 minutes total. And we turned around and left. Because what we learned, after the fact, that must have been the Dachau Prisoner Camp.  Because we saw the sign, Dachau, which was Dachau for the town. The city of Dachau, not the camp, camps, whatever was there, and that was pretty much our experience. There was no real combat, but we learned what happened when our first infantry guys arrived. After the war, we learned our division every year used to have a reunion in a different city in the United States every year. So, we got to meet some of the infantry guys and learn what they experienced when they first arrived. That's how we first learned from their experience in the following years as well.   

“Headquarters, officers, they all knew. They knew about the camps. The camps were not military objectives. In other words, there was no plans to free up any camps, concentration camps. They were just not military objectives.”  

Editor's Note: The bodies inside the boxcars had clothes on, but the bodies lying in different areas were naked. The Margols later found out that the dead bodies lying in different areas, in the nude, were there because the Germans had run out of coal. Without coal, they could not operate the crematoria (ovens). The Margols also learned later that the boxcars had come from Buchenwald concentration camp. It took twenty days for the death train to arrive from Buchenwald to Dachau. In the very cold weather, and without proper nutrition, many of the men in the trains died on the way.