Dachau (US Army report): Difference between revisions

Dachau is a 72-page investigation report by the 7th US Army on the German Dachau concentration camp and the mass murder and mass atrocities committed there by the SS and other personnel. The report was prepared immediately after the liberation of the camp by troops of the 7th US Army on 29 April 1945, and was published in a larger edition as early as May 1945. In addition to a preface, the report contains three independent reports which partly overlap thematically. The report is considered one of the first studies on the subject of concentration camps and extermination camps in Nazi Germany.

Built in 1933, Dachau was one of the first Nazi concentration camps. Though a large number of prisoners were executed, the camp was more of a large scale prison and internment camp and not part of the complex of the extermination camps such as the Auschwitz concentration camp. In the final phase of the Second World War, the living conditions of the prisoners in Dachau concentration camp drastically deteriorated, causing the death rate in the camp to rise rapidly. Many inmates of the overcrowded camp suffered from malnutrition and the untenable hygienic conditions. Evacuation transports from other concentration camps and a rampant typhus epidemic exacerbated the catastrophic camp conditions. From January to April 1945 alone, more than 13,000 prisoners died of disease or exhaustion in the Dachau concentration camp and the affiliated subcamps; many of the bodies remained unburied on the grounds. In addition, thousands of prisoners lost their lives on death marches to the south. Shortly before the arrival of the US Army, there were more than 32,000 emaciated prisoners in Dachau concentration camp; about 8,000 of whom were bedridden.^[1]

After the Dachau concentration camp was liberated on 29 April 1945 by units of the 42nd and 45th Infantry Divisions of the Seventh United States Army, the liberators found 3,000 corpses and several thousand people vegetating. In addition, there was a strong smell of decay lying on the camp.^[2] Even before entering the camp grounds, the US soldiers had discovered hundreds of dead concentration camp prisoners in the death train from Buchenwald parked on a siding, most of whom had died of hunger, debilitation or disease during transport to Dachau concentration camp.^[3][4] Battalion commander Felix Sparks later reported:^[2]

During the early period of our entry into the camp, a number of company men all battle hardened veterans, became extremely distraught. Some cried, while others raged.

Upset by these traumatic experiences, spontaneous shootings of captured SS men by US soldiers occurred.^[2]

When Colonel William Wilson Quinn, Assistant Chief of Staff of the G2 Military Intelligence of the 7th US Army, learned of the shocking and indescribable impressions of his comrades after the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp, he immediately went to the site to see the situation for himself. He remarked that the mass crimes found there were beyond his imagination,^[5] and that no one would have believed the atrocities committed in the camp at the time. As a result, he decided to immediately document what he had experienced, resulting in this investigative report.^[6] The preface, signed by Quinn, states:^[7]

DACHAU, 1933-1945, will stand for all time as one of history’s most gruesome symbols of inhumanity. There our troops found (...) cruelties so enormous as to be incomprehensible to the normal mind. Dachau and death were synonymous.

Quinn formed several teams to gather information about what happened in the camp, including taking statements from former prisoners. In particular, he was also interested in finding out what the population of the nearby town of Dachau knew about the concentration camp and what they thought about it.^[5] Involved in the report were the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) and the Psychological Warfare Branch (PWB) of the 7th US Army. The report is based primarily on interviews with liberated detainees by US intelligence officers and on field investigations. Members of the unofficial International Prisoner Administration of the liberated camp, which had been formed shortly before the liberation, assisted in this.

The report was completed in a very short time, with dates ranging from one to two weeks.^[8][9] The report is divided into four parts, listed in a table of contents on the third page of the document. Part I features the foreword by William Wilson Quinn while Part II was prepared by the Office of Strategic Services. Part III was prepared by the Psychological Warfare Branch and Part IV prepared by the Counter Intelligence Corps. Parts II to IV partly overlap thematically, since they were prepared as individual reports that were largely independent of each other. According to the preface, the reports were deliberately not combined into a common document with a uniform style, as doing so would have "seriously weaken[ed] [their] realism".^[10] In the summary preceding the second part of the report, it noted that the report does not intend to be a comprehensive or exhaustive account of Dachau Concentration Camp, and that work was already being done on further, more comprehensive reports.^[11] Thus, in preparation for the War Crimes Trial Program, American investigators conducted investigations from April 30, 1945 to August 7, 1945 to determine who was responsible for the crimes associated with the Dachau complex. This investigation report, completed on 31 August 1945, was the basis for the Dachau Camp Trial.^[12]

The 649th Engineer Topographic Battalion of the U.S. Army took over the printing and duplication of the report, which was published in typewritten form.^[13] By May 1945, 10,000 copies had aready been circulated.^[5] The Dachau Report was, according to the memoirs of William W. Quinn^[14] initially intended only as an internal report for use in the US Army, but then got to journalists unplanned through display in a press room, making it known to the public.^{[citation needed]} It soon circulated among US soldiers and members of the press.^[6][15]

The public was promptly informed about the conditions found in Dachau concentration camp. Several journalists accompanied the US soldiers during the liberation of Dachau concentration camp, including Marguerite Higgins, who was a war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune. She wrote the "first, though belatedly transmitted, report from Dachau."^[16] As early as 1 May 1945, many newspapers published articles to this effect. Film crews also arrived at the liberated camp. At the invitation of Dwight D. Eisenhower, delegations of American politicians as well as editors-in-chief and publishers went to the site on 2nd and 3rd of May 1945 respectively to get a picture of the situation. According to Harold Marcuse, the aim was "to convince the American public of the extent and authenticity of the atrocities through their reporting".^[17]

The report presents the Dachau concentration camp complex comprehensively and from different perspectives. Since the American investigators were in the camp as liberators and could therefore rely on a high level of cooperation and willingness to testify^[18] on the part of the liberated prisoners, a part of the report is taken up by eyewitness accounts of the inmates, as well as occasional longer excerpts from diaries and personal accounts of the experiences of individual prisoners.^[19] A large part is factual analysis or summaries by the authors of the report.

The sociology and social psychology of the system of prisoners and prisoner groups, their interaction with each other^[20] as well as with the SS commanding the camp and the so-called prisoner administration or labour administration^[21] are supplemented by a presentation of the organization of the concentration camp as an organigram.^[22] There are statistical listings of prisoner numbers and the proportion of different nationalities^[23] and the crimes charged, as well as figures on deaths in the camp, which rose sharply from autumn 1944 onwards.^[24] Accounts of the social dynamics among the prisoners^[20] take up considerable space, such as the interaction between prisoner groups of different nationalities, and how these differences were deliberately instrumentalised by the SS for purposes of control and oppression - for example, by deliberately and disproportionately placing German inmates in positions of some power as functional prisoners in the prisoner administration.^[25]

One section deals with the pseudoscientific, inhumane human experiments. These included, for example, the deliberate infection of healthy inmates with serious, potentially deadly infectious diseases without subsequent treatment. In other "experiments", prisoners were forced to be immersed in tanks filled with icy water at about 1 °C for long periods of time until unconsciousness set in.^[26]

Throughout the report there are descriptions of various aspects of the extremely harsh living conditions, both physical and psychological, which were forced upon the inmates and which determined their struggle for survival.^[27] Exemplarily, the OSS wrote in section I of the report:^[28]

These factors dividing people in a normal type of society are totally inapplicable to the situation at Dachau where people lived the most abnormal kind of existence imaginable. Regardless of origin, education, wealth, politics, or religion, people living in Dachau for a certain time were gradually reduced to the most primitive and cruel form of existence – motivated almost exclusively by fear of death. They no longer acted as former bankers, workers, priests, Communists, intellectuals or artists, but primarily as individuals trying to survive in the physical conditions of Dachau, i.e., trying to escape the constantly threatening death by starvation, freezing, or execution.

A significant amount of space is given to the description of the control, repression and terror system that the SS had set up in Dachau, just as in all other German concentration camps.^[29] Selected inmates who were in the camp for criminal offences such as murder or robbery and who were called criminals were given special positions in the hierarchy of the camp. They were instrumentalised by the SS to suppress and control the larger number of people imprisoned for political reasons (politicals) through psychological and physical terror.^[30] This included, for example, reducing or depriving food rations for individuals, threats, harassment and physical violence up to torture and murder of political prisoners by criminals.^[31] These acts usually occurred on direct instruction of the SS or by the specification of a particular goal by the SS to one or more criminal inmates.^[32] Several pages document the various ways in which inmates were executed at Dachau.^[33]

It also discusses the history of the Dachau concentration camp, which existed as early as 1933 and is considered the first camp of its kind in Nazi Germany.^[34] The US investigators also conducted extensive interviews with residents of the town of Dachau, which was close to the camp. In doing so, they particularly tried to find individuals among the mass of allegedly unsuspecting and innocent residents who had in some way politically resisted. Their statements, especially their assessment of the attitude of the average population, are given considerable space.^[35]

Other sections deal with the liberation of the camp by the US Army and the events that followed^[36] as well as with the physical structure or organization of the camp^[37] and the daily routine of the prisoners.^[38]

Excursus: Source-Critical Annotations

Under the heading "Executions" on page 33, the report states that in Dachau there was a large gas chamber with a capacity of 200 people in addition to five small ones. It bore the inscription "Brausebad" (shower bath) above the door and inside there were 15 shower heads through which poisonous gas was introduced. In addition, the execution of unsuspecting prisoners, with death occurring after ten minutes, is described as if this had actually happened in the Dachau concentration camp. However, this account of the report does not correspond to the current state of research for this particular concentration camp.

In fact, the construction of a new crematorium was completed in Dachau in the spring of 1943. In this "Barrack X" there were four small chambers for clothing disinfestation using Zyklon B^[39] and a larger gas chamber. However, the latter was - "according to today's knowledge" - never used for executions.^[40] There is only evidence of considerations to use the gas chamber for testing combat gases on humans. Whether these experiments, planned by medical doctor and SS member Sigmund Rascher, were in fact carried out is "not clearly established to this day".^[41]

Furthermore, the report paints a very negative overall picture of the group of "criminal" prisoners. According to the current state of research, the collective stigmatisation of the "criminal" prisoners as helpers of the SS is, however, no longer tenable.^[42]

• 
  Aerial photograph of the camp by an American reconnaissance plane, p. 2
• 
  Bodies of prisoners who died of conditions in the camp, p. 41
• 
  Picture of three liberated inmates, two wearing the black and white striped concentration camp inmate clothing, p. 13
• 
  Introduction Part III (p. 16): "(...) the first impression comes as a complete, a stunning shock." Picture of murdered prisoners of the Außenlager Kaufering IV on the railway line Kaufering-Landsberg^[43]

The preface by Colonel William W. Quinn, relatively brief at three paragraphs but written with emphasis unusual for a military report, expresses the outrage and horror felt by the American troops at the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp:^[7]

No words or pictures can carry the full impact of these unbelievable scenes but this report presents some of the outstanding facts and photographs in order to emphasize the type of crime which elements of the SS committed thousands of times a day, to remind us of the ghastly capabilities of certain classes of men, to strengthen our determination that they and their work shall vanish from the earth.

— Colonel William W. Quinn

The OSS section, introduced by a Summary (pp. 3, 4), comprises twelve pages and is divided into the sections History (pp. 5 to 6), Composition (pp. 6 to 8), Organization (pp. 9 to 11) and Groupings of Prisoners (pp. 11 to 15). The summary is followed by a brief outline of the history of Dachau Concentration Camp from 1933 to 1945, referring to the increasing number of prisoners in the camp, the expansion of the groups of prisoners admitted and the constantly expanding network of affiliated subcamps. Furthermore, reference is made to the increasing overcrowding of the camp during Second World War, which had led to a considerable increase in the death rate among the prisoners due to hunger and disease in the final phase of the camp, also due to incoming evacuation transports from other camps.

The following section is devoted to the composition of the prisoner groups, whereby nationality and the reason for admission are mentioned as the main distinguishing features. Furthermore, the identification of prisoners in the concentration camps and the contrast between political (Reds) and so-called criminal prisoners (Greens) are explained. Finally, the murderous and inhumane living conditions in the camp to which the prisoners were subjected on a daily basis are discussed. In the section Organization the terror system in the camp is explained, which consisted of external control by the camp SS and internal control by the function prisoners appointed by the SS. In the section Prisoner Groups, the functional posts for prisoners are explained and, within the framework of internal organization, the key position of the Labour Deployment Department is emphasised. The second part concludes with references to the significance of the nationalities of prisoners and to the International Prisoners' Committee.

The third part of the report is from the PWS section and is eleven pages long. It is divided into the sections Introduction (pp. 16 to 18), The Camp (pp. 18 to 21), The Townspeople (pp. 22 to 25) and Conclusion (pp. 25 to 26). In the introduction, the subject of the study is derived by prefacing the following remarks with two crucial questions: What is currently known about the situation in the camp, and what did the Dachau townspeople know about the events in the camp, or what is their corresponding attitude towards it. For the first question 20 former political prisoners were interviewed, for the second question citizens of the nearby town of Dachau. The Dachau camp survivors told the American interrogators about everyday life in the camp, which was characterized by hunger, illness and punishment, mass crimes, the role of the SS guards and the prisoner functionaries, camp hierarchies and the poor medical care. The questioning of the Dachau citizens revealed that the existence of the camp was known - however, many of them remarked to the interrogators that they had known nothing about what was going on in the camp and the mass crimes. This section also lists some of the explanations given in German, such as "Wir sind belogen worden" (engl. We were lied to) or "Was konnten wir tun" (engl. What could we do). However, some interviewed political opponents to the NS regime from the town of Dachau stated that the events in the camp had been known in the town. The interrogators concluded that the overwhelming majority of the Dachau population had brought guilt upon themselves through alleged ignorance and lack of civil courage.

The main part of the report, prepared by the CIC, comprises forty pages. This part is essentially divided into the sections Memorandum (pp. 27 and 28), Liberation (pp. 28 to 30), Life at Dachau (pp. 30 to 34), Diary of E.K. (pp. 35 to 45), Statement by E.H. (pp. 35 to 45), Special Case Reports (pp. 61 to 63) and Miscellaneous (p. 63ff.). The Memorandum leads on to the next section, which deals with the circumstances of the liberation of the camp. The section Life at Dachau deals with the transport of prisoners to the camp, the admission procedure after arrival, and the harsh everyday life in the camp. The following pages contain a detailed account of the cruel human experiments on prisoners and of the types of executions in the camp.

The special case reports focus on persons with a connection to Dachau concentration camp, including the camp medical doctor Claus Schilling, executed for his crimes against the Dachau prisoners in 1946, and the members of the camp SS Wilhelm Welter, Franz Böttger and Johann Kick. The report concludes with the section Miscellaneous, here the structure of the camp SS including its departments is listed and several tables are depicted. These concern the list of Dachau survivors by nationality, the number of prisoners who passed through the Dachau concentration camp, a list of the number of deaths and executions by year, and at the end the composition of the International Prisoners Committee.

Ten pages of the Dachau report are devoted to a diary that was partially translated from German into English in the course of writing the report. These are excerpts from the diary of the Dachau survivor Edgar Kupfer-Koberwitz, which he wrote secretly and at great risk to his own life during his imprisonment in the camp from November 1942 to spring 1945. In the diary, Kupfer-Koberwitz recorded his personal experiences and those of his prisoner friends concerning the incidents in the camp. The excerpts from the diary are meant to illustrate and prove crimes committed in Dachau concentration camp. The CIC Detachment investigators considered this diary to be one of the most interesting documents they had obtained on the Dachau crime complex. Because Kupfer-Koberwitz was seen to be at risk of German reprisals, only his initials are given as the author in the Dachau report.^[44] Kupfer-Koberwitz, who managed to hide the diary until the liberation, published excerpts from it in 1957 under the title "The Powerful and the Helpless". As "Dachau Diaries" his notes were published in 1997 in an unabridged version.^[45]

The section Statement by E.H. covers 15 pages in the Dachau report (pp. 46 to 60) and is thus the longest thematically continuous section in the report. It contains the testimony of a female concentration camp inmate with the initials E.H., who reports on her experiences in the Auschwitz concentration camp and incriminates members of the camp SS assigned there. She gave a detailed account of events in the Auschwitz concentration camp and in particular of the violent crimes committed by the camp SS in the "bunker", the camp prison in Block 11 of the main camp in Auschwitz, where, according to her own statements, she was imprisoned for nine months. Among other things, she stated that after being admitted to the Auschwitz concentration camp, she initially had a privileged position among the prisoners. For example, she had also been employed as an embroiderer in the villa of the camp commander Rudolf Höß, had been well fed and had had a single room. She also reports that the camp commandant made advances to her. In October 1942 she was locked up in the bunker (Block 11) and initially received preferential treatment there. Along with other members of the Auschwitz camp SS, she also incriminated camp commander Höß. He had secretly visited her in the bunker and had sexual intercourse with her. Höß is said to have finally impregnated Hodys, whereupon she was taken to a standing cell to die of starvation to cover up the affair.^[46][47]

Excursus: Source-Critical Annotations

Why this statement was included in the Dachau report, although it has no connection with the Dachau crime complex, is unclear. The Statement by E.H. contains the transcript of the testimony of the female prisoner Eleonore Hodys (also: Nora Mattaliano-Hodys) about her experiences in the Auschwitz concentration camp, which was recorded by the SS judge Konrad Morgen in October 1944. Morgen headed an SS commission of internal enquiry that was supposed to uncover and bring to trial corruption in concentration camps in particular. The members of the investigating commission were made aware of Hodys by a member of the camp SS in Auschwitz concentration camp who was in custody and had testified as a witness in the proceedings against the former head of the political department in Auschwitz Max Grabner before the SS and police court in Weimar. Morgen stated after the end of the war that he had taken Hodys out of the bunker to provide witness protection. Physically weakened and ill, he had her taken to a Munich clinic for convalescence at the end of July 1944, until she could finally be questioned by Morgen in October 1944 about events in the Auschwitz concentration camp.^[48]

A copy of this protocol was given to US investigators by Gerhard Wiebeck, who worked under Morgen, immediately after the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp. The Hodys' transcript was translated from German into English and included in the Dachau Report.^[49] Wiebeck, who was taken into American internment custody in the course of the liberation of Dachau concentration camp, is also listed with a short vita in the Dachau report.^[50] A back-translation of this protocol into German made by Wiebeck also played a role as evidence in the first Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, on which he provided comprehensive information during his testimony in October 1964.^[49]

The Auschwitz survivor and camp chronicler Hermann Langbein classifies Hody's statements in this protocol, after his examination, as a mixture of "memories with fantasies of an insane person".^[51] In addition to true incidents, certain details would also be untrue, especially those with regard to time details. In his view, the protocol should be subjected to a critical review within the framework of a historical evaluation.^[52] Transcripts of the protocols of Hody's interrogation are kept in the Institute of Contemporary History and are available in digitalised form.^[53]

The historian Dan Stone considers the report to be one of the first post-war publications on the German concentration camps, which would represent a combination of careful scientific observation and "burning rage" - resulting from the disturbing conditions also documented photographically, for example the many prisoner corpses in the death train from Buchenwald outside the camp.^[54]

The historian Ludwig Eiber classifies the US Army report as the "first overview" of the Dachau concentration camp crime complex. However, the report would also contain "some significant errors", because the interrogators would not have distinguished enough the reports of prisoners that applied to Dachau from those that referred to Auschwitz.^[55] According to his assessment, the Dachau Report focused on the mass crimes committed in this concentration camp. Eiber cites the report as an example of one of the first post-war publications on the subject. By means of this documentation, the unimaginable crimes were to be proven in order to "thus create a basis for punishment".^[56]

Several surviving originals of the report are in the library of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.^[57]

In July 2000, a new edition of this investigation report, edited and expanded by Michael Wiley Perry, was published by an American publisher under the title Dachau Liberated: The Official Report by U.S. Seventh Army. The new edition contains the original report including photographs and illustrations, additional edits/commentaries by Perry and the sketches made by 2nd Lt. Ted Mackechnie at Dachau on 30 April 1945. Perry dedicates the new edition to all those whose lives were changed forever on the day the camps were liberated. His preface concludes with the admonition that reading the report should help never to forget the crimes committed at Dachau concentration camp.^[58]

• Dachau at Wikimedia Commons
• Dachau, digitised PDF version with bibliographical references in the online library of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
• Dachau is available for free viewing and download at the Internet Archive (with bibliographical references)