There were actually three Dachaus ahead of the advancing Americans. 2nd Lt. Wicker and Victor Maurer pose at the death train. Led by Linden, the group also included Brigadier-General Charles Banfill Deputy Commander Operations U.S. 8th Army Air Force, several staff officers, and a handful of war correspondents and photographers. In all, Sparks estimates that around 30-50 SS camp guards were either killed by American troops or allowed to be killed by former Dachau inmates. As Allied forces approached concentration camps, the Germans tried to eliminate remaining prisoners. An American lieutenant had just been captured by chance as heand his driver had wandered into the town from the other direction. Such operations began later in the same month with the arrival of about 200 prisoners from Stadelheim Prison in Mnchen and the Landsberg Prison in Landsberg am Lech, making it the first Nazi concentration camp; most of these first prisoners were socialists, communists, and other "enemies of the state". The deaths of 86 inmates were, in the words of Hirt, "induced" at a jury rigged gassing facility at Natzweiler-Struthof on several days in August and their corpses, 57 men and 29 women, were sent to Strasbourg for study. Thousands of prisoners were killed before the evacuation due to being ill or unable to walk. This camp was near the Bavarian city of Dachau, and and human feces. and useful information about WW2. 2nd Lt. Heinrich Wicker | Scrapbookpages Blog It was a labor camp and a transit camp, as many prisoners were sent to other Nazi concentration camps before the final evacuation. . Colonel Charles L. Decker, an acting deputy judge advocate in the US Army, concluded in late 1945 that, while war crimes had been committed by Americans at Dachau, "there was no such systematic criminality among United States forces as pervaded the Nazi groups in Germany.". We are building this Liberators section in the Cybrary, and Chuck Ferree was the first to share his story. In 1946, Morris Janowitz wrote that just a few years after opening the camp, Germans feared the place. Though understandable, the American reprisals constituted a war crime, a potentially deeply embarrassing situation for the Allies. Once inside, the U.S. troops were horrified and enraged by the scene. The region, adjacent to the German border, was chosen for full Germanization and was annexed to Gau Baden-Alsace. The tall scar-faced SS-Untersturmfhrer Wicker had been left in charge. The names and biographical information of the victims were published in the book Die Namen der Nummern (The Names of the Numbers). Comment by Dame Belette May 18, 2013 @ 3:08 pm. Maurer promised that if Wicker did this, then he and his men would be allowed to flee unmolested. Your email address will not be published. General George S. Patton, as military governor of Bavaria, received the report and the charges of Sparks being complicit in the reprisal but tore up the charges. Usually a writer, a photographer and a G-2 (intelligence section) jeep driver would be assigned to a team to accompany a battalion on a particular mission, or occasionally, we would go out on our own without orders, if requested by a well-known correspondent, Hazard described in the Dann memoirs. These units include 4th Infantry Division, 36th Infantry Division, 42nd Infantry Division, 45th Infantry Division, 63rd Infantry Division, 99th Infantry Division, 103rd Infantry Division, 10th Armored Division, 12th Armored Division, 14th Armored Division, 20th Armored Division, and 101st Airborne Division.
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