Dachau (US Army report)

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.

[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.

[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.

Dachau and death were synonymous.Quinn formed several teams to gather information about what happened in the camp, including taking statements from former prisoners.

[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.

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.

Since the American investigators were in the camp as liberators, they were able to rely on a high level of cooperation and willingness to testify[18] from the liberated prisoners; a part of the report consists of eyewitness accounts of the inmates, as well as occasional longer excerpts from diaries and personal accounts of the experiences of individual prisoners.

[22] The report also contains 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] also make up a large part of the report, 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, German inmates were placed in administrative positions in order to stir anti-German sentiment among non-German inmates.

In other "experiments", prisoners were forcefully immersed in tanks filled with icy water at about 1 °C (34 °F) for long periods of time until they became unconscious.

[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 determined their struggle for survival.

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 large section is also dedicated 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.

[30] This included, for example, reducing or depriving food rations, threats, harassment and physical violence up to torture and murder of political prisoners by "criminals".

[38] The three-paragraph preface by Colonel William W. Quinn includes the following statement: 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 works shall vanish from the earth.

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.

Finally, the section notes the irrelevance of previous social distinctions given the camp's poor conditions, leading to prisoners being "gradually reduced to the most primitive and cruel form of existence—motivated almost exclusively by fear of death."

The interrogators concluded that the overwhelming majority of the town population had brought guilt upon themselves through alleged ignorance and lack of civil courage.

These are excerpts from the diary of the Dachau survivor Edgar Kupfer-Koberwitz, which he risked his life to write secretly during his imprisonment in the camp from November 1942 to spring 1945.

The excerpts from the diary are meant to illustrate and serve as evidence for crimes committed in the Dachau concentration camp.

[40] Kupfer-Koberwitz, who managed to hide the diary until the camp's liberation, published excerpts from it in 1957 under the title "The Powerful and the Helpless".

The "Statement by E.H." contains the transcript of the testimony of the female prisoner Eleonore Hodys, also known as Nora Mattaliano-Hodys, about her experiences in the Auschwitz concentration camp, as 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.

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.

[44] 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.

[46] 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.

[47] British 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" which resulted from the disturbing conditions which were documented photographically.

[48] German historian Ludwig Eiber classifies the US Army report as the "first overview" of the Dachau concentration camp crime complex.

[55] Some Holocaust deniers have cited the incorrect reports of gassing at Dachau in order to falsely claim that the Nazis did not systematically exterminate Jews using poison gas at other camps such as Auschwitz–Birkenau.

[56] The Auschwitz survivor and camp chronicler Hermann Langbein classifies Hody's statements in the report as mixture of "memories with fantasies of an insane person".