[1] When Allied soldiers liberated Dachau, they were variously shocked, horrified, disturbed, and angered at finding the massed corpses of prisoners, and by the combativeness of some of the remaining guards who allegedly fired on them.

On April 29, 1945, scouts of the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion located a satellite camp next to the small Bavarian town of Lager Lechfeld, adjacent to Hurlach.

Soldiers reported seeing a row of concrete structures that contained rooms full of hundreds of naked and barely clothed dead bodies piled floor to ceiling, a coal-fired crematorium, and a gas chamber.

SS-Untersturmführer Heinrich Wicker (killed after the surrender) was left in charge and had roughly 560 personnel at his disposal; these came from conscripted inmates of the SS disciplinary prison inside the Dachau concentration camp and Hungarian Waffen-SS troops.

According to Linden, he arrived at the command post in Dachau at about 15:00 and proceeded to make his way across the Amper River to the site of the complex, approximately one-half kilometre south of the bridge he crossed.

These three people were a Swiss Red Cross representative, Victor Maurer, and two SS troopers who said they were the camp commander and his assistant.

He left those men behind to head towards the center of the camp where there were SS who had not yet surrendered; he had only gone a short distance when he heard a soldier yell, "They're trying to get away!"

[19] Sparks further stated: It was the foregoing incident which has given rise to wild claims in various publications that most or all of the German prisoners captured at Dachau were executed.

Since my task force was leading the regimental attack, almost all the prisoners were taken by the task force, including several hundred from Dachau.In the U.S. military Investigation of Alleged Mistreatment of German Guards at Dachau conducted by Lt. Col. Joseph Whitaker, the account given by Howard Buechner (then a first lieutenant in the United States Army and medical officer with the 3rd Battalion, 157th Infantry) to Whitaker on May 5, 1945, did not contradict the Sparks account.

[20][21] David L. Israel disputed this account in his book The Day the Thunderbird Cried: Buechner's inaccuracies and arbitrary use of figures in citing the untrue story about the total liquidation of all SS troops found in Dachau was eagerly accepted by Revisionist organizations and exploited to meet their own distorted stories of Dachau.Jürgen Zarusky also concluded that Buechner's claims were incorrect.

Zarusky's research makes use of the detailed interrogation records contained in Whitaker's official May 1945 investigation report, which became accessible in 1992, as well as a collection of documents compiled by General Henning Linden's son.

[28] An American chaplain was told by three young Jewish men, who had left the camp during liberation, that they had beaten to death one of the most sadistic SS guards when they discovered him hiding in a barn, dressed as a peasant.

[29] Lt. Col. Joseph Whitaker, the Seventh Army's Assistant Inspector General, was ordered to investigate after witnesses came forward testifying about the killings.

[21] Whitaker reported that close to the back entrance to the camp, Lt. William P. Walsh, commander of Company "I", 157th Infantry, shot four German soldiers in a boxcar who had surrendered to him.

[21] After he had entered the camp, Walsh, along with Lt. Jack Bushyhead, the executive officer of Company "I", organized the segregation of POWs into those who were members of the Wehrmacht and those who were in the SS.

[21] The investigation resulted in the U.S. military considering courts-martial against those involved, including battalion commander Lt. Col. Felix Sparks, while Lt. Howard Buechner was cited in the report for dereliction of duty for not giving medical aid to the wounded SS men in the coal yard.

[19] Col. Charles L. Decker, an acting deputy judge advocate, concluded in late 1945 that, while there had probably been a violation of international law, "in the light of the conditions which greeted the eyes of the first combat troops, it is not believed that justice or equity demand that the difficult and perhaps impossible task of fixing individual responsibility now be undertaken".