Photo showing the execution of German SS Guards by U.S. Troops during the liberation of Dachau.
This is the 45th Div. There's an actual video of this, without audio, of course. I saw it a couple of years ago but don't have a source. I think it is a documentary. The SS are standing against the wall, and someone just spontaneously starts shooting, then 30 cal. joins in. An officer or NCO starts waving his hands running towards the scene, any more the shooting stops. It's really quick.
Im the mod of r/MilitaryHistory. This photo comes up occasionally, with some wild and extreme commands
about warcimes, and if you're a hardcore neo-Nazi, German genocide. The claim that it's a warcrime is
debatable, but this is absolutely a case where the situation is ambiguous, and eyewitness testimony is
unclear. To explain what led to the death of these camp guards, we have to first think about the operation to take the prison in the first place. The camp's capture occurred in the last days of WWIl, the spring of 1945, when
German resistance was in the process of collapsing.
The SS unit, which garrisoned the camp, was ordered to defend it, but many had no intention of complying.
This photograph was taken on April 29th, the day the main camp fell to advancing American troops. The
The first camp had been captured on April 27th, and for two days, the Americans fought an odd kind of battle in which some Germans would surrender, but others, especially among the most dedicated (and complicit) among the SS continued to fight. There were several
instances of false surrenders, and where regular Wehrmacht troops tried to surrender and were fired
on by SS men who hoped to bag both the 'cowards' and the Americans in one go. Indeed, on April 29th
there were reports of false surrenders. This primed the Americans to view their prisoners with suspicion and
fear. Also, at issue were the horrors that they witnessed in the camps. A hell march cleared all but the camps
of all but the weakest of the remaining camp victims.
Nevertheless, hundreds of camp victims died in the aftermath of liberation because they had been so
badly mistreated. And on top of that, the facilities were packed with the bodies of people who had been
murdered rather than removed to other facilities.
Lt. Col. Sparks, a battalion commander of the 157th Infantry Regiment, 45th Infantry Division, wrote about
the incident. Sparks watched as about 50 German prisoners captured by the 157th Infantry Regiment were confined in an area that had been used for storing coal. The area was partially enclosed by an L-shaped masonry wall about 8 ft (2.4 m) high and next to a hospital. The German POWs were watched over by a machine gun team from Company I. He left those men behind to head towards the centre 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!" and then machine-gun fire coming from the area he had just left. He ran back and kicked a 19-year-old soldier nicknamed "Birdeye" who was manning the machine gun and who had killed about 12 of the prisoners and wounded several more. The
gunner, who was crying hysterically, said that the prisoners had tried to escape. Sparks said that he
doubted the story; Sparks placed an NCO on the gun before resuming his journey towards the centre of the camp. 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. Nothing could be further from the truth. The
total number of German guards killed at Dachau during that day most certainly did not exceed fifty, with thirty probably being a more accurate figure. The regimental records for that date indicate that over a thousand
German prisoners were brought to the regimental collecting point. Since my task force was leading the
regimental attack, almost all the prisoners were taken by the task force, including several hundred from
Dachau." We dont know what really happened, none of us w there.
Did the prisoners run? Did the unit come und.fire? There were active combat operations occurring throughout the camp as uncoordinated groaps of
SS men fought or surrendered, according to their
nature. Maybe a string of shooting came too close and spooked the Americans, or Germans, into assuming the worst. Or maybe the man behind the gun had seen
too much, hated too hard, and opened fire to get his measure of revenge. We dont know why he pulled the
trigger. But it's clear that there was no coordinated policy of murder on the part of the Americans, and that this incident was probably based on the decisions, right or wrong, of one man magnified by the power of
his weapon (a belt fed.30cal) and the unique situation of the POWs.
The optics of this one photograph though has given rise to the wildest claims regarding American
behaviour at the camp, both in an attempt to excuse the Americans (who wouldn't shoot every SS camp
guard?) and to condemn them (just innocent Germans caught up in an allied campaign of extermination!).
Really, the truth is a lot less exciting. The US Army had a policy to capture camp guards for later trial, and during the liberation of Dachau, that policy was complied with. This situation is a tragic exception, but likely the product of a snap choice made by one man
whose thinking I've certainly never read, and whose mind, we really can't understand.
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