This Day in History: Dachau liberated

On this day in 1945, the 42nd and 45th Infantry Divisions liberate Dachau. The notorious concentration camp had then been in existence for more than a decade.

By this point in 1945, Allied forces were pushing deeper and deeper into Germany. The American infantry divisions working their way toward Munich knew that there was a concentration camp in the area, but that was about all they knew.

“Up until April 29, 1945,” Lt. Jack Westbrook would later explain, “the majority of us in my unit were not aware of the Nazi efforts to exterminate the Jews—certainly not its scope, nor its effect on the world; and certainly none of us were aware of the Dachau Concentration Camp.”

Soldiers from the 42nd take cover near Dachau.

He thought perhaps the prisoners were being used as slave labor, but that was about it. Needless to say, he was completely unprepared for what they actually found.

“As we approached, there was a very distinctive smell,” Private Richard Marowitz described. “We knew it fairly well, the stench of death.” He thought maybe the smell came from dead farm animals, but he soon saw that was wrong. “[T]he smell was not a farm,” he concluded, “it was Dachau that we had smelled miles before we got there.”

Soldiers in the 42nd were greeted with an awful sight as they approached: a “death train.” Boxcar after boxcar was filled with corpses. Our soldiers couldn’t then know it, but the train had arrived the night before. “They were expected to be dead by the time they reached Dachau,” Colonel William W. Quinn reported, “so that their corpses could be done away with in the famous crematory.”

“We were not prepared for this,” veteran Tom Sitter said. “This was one of the most sickening . . . . All we saw were bodies piled on flatcars and people were streaming out when we got there.” Chaplain Eli Bohnen agreed. “The human mind refuses to believe what the eyes see,” he wrote to his family. “All the stories of Nazi horrors are underestimated rather than exaggerated.”

Captain J. Barnett arrived at one of Dachau’s subcamps to find that “[a]ll life in the camp had been extinguished.” Burned bodies were near the entrance. Nearby, two large pits were found. Inside were a “huge number of corpses piled on top of one another . . . . The arms and legs of many of the corpses had been broken, apparently to force them into the pit.”

The prisoners were not all Jewish, but those that were had received the worst treatment. “They were emaciated, diseased, beaten, miserable caricatures of human beings. I don’t know how they didn’t all go mad,” Bohnen said.

No one could really process what they were seeing. “[Dachau] will stand for all time as one of history’s most gruesome symbols of inhumanity,” Quinn concluded. “There our troops found sights, sounds and stenches horrible beyond belief, cruelties so enormous as to be incomprehensible to the normal mind.”

Our soldiers ultimately freed about 60,000 prisoners from Dachau and its subcamps. Medical staff arrived to set up a typhus ward. It would also be necessary to regulate how the freed prisoners were reintroduced to normal diets.

One survivor went on to marry one of the soldiers who liberated the camp, but she would not speak about her experience. “[T]he only thing I ever remember her saying was, ‘I remember the day the Americans came,’” her granddaughter said years later.

Other survivors agreed.

“I hate to think of what would have happened to us if you had not come at the time you did,” one wrote. “You, the G.I. Joes, spoke the first kind words to us in years. You held in your arms our living skeletons, too weak to walk, too weak to eat, and too weak to live. . . . To the camp survivors, G.I. Joe came from heaven. You were a divine force of mercy.”

Primary Sources:

• Bailey Breving, “I remember the day the Americans came” (VA website; May 6, 2024)

• Ben Tamashiro, The Liberation of Dachau: The Story of the 522 (Hawaii Herald; May 16, 1986)

• Col. Richard Goldenberg, NY’s 42nd Infantry Division liberated Dachau 75 years ago (U.S. Army website; April 27, 2020)

• Debralee Best, WWII veteran recalls liberation of Dachau during Days of Remembrance (U.S. Army website; April 10, 2021)

• Jake Collins, ‘Lest we forget’—a letter to the soldiers who liberated Dachau (Israel National News; April 24, 2025)

• Olivia B. Waxman, Long-Forgotten Cables Reveal What TIME’s Correspondent Saw at the Liberation of Dachau (TIME; April 21, 2020)

• The Last Days of the Dachau Concentration Camp (National WWII Museum; July 15, 2022)

• The Liberation of Dachau (Truman Library Institute)

• William W. Quinn, Dachau Liberated : The Official Report (available here)