This is how they were made to bear witness. Later, American soldiers ordered farmers and local residents who were members of the Nazi party to bury some 5,000 corpses.

They also saw thousands of emaciated survivors emerging from the barracks-“walking skeletons,” as many soldiers described them, barely holding on to life.

When they arrived on that spring day, they saw piles of bodies, mountains of rotting flesh. German people, the Americans reasoned, should have to see what had been done in their name.Īnd so the soldiers brought a group of about 30 local officials to the camp. Buying groceries, playing soccer with their children, drinking coffee with their neighbors. How thousands of people could have been held captive, tortured, and killed at the camp, while just outside its walls was a small town where people were going about their lives as if impervious to the depravity taking place inside. The American soldiers wondered how this could have happened.

Many were burned in the crematorium or buried, but thousands of corpses remained aboveground. In Dachau’s 12 years of existence, approximately 41,500 people had been killed there and in its subcamps. They were given barely any food they died from disease and malnutrition, or they were executed. Its prisoners were subjected to hard labor, corporal punishment, and torturous medical experiments. It had operated as a training center for SS guards and served as the prototype for other camps. They vomited they cried.ĭachau was about 10 miles northwest of Munich, and was the first concentration camp built by the Nazi regime. Soldiers turned their heads and covered their noses as the sight and smell of the bodies washed over them. When Dachau was liberated in April and American forces came upon the railcars near the camp, they found corpses packed on top of one another. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

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