“The vanguard of the 42nd Infantry Division arrived at the main gate to be welcomed by the infamous Arbeit Macht Frei signage and, a brigadier general recounted, ‘a yelling, seething mass of prisoners who broke through the steel wire fence at several places. . . . In this process several were electrocuted.’ Sixteen Germans were rousted from a guard tower near the Würm River canal. Witnesses subsequently disagreed on whether any resisted, but upon being disarmed and assembled in two ranks the men were gunned down by soldiers from both the 42nd and 45th Divisions. Seven bodies lay like bloody bundles on the canal bank, with others heaved into the water ‘amidst a roar unlike anything ever heard from human throats,’ an Associated Press reporter wrote. The rampage spent itself. Medics arrived, and grave diggers. ‘I haven’t the words to tell you how horrible it really is,’ an Army nurse wrote her husband.” – Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light
“Prisoners cornered kapos and suspected informers, clubbing them with shovels. Howling inmates pursued remaining Waffen-SS troops, some of whom were masquerading in prison garb. ‘They tore the Germans apart by hand,’ a soldier reported. Rabbi Eichhorn, who arrived at Dachau that afternoon, wrote, ‘We stood aside and watched while these guards were beaten to death, beaten so badly that their bodies were ripped open. . . . We watched with less feeling than if a dog were being beaten.’ Inmates desecrated dead and dying Germans with sticks and rocks, crushing skulls and severing fingers. One guard’s ‘body was strewn all over the place,’ a witness reported, ‘arms out of sockets.’ After entering the compound, soldiers from I Company herded several dozen Germans against the eight-foot stucco wall of a coal yard where, without warning, a gunner manning a light machine gun on a tripod opened fire. Others joined in with carbines and a Browning Automatic Rifle. By the time an officer halted the fusillade, seventeen victims lay dead. A battalion surgeon refused to treat the SS wounded.” – Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light
“On a chilly, sunless Sunday morning, April 29 [1945], the 45th Infantry Division, bound for Munich and badly frayed after vicious gunfights in Ascheffenburg and Nuremberg, arrived in Dachau town. ‘There are flower beds and trees, small shops, bicycles on the ground, churches with steeples, a mirror-like river,’ an Army physician wrote. There was more, as I Company of the 157th Infantry discovered upon following a rail spur toward the prison compound. Thirty-nine train cars—gondolas, passenger carriages, and boxcars—sat on the siding. Either in the cars or scattered along the tracks lay 2,310 decomposing corpses, some naked, others in tattered blue-and-white camp livery; most were Poles who had starved to death after being forcibly evacuated from Buchenwald. While GIs wept at the sight, four Waffen-SS soldiers emerged from hiding with hands high. A lieutenant herded the men into a boxcar and then emptied his pistol into them. Another GI pumped rifle rounds into those still moaning. ‘You sons of bitches,’ the lieutenant shrieked. ‘You sons of bitches.’ ” – Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light