Dachau massacre inmates

Most of the prisoners in the sub-camps of Dachau were Jews who had survived Auschwitz and had been brought on trains to Germany after Auschwitz was abandoned by the Germans in January 1945. Historians have described the massacre of dozens of SS guards at the hands of American GIs as arguably the most shameful episode in American involvement in WWII. Wearing the striped uniform of the concentration camp, happy prisoners at Dachau cheer troops of the 45th Div, 7th US Army who liberated them on April 30, 1945.

Dachau, Buchenwald and Mauthausen camps were simplymurdered after the camps were taken by the Americans in the final weeks of thewar, I testified. German soldiers after their surrender as prisoners of war to American troops were summarily shot and killed by such troops.

Located in southern Germany, Dachau initially housed political prisoners; however, it eventually evolved into a death camp where countless thousands of Jews died from malnutrition, disease and overwork or were executed. Hans Linberger survived the Dachau MassacreFive SS soldiers who have surrenderedHans Linberger was a Waffen-SS soldier who had been wounded in battle on the easternfront and, after a long hospital stay, had arrived at the Dachau SS garrison on March 9,1 945 as a member of a Reserve Company. The first job of the camp inmates will be to restore theother stonebuildings, which are very run-down.

He wisely surrendered the Dachau concentration camp to US forces. During the war, the treatment of prisoners of war was supposedly governed by the Geneva Convention, a document formulated in 1929 in Switzerland and signed by the major western powers including Britain, Italy, the US and Germany. To the early prisoners of the camps, a straight line to Auschwitz, or something like it, may have been discernible within a few months of Hitler’s assumption to power. Dachau was filmed and numerous still photographs have survived. Records indicate that at least 32,000 inmates died at Dachau, and countless more were transported to extermination camps.

Prisoners at the electric fence of Dachau concentration camp cheer American soldiers in Dachau, Germany in an undated photo. The number of these camps, and of the prisoners held in them, increased markedly late in the decade.