No Victory in Valhalla

by Ian Gardner

  3rd Bn followed the 411th IR into Landsberg by truck, passing KZ-I, while H Co made their way through Staustufe 15 and headed toward the edge of the woods. Ralph Bennett and Hank DiCarlo took their respective assault teams and moved forward to investigate the smoke. Advancing through the trees, the men began to choke on the stench of burning gasoline. Although they did not know it at the time they were about to enter KZ-VII – one of the last Kaufering camps to be liberated. Reaching the main entrance, Bennett and DiCarlo saw a number of smoldering huts and buildings. Except for one or two piles of burned corpses, KZ-VII appeared empty. Ralph took his men across the camp to investigate two huts that were still intact, while Hank approached a nearby pile of charred bodies: “I distinctly remember turning to Jimmy Igoe and saying, ‘What the hell would they burn logs for?’ It was then that we realized they weren’t logs but human beings. One man still appeared to be alive but was in a terrible state. As I stood considering what to do next, Jimmy came over and put the poor guy out of his misery.”

  The remaining huts had both been doused in gasoline. “I broke open the first door and found people inside,” recalls Ralph. “The other one seemed so overcrowded that some individuals looked to me like they had died standing up. We asked the people to come out, and when they realized we were friendly everyone wept. We didn’t know what to say. They couldn’t speak; it was overwhelming and I hope to God that some of them made it. I never want to see anything like that again because it changed me and the other boys forever.” It was rumored that before they surrendered a small number of Volkssturm had entered KZ-VII and killed two SS men who had remained behind to destroy the camp. About a dozen SS guards were brought back to KZ-VII after being captured hiding in the local area. “My machine gunner, Jack Grace, took these men aside and directed them to dig a pit,” recalls Hank DiCarlo. “When the trench was big enough, Grace directed them to stand in front while he mounted his machine gun on a tripod. Realizing what was about to happen, the SS men began begging for their lives.” Jack was just about to adamantly close the top cover on a belt of ammunition when Lt Ed Buss (who had recently been posted in from the States) came over and chewed him out. DiCarlo adds, “I truly believe that if the lieutenant hadn’t arrived when he did then those SOBs would have ended up at the bottom of the pit underneath the emaciated corpses of their victims.”

  Shortly after KZ-VII was “liberated,” 1st and 3rd battalions, along with Regimental HQ, Service Co, C/326, and A Battery, 81st AA Bn moved into Landsberg. 2nd Bn remained at Buchloe, 7 miles away to the east, while 321st GFA were sent to Holzhausen 3 miles west of Landsberg. The 12th Armored Division took control of the Kaufering camps and did an amazing job sanitizing and saving the surviving inmates from further harm.

  Even though Harley Dingman was acting sergeant major, his previous rank insignia remained in place. “Generally, when it came to selecting a billet for Col Patch and Battalion HQ, I’d choose a larger property owned by an elderly couple. We did our best not to disrupt families with children. Normally we would order, ‘Um 11 Uhr sind Sie raus’ – ‘be out by 11am.’” Clearly this was not the case for Harold Stedman and his 60mm mortar squad: “Five of us arrived at our billet and the family just stood and stared like we were from a different planet. There was a zither in the corner and I tried to tell them that I liked the kind of music it made. At this point the mother anxiously motioned to her daughter to play it for me. The girl turned out to be a very competent musician and the sensitive sounds she produced brought a welcome change from all the madness.” Piet Luitens and his team commandeered an expensive automobile from a local family. “The couple were so outraged that they went to see Col Sink and complained. Can you believe that? Of course the colonel told them to take a hike and threw them out into the street.”

  “Once things settled down, the local population were instructed to bring any weapons they had to the center of town,” recalls Lou Vecchi. “They brought in everything you could imagine, from antique shotguns to hunting rifles. A Sherman from 12th Armored then drove over the entire collection, crushing it to pieces. We figured most of those people who lived around the camp must have known what was going on. Some local factories paid peppercorn wages to the SS, who then supplied them with slave labor, so don’t tell me they didn’t know. These people were as much a part of the war effort as the German Army, but when death and destruction became a possibility most towns like Landsberg quickly displayed the white flag of surrender.”

  Upon orders from division, 1st and 3rd battalions rounded up as many of the townspeople as possible and escorted them to KZ-IV and a couple of the other camps so that they could witness for themselves the results of the atrocities committed by their fellow countrymen.

  Jim Martin recalls: “Although later on we visited in small groups like bizarre tourists we were somewhat unaware of the potential health risks.” Again, the men were warned not to feed or hand over food, but Jim Martin and his friends decided to ignore the order. “When we went in through the back gates I stupidly handed out some K rations, which was soon stopped by the authorities. The sight of this particular camp and the stench that permeated into our clothes was hideous.” Capt Cann, Ira Morehart, and Bob Izumi were speechless as they watched one ex-prisoner stoop to rip the gold teeth from a corpse before nonchalantly moving on to the next body.

  Lenny “Sam” Goodgal had only just returned to I Co after recovering from trench foot:

  Thankfully, I never got to see any of the concentration camps, as the battalion had me manning a machine-gun position on the outskirts of town with Pfc Ed Austin. Nearby we spotted three emaciated inmates in tattered striped clothing walking toward us. These three men turned out to be Russian and we gave them some of our bread and boiled up some D-Bars in a canteen to make it easier to eat. One of them was shaking uncontrollably and Ed gave him his overcoat. “Are you out of your mind … you’ll get charged for that – leave it to the Red Cross,” I scolded. “I’ve gotta do it Sam,” he replied, “I mean the guy is in poor shape and needs something now, not tomorrow!” A short while later an MP came along and took the Russians away, but it was only after they’d gone that I wished I’d done the same thing as Austin. Not long afterwards we picked up another inmate called Maurice who spoke five different languages and became a tremendous asset to I Co. He stayed with us until the end of the war and eventually became one of our cooks in Austria.

  The terror and despair of Dachau

  On May 2, the regiment moved east toward Munich (which had surrendered two days earlier) to Starnberg, situated on the northern end of Lake Starnberg. The 321st GFA transported about 80 Kaufering camp survivors to a German military hospital near Munich, as Ray Nagell recalls: “Many of the wards were requisitioned and the walking wounded ordered to make room for the emaciated prisoners. One German soldier with his arm in a sling refused to budge but quickly changed his mind when one of our guys pointed his pistol at him.”

  The 506th were given the job of helping process thousands of German soldiers who had surrendered around Munich. Many were just sitting around waiting for someone to come along, like these men witnessed by Piet Luiten and the IPW team as they drove along the river Isar: “We were riding in a German staff car and came across about 50 soldiers sitting by the roadside. As soon as they saw the vehicle they all started waving. When I got out they immediately called, ‘Wir ergeben uns’ – ‘We surrender’ – and started holding white sheets above their heads. As we were so close to the main highway, I told them to shift their butts and hand themselves over to next passing convoy.”

  Before the regiment moved to Miesbach, Col Sink summoned Ed Shames to discuss the possibility of sending a small team to Dachau (liberated on April 28). Ed was asked by Sink to provide him with a personal assessment of the camp that was believed to be a central hub for over 140 subsidiary facilities, including Landsberg. Sink handed Shames a file containing a few pieces of paper plus an aerial photograph and gave him two days to complete the task. Ed went back to his
platoon, now billeted in a nearby barn, and carefully studied the picture and his maps before formulating a plan of action. “I selected Carl Fenstermacker (who had recently returned after a spell with the Pathfinders) as my driver/translator and left Roy Gates and Paul Rogers in charge, before heading off at dawn the following morning.”

  Located about 10 miles northwest of Munich, Dachau was the first camp of its kind to be opened and operated by the Nazi regime for political prisoners, regular criminals, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Gypsies. Developed from a former World War I munitions factory, the “correctional facility” at Dachau was dramatically enlarged by the SS in 1937 using the plentiful supply of prison labor. Thirty-two enormous single-storey huts were built in two neat rows either side of a central roadway. Every block encompassed a set of self-contained barracks, each designed to hold 208 prisoners. The industrial area and railway sidings adjacent to the new camp were converted into a vast training center for the SS. At the same time, SS leader Heinrich Himmler began recruiting personnel to staff hundreds of new labor camps based on the blueprint modeled by his “super facility” at Dachau.

  The Jourhaus Gate, where the SS administration also had their offices, was the main entrance to Dachau. Access was via a small bridge across the Würm canal, which ran down one side of the camp. Although Dachau was not a death camp like Auschwitz it still possessed a gas chamber and small crematorium that was enlarged in 1942.

  Dachau was a labor camp where the prisoners were used in local German industry. Those who could no longer work were originally sent by rail to the Hartheim Center near Linz where they were murdered by lethal injection. However, toward the end of 1944 the SS began to use a rifle range and gallows located inside the crematorium compound to kill those deemed unable to continue working. Dr Fritz Hintermayor headed a small medical team that included Dr Klaus Schilling and Dr Bruno Fialkowski. These two physicians were responsible for thousands of malaria experiments conducted on over 1,200 priests who had been imprisoned due to their opposition to the regime. Dr Hans Eisele was in charge of Dachau’s surgical department and during the course of the war carried out countless cruel experiments on hundreds of innocent men, women, and children. By the end of April 1945, conditions rapidly deteriorated as more and more prisoners arrived from other camps like Landsberg.

  On the morning of April 28, 3/157 from the 45th ID reached the outer perimeter of the SS complex more or less at the same time as the 42nd ID. Ironically, ten of the guards had already fled, plus commandant SS-Obersturmbannführer Weiter and the medical staff. At the time the garrison contained around 560 SS troops, who were either recuperating from wounds in the base hospital or attending courses at the training school.

  At 1100hrs, after a brief gun battle (in which 30 SS soldiers were killed), junior SS officer Heinrich Wicker surrendered to BrigGen Henning Linden, outside a secondary entrance that led into the camp from the SS compound. As the scale and purpose of Dachau became apparent, elements of I/157 led by their XO, 1st Lt Jack Bushyhead, headed into the SS area where almost immediately they gunned down 122 enemy soldiers who were mostly from the Waffen-SS. Around 40 of the guards who had donned civilian clothing were also caught and beaten to death with shovels by some of the inmates. Over the next 3 hours several hundred more SS troops were killed by I Co, while the 42nd ID cleared the area up to the Jourhaus Gate.

  Four days later, as Ed Shames and Carl Fenstermacker were driving toward Dachau, they noticed the same disgusting smell that had permeated around Landsberg, but far worse. The weather was getting warmer as Fenstermacker turned off the main road alongside the railway tracks originally designed to support the nearby munitions factories. Among the open carriages parked in the sidings were 30 abandoned boxcars from KZ-IV at Kaufering and Buchenwald. With double doors wide open, each carriage contained around 20 corpses rotting in the morning sun. Several large piles of clothing lay nearby, left behind by the inmates who were marched to Tegernsee.

  As the two paratroopers stood motionless surveying the scene they concluded that this must have been the very last train to arrive. Wiping away the tears, Ed and Carl got back in their jeep and drove through the industrial area, past the Kommandantur’s HQ, toward a neatly planted row of tall poplar trees either side of the main entrance. Crossing over the bridge outside Dachau’s Jourhaus Gate, the vehicle was stopped at a US checkpoint before being given permission to enter. Ed stole a glance at Carl as they continued ahead through the low archway that opened onto an enormous parade square or Appellplatz (which had previously been the site of countless executions).

  The first thing Ed noticed was the three-storey, 60ft high guard tower on the other side of the square. The place was ridiculously overcrowded, with over 30,000 people, many simply wandering around devoid of all human reason. The men were overwhelmed by the scale compared with what they had previously seen at Landsberg. Being Jewish, it was unbelievably hard for Ed to absorb.

  Many of the prisoners were dressed in filthy blue and white-striped jackets and trousers with blue skullcaps. However, others, still wearing civilian clothes, had large white crosses painted on their backs because the camp quartermaster had run out of prison clothing several weeks before the liberation.

  Over on Ed’s right were the main support buildings belonging to the SS, containing kitchen, laundry, showers, and workshops as well as a prewar underground cell system. The large U-shaped structure spanned the entire width of the camp and had the following message emblazoned in gigantic white letters across its roof: “THERE IS ONE PATH TO FREEDOM. ITS MILESTONES ARE OBEDIENCE, HONESTY, CLEANLINESS, SOBRIETY, HARD WORK, DISCIPLINE, SACRIFICE, TRUTHFULNESS & LOVE OF THE FATHERLAND.”

  To their left, Shames and Fenstermacker could see the two rows of wooden barracks partly obscured by smoke emanating from thousands of small cooking fires. Putting the jeep in second gear, the two men slowly drove through the crowds along the central roadway to the far side of the camp where the gas chamber was located. The sizable building was officially known as “Brausebad” or “Shower bath.” German records state that these were very rarely used, as the SS preferred to work their prisoners to death – hence the need for an onsite crematorium to dispose of the corpses. The piles of naked bodies that were still waiting to be cleared away made Ed feel sick. Carl kept asking, “Entschuldigung bitte, spricht hier jemand Deutsch [excuse me, does anyone here speak German]?”

  “As we were moving around I noticed one particular lady whose behavior was different from the rest,” recalls Ed. He continues:

  Like many others she was just skin and bone but seemed to be making a terrible, penetrating, primeval wailing sound. Eventually we came across a guy who seemed much stronger than the other inmates who could talk to us in German. The man was from a small village in western Poland, called Zary, near Zagan (close to the German border) where his parents had run a bakery. He went on to say that his family had all been murdered and he’d survived because of his baking skills, which had been deemed useful to the Germans here in Dachau.

  During our conversation with the baker we inquired about the woman who was still shrieking in the background. “Oh her, well, yes, she’s a kind of ‘show piece’ – a trophy for the Germans,” he replied. “What on earth do you mean by trophy?” “About two years ago she arrived here with her six-year-old daughter. A couple of the guards tried to separate them at the station but she put up quite a struggle before they eventually prized the child away. One of the guards threw the kid to the ground and stamped her to death until the intestines ran from her mouth.” Carl and I were almost speechless and just couldn’t understand how afterwards the mother could become a “trophy.” The baker soon put us right. “Don’t you people get it? They used her as an example to others as to what might happen if discipline and obedience weren’t observed.” Carl was becoming an emotional wreck as he translated all of this crazy stuff to me and the morning just went on and on like that. Totally unbelievable.

  The full death toll at Dachau will
never be fully known but it is estimated to be somewhere around 28,000 people. In the words of Ed, “The stench and horror of that place will stay with me for as long as I live, and I’d like to tell you more but it’s now buried so deep inside me that it can never come out.”

  Eventually some justice was done. Johann Eichelsdorfer was tried and summarily executed on May 29, 1946 at Landsberg Prison (which became US War Criminals Prison No. 1), along with 22 other war criminals responsible for Dachau and other satellite camps.

  14

  “The roaring silence”

  Berchtesgaden, Austria, and France – May 4–November 30, 1945

  While looking around Miesbach for a suitable billet, Harley Dingman came across a large property with a grand piano. An accomplished pianist, Harley sat down and began playing a haunting romantic melody by German composer Robert Schumann. “As my fingers moved over the keys I magically lost all sense of the surroundings. Bizarrely, a small audience of older people began to gather behind me. As the last note tapered away I turned around and smiled as the crowd dispersed without uttering a single word.”

  “If we found a nice place to stay I simply evicted the owners,” recalls Ed Shames. “Often when entering a village I’d go straight to the Burgermeister with a demand that all weapons be brought in for disposal. Anyone found to be hiding anything after the amnesty would be severely dealt with. It was amazing what would turn up alongside the regular rifles and pistols, such as the most beautiful antique hunting rifles and swords. Of course we helped ourselves to many of these items before handing the rest over to the authorities. My particular interest was the 9mm Luger but each one I acquired had to be in pristine condition.”