THIS DAY IN HISTORY: APRIL 29, 1945
Today is the 77th anniversary of the Liberation of Dachau. Interestingly enough, that event has a personal connection to your author.
First, an interesting bit of history about the liberation. The “Liberator” wasn’t a soldier. She wasn’t even in the military. She was 24-year old Margueritte Higgins, reporting for the New York Herald Tribune, who had bent every rule to finally get out of London and over to Europe, finally arriving in February 1945. The first woman to edit The Daily Cal at Berkeley in 1940 had been trying since her graduation in 1942 to become a “real” war correspondent. Being six feet tall, it really wasn’t surprising that she was mistaken for a soldier at Dachau. She would go on to write the best accounts of the Berlin Airlift and at age 29 was the first woman reporter to win the International News Pulitzer in 1950 for her first-person reporting of the disaster of the first six months of the Korean War. The specific winning article was “Everybody Get Down, Here We Go!” which she wrote from a foxhole on Red Beach after landing in the first wave at the Invasion of Inchon in September 1950.
(You can read it here: https://www.pulitzer.org/article/marguerite-higgins-hits-red-beach)
Here’s her scoop report - the first published account of the liberation of a concentration camp - which appeared on the front page of the International Herald Tribune on May 1, 1945:
“(Germany, April 29, 1945) Troops of the United States 7th Army liberated 33,000 prisoners this afternoon at this first and largest of the Nazi concentration camps. Some of the prisoners had endured for eleven years the horrors of notorious Dachau.
“The liberation was a frenzied scene: Inmates of the camp hugged and embraced the American troops, kissed the ground before them and carried them shoulder high around the place.
“The Dachau camp, in which at least a thousand prisoners were killed last night before the SS (Elite Guard) men in charge fled, is a grimmer and larger edition of the similarly notorious Buchenwald camp near Weimar.
“This correspondent and Peter Furst, of the Army newspaper, Stars and Stripes, were the first two Americans to enter the enclosure at Dachau, where persons possessing some of the best brains in Europe were held during what might have been the most fruitful years of their lives.
“While a United States 45th Infantry Division patrol was still fighting a way down through S.S. barracks to the north, our jeep and two others from the 42d Infantry drove into the camp enclosure through the southern entrance. As men of the patrol with us busied themselves accepting an S.S. man’s surrender, we impressed a soldier into service and drove with him to the prisoners’ barracks. There he opened the gate after pushing the body of a prisoner shot last night while attempting to get out to meet the Americans.
“There was not a soul in the yard when the gate was opened. As we learned later, the prisoners themselves had taken over control of their enclosure the night before, refusing to obey any further orders from the German guards, who had retreated to the outside. The prisoners maintained strict discipline among themselves, remaining close to their barracks so as not to give the S.S. men an excuse for mass murder.
“But the minute the two of us entered, a jangled barrage of “Are you Americans?” in about 16 languages came from the barracks 200 yards from the gate. An affirmative nod caused pandemonium.
“Tattered, emaciated men weeping, yelling and shouting “Long live America!” swept toward the gate in a mob. Those who could not walk limped or crawled. In the confusion, they were so hysterically happy that they took the S.S. man for an American. During a wild five minutes, he was patted on the back, paraded on shoulders and embraced enthusiastically by the prisoners. The arrival of the American soldier soon straightened out the situation.
“I happened to be the first through the gate, and the first person to rush up to me turned out to be a Polish Catholic Hlond, Primate of Poland, who was not a little startled to discover that the helmeted, uniformed, begoggled individual he had so heartily embraced was not a man.
“In the excitement, which was not the least dampened by the German artillery and the sounds of battle in the northern part of the camp, some of the prisoners died trying to pass through electrically charged barbed wire. Some who got out after the wires were decharged joined in the battle, when some ill-advised S.S. men holding out in a tower fired upon them.
“The prisoners charged the tower and threw all six S.S. men out the window.
“After an hour and a half of cheering, the crowd, which would virtually mob each soldier that dared to venture into the excited, milling group, was calmed down enough to make possible a tour of the camp. The only American prisoner, a flyer, with the rank of major, took some of the soldiers through.
“According to the prisoners, the most famous individuals who had been at the camp had been removed by S.S. men to Innsbrueck. Among them were Leon Blum, former French Premier, and his wife; the Rev. Martin Niemoeller, German church leader; Kurt Schuschnigg, Chancellor of Austria at the time of the anschluss (he was said to have been alive a few days ago); Gabriel Piquet, Bishop of St. Etienne; Prince Leopold of Russia; Baron Fritz Cirini, aide to Prince Leopold; Richard Schmitz, former Mayor of Vienna; and Marshal Stalin’s son, Jacob.
“The barracks at Dachau, like those at Buchenwald, had the stench of death and sickness. But at Dachau there were six barracks like the infamous No. 61 at Buchenwald, where the starving and dying lay virtually on top of each other in quarters where 1,200 men occupied a space intended for 200. The dead—300 died of sickness yesterday—lay on concrete walks outside the quarters and others were carried out as the reporters went through.
“The mark of starvation was on all the emaciated corpses. Many of the living were so frail it seemed impossible they could still be holding on to life.
“The crematorium and torture chambers lay outside the prisoner inclosures. Situated in a wood close by, a new building had been built by prisoners under Nazi guards. Inside, in the two rooms used as torture chambers, an estimated 1,200 bodies were piled.
“In the crematorium itself were hooks on which the S.S. men hung their victims when they wished to flog them or to use any of the other torture instruments. Symbolic of the S.S. was a mural the S.S. men themselves had painted on the wall. It showed a headless man in uniform with the S.S. insigne on the collar. The man was astride a huge inflated pig, into which he was digging his spurs.
“The prisoners also showed reporters the grounds where men knelt and were shot in the back of the neck. On this very spot a week ago a French general, a resistance leader under General Charles de Gaulle, had been killed.
“Just beyond the crematorium was a ditch containing some 2,000 bodies, which had been hastily tossed there in the last few days by the S.S. men, who were so busy preparing their escape they did not have time to burn the bodies.
“Below the camp were cattle cars in which prisoners from Buchenwald had been transported to Dachau. Hundreds of dead were still in the cars due to the fact that prisoners in the camp had rejected S.S. orders to remove them. It was mainly the men from these cattle cars that the S.S. leaders had shot before making their escape. Among those who had been left for dead in the cattle cars was one man still alive who managed to lift himself from the heap of corpses on which he lay.”
And now flash forward 13 years to 1958, in Denver, Colorado.
The spring of 1958 was a momentous time for those of us who lived in South Denver. A Jewish synagogue was being built on a hill overlooking one of the main commercial areas of South Denver, the newly-created Cherry Creek Shopping Center, the first mall in Colorado, a monument to the Greatness of America. The “nickname” kids gave the project was “Kike’s Peak,” and no one thought anything about saying that. Denver was a very segregated city: South Denver was where the (anglo) white working and middle classes lived - we went to South High School, “The Rebels” and waved the Stars and Bars from our cars on Colors Day and at athletic events, and no one thought anything of that; East Denver was where the Jews and the Rich White People lived - they went to East High School, the major athletic competitors of South High; the Negroes lived in the central part of town and went to Manual Arts High School; the Italians and the Polacks lived in North Denver and went to North High School - their football team was considered “dangerous;” the Mexicans lived in West Denver and went to West High School.
People stayed “where they belonged,” and so the building going up on “Kike’s Peak” got a lot of interest. Someone even tried to start a fire among the construction materials there one night, but the Denver Fire Department was on the job and nothing important was harmed. The Denver Police stopped robbing stores (a Major Scandal about the DPD burglary ring was then unknown but in the near offing) and kept two cruisers there afterwards until it was completed in May.
In June, the kids from the Congregational Church I attended by my choice - the minister there went by “Bruce” and the teenagers really liked him, and there was a girl I really liked who went there, my original reason for so doing; my parents were just happy I had “found religion” and was going to church - I even went to a week of Church Camp that June. Bruce went with us.
The first day after we arrived, Bruce introduced us to a stranger who arrived that morning. He was Bruce’s guest - the Rabbi of “Kike’s Peak”!
He told us the story of how he, a “secular Jew,” became an officer during the war after he graduated from Denver University. He was assigned as a platoon leader in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. They were different from everyone else: the men were Japanese-Americans who had been in “concentration camps” (this was the first time we ever heard of this event, also), and they became the most-decorated unit in the army for battlefield bravery. They were the first troops to enter Dachau.
(As an aside, the “white” officers who commanded “non-white” troops during the war were mostly “honorary whites”: Jews, Italians, Poles, other Eastern Europeans, etc. - their service during the war got them a permanent promotion to “white.”)
The young Jewish officer had a Brownie camera and he went all over the camp that day and took three rolls of film, which he didn’t develop until he returned to Denver after the war. The experience of Dachau changed him, and he came home and studied to become a Rabbi, and he took as his “rabbinical mission” the task of Telling The Story of the Holocaust to the Gentiles.
And so he took out the box of 3x3 Black and White photos, and began passing them around, describing what each showed before he did so. “I took these to make sure that I would remember that this really happened.”
Several of my fellow campers broke out in tears when they saw the photos - these were not the “edited” and “censored” photos one normally sees of the Holocaust. These were The Real Deal.
When kids had started calling the synagogue “Kike’s Peak,” I had been uncomfortable hearing that, though I couldn’t explain why.
After I saw the photos and heard the Rabbi’s story, I knew why.
Somehow, the thing that made Denver the way it was, was the thing that had done this. I didn’t know how or why, but that was the day I set out to find out. It turned out to be a long journey, which continues.
Good news: South High stopped being The Rebels and put aside the Stars and Bars 50 years ago - as a result of a campaign by the students to change that in the atmosphere of “The Sixties.”
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I am crying as I read. My NW Chicago was so like Denver and it would be in my 20s that I realized this. My tears run, even now as I write this, because Dachau was ... and could have been the product of our lesser angels. The hate and mostly the indifference to those lessers let all that, as Margueritte Higgins and you wrote about here, happen. I can see the early steps with soft facism and the arching of attitudes in the far right in our country, in Ukraine and Russia, in Israel, in France, in Hungary and other Western democracies laying a more nuanced groundwork toward the same genocide. Thanks, TC. We who remembered have to be reminded. Those who only read about it in short, cleaned up Readers Digest versions of a history they were never a part of, must be taught. Never forget. Light the candle and repeat the story, share the truth in every household and school of this history lived and died for. Thousands, hundreds of thousand, millions with cruelty and intent, murdered in the name of ideology and indifference to life other than ones own. Thanks.
Great commentary, Tom. I suspect many of us on our side of the racial struggle "fence" had similar experiences. I grew up on Long Island and until I went to high school, I had never met a black person "in person", only in the movies..... But even then, literature and PBS did a job of educating me on how things were not so rosy for many people of color.
Two things stand out. On PBS, a black entertainer described his childhood in a mixed neighborhood. One day, the other kids, all white, started a game - when they saw him, they'd run down the street yelling "here comes the nigger, here comes the nigger!" He joined in, running down the street, yelling the same thing, not realizing that HE was the "nigger"..... That was #1.
Second was a well-known short story "A Short Wait Between Trains" - based on a true incident, it tells the story of several black soldiers waiting to be sent overseas to fight in North Africa, getting off a train in the south to have lunch. They are told they cannot eat in the station's dining room, but have to go out back to the kitchen where they will get what's left over from the meal being served inside. They happen to look inside the dining room and see that the people being fed inside are German prisoners of war being sent to a prison camp - being treated better than black soldiers fighting for the country..... Needless to say, it made quite an impression - fortunately one that has stuck with me over 60 years later. I'm with Rodney King - can't we all just get along?