This is from an excellent series The Boston Globe ran on WWII in 2001 after the declassification of numerous CIA files on WWII. The dark side of the Allied victory…
By Thomas Farragher / The Boston Globe Staff / July 2, 2001
It was a chilling spring dawn a lifetime ago, the day before Hitler’s suicide, a week before Americans danced in the streets to sweetly toast triumph in Europe.
But in that wan Sunday sunlight as the Allies raced for Munich and history, Felix Sparks, William Walsh, and John Lee were still combat soldiers trying to stay alive at the end of a long and bloody war. Still on fierce duty. Still hunting desperate Germans pushed to the brink of defeat and disgrace.
As the GIs were detoured into an intersection of righteousness and revenge at the Bavarian town of Dachau, they had no way of knowing they were marching toward one of the war’s most egregious but barely explored cases of prisoner mistreatment by US forces in Europe.
They could not have fathomed that they would soon find themselves at the center of a US Army investigation into a massacre of German soldiers that General Dwight D. Eisenhower worried might erode America’s moral authority to prosecute the Nazis at Nuremburg.
At first, they simply saw a train.
‘‘The first goddamn thing we saw were 20 or 30 boxcars,’’ said Walsh, a Newton native, his Boston accent chowder-thick. ''Some open at the top, some closed in. And here are all these goddamn people in it. And you kind of figure, well, maybe they’re sleeping. Maybe they’re hungry.
‘‘You soon realize: They’re all dead! What the hell is this? We had never seen anything like that before.’’
Few had. The horrific lexicon is familiar now. Concentration camps. The Final Solution. Six million Jews murdered by a megalomaniac on a satanic mission. The Holocaust.
But the war-worn members of the 45th Infantry Division, who received radio orders to take Dachau on April 29, 1945, knew little or nothing of concentration camps. They knew only what they could see, hear, and smell.
The sight of 2,310 decomposing corpses on that train, an edgy silence interrupted by episodic gunfire, and the stench of death that hung in the air that day ignited a deadly fuse. It would quickly explode with fury and linger like gunsmoke for more than a half century.
The word went out at Dachau: We’ll take no prisoners here. A machine gun was set up. Scores of captured acolytes of Hitler’s Third Reich were herded into a dusty coal yard and lined up against a stucco wall.
Then American gunfire crackled. Germans fell. Officially, at least 17 were killed. Eleven other Germans who had surrendered were shot in two other locations at Dachau that day, according to records and interviews.
As an eye blink’s worth of springtime light slipped onto black-and-white film from behind a camera’s shutter, the dark image that slowly took focus endures today. It is frightful evidence that the evil the Nazis manufactured at their death camps was strong enough to badly cloud the judgment of some Americans who tore down Hitler’s barbaric cages.
In an almost forgotten footnote of history, American investigators concluded that some of the GIs who rounded up elite SS troops during Dachau’s liberation were not heroes, but murderers - the ugly underbelly of the Greatest Generation.
‘‘It certainly has to be among the most egregious imaginable examples of misbehavior by the US military in the Second World War,’’ said Douglas Brinkley, director of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies at the University of New Orleans. ‘‘It’s a low point in an otherwise gallant effort to beat facism. It’s an example of what every commading officer does not want to see happen. … I think the general sentiment about this is: ‘Oh, come on. Look how horrible the Nazis were. I would have done the same thing.’ We give a bit of empathy to the soldiers who killed the Nazis. And yet, they became very much like the Nazis they were gunning down.’’
That sharp assessment is shared by some of the soldiers who witnessed the shootings. When forces have surrendered, their hands in the air, you don’t fire, they say. If you do, you cross the line that separates soldier from criminal.
‘‘That is not the American way of fighting,’’ Second Lieutenant Daniel F. Drain, who was ordered to set up his machine gun on that unseasonably cool April day, testified at the Army’s official inquiry 56 years ago.
But men like General George S. Patton did not believe that. Patton dismissed the murder charges with a flourish, tossing all of the investigative files into a trash can and telling the accused men to go home and get on with their lives, according to two officers interviewed by The Boston Globe.
One copy of the classified investigation survived, however, sandwiched into a gray cardboard box at the National Archives outside Washington, D.C., mislabeled, undisturbed for nearly 50 years, and reviewed by the Globe as the basis for this article.
The investigation was declassified in 1987, before the 3 million pages that have become available in the last few years under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, some of which have formed the basis for other articles in this series. Yet according to National Archives historian Greg Bradsher, some of the best material was declassified long ago, but never examined by anybody. ‘‘If something has sat here for 50 years and nobody’s used it, it’s basically news,’’ he said.
The report on the Dachau investigation tells a story that has gone virtually unreported in major American newspapers and magazines, meriting just several sentences, for example, in a 1995 US News & World Report account of the 50th anniversary of Dachau’s liberation.
Inside those archived files, however, is gripping testimony of citizen-soldiers – some of them just teenagers at the time – who never forgot the moment they confronted the devilish divide between good and evil. Walk a mile in my boots, those men later would implore, before passing judgment on what happened that day at Dachau.
The Rest Here.
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Thomas Farragher’s email address is farragher@globe.com.
