After the U.S. Army's 42nd and 45th Infantry Divisions liberated the concentration camp on April 29, 1945, survivors of the Dachau concentration camp defeated a concentration camp SS guard.
On April 29, 1945, the 45th Infantry Division of the U.S. 7th Army liberated Dachau, the first concentration camp established by the Nazi regime in Germany. On the same day, the 42nd Rainbow Division liberated a major sub-camp of the Dachau concentration camp.
January 27, 1945, Auschwitz
Founded five weeks after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, Dachau is located on the outskirts of the town of Dachau, about 10 miles northwest of Munich. In the first year, the camps held about 5,000 political prisoners, mainly German Communists, Social Democrats, and other political opponents of the Nazi regime. In the following years, the number of prisoners increased dramatically, and other groups were held in Dachau, including Jehovah's Witnesses, Roma, homosexuals, and habitual offenders.
Prisoners released from the Ebensee concentration camp in Austria, may 8
Ebenssee was a sub-camp of the Mauthausen concentration camp established by the SS in 1943 near the Austrian town of Ebenssee. From 1943 to 1945, the camp held a total of 27,278 male prisoners. Between 8,500 and 11,000 prisoners died in the camps, mostly from hunger or malnutrition. Political prisoners are the most common, and prisoners come from many different countries. Poor conditions, coupled with a lack of food, exposure to cold weather and forced labor make survival difficult. U.S. troops from the U.S. 80th Infantry Division liberated the camp on May 6, 1945. There are now residences at the site of the camp and a memorial cemetery nearby. The Memorial Tunnel, created in 1994, and the Epence Contemporary History Museum, created in 2001, provide visitors with information about the campsite.
Beginning in 1938, Jews began to become a major part of the camp detainees. Prisoners in Dachau were used as forced labor, initially for the construction and expansion of concentration camps and later for German armaments production. The camp was a training center for SS concentration camp guards and a model for other Nazi concentration camps.
January 27, 1945, Auschwitz
Dachau was also the first Nazi concentration camp to use prisoners as human guinea pigs in medical experiments. In Dachau, Nazi scientists tested the effects of freezing and changes in atmospheric pressure on prisoners, infected them with malaria and tuberculosis, treated them with experimental drugs, and forced them to test ways to make seawater drinkable and stop excessive bleeding. As a result of these experiments, hundreds of prisoners died or were crippled.
In 1945, German prisoners of war in American concentration camps were forced to watch a movie about German concentration camps
Thousands of prisoners died or were executed in Dachau, and thousands more were transferred to Nazi extermination centers near Linz, Austria, because they were too sick or too weak to work. In 1944, in order to increase war production, dozens of satellite camps were established near armaments factories in southern Germany and Austria as a complement to the main camp. These camps are managed by the main camp and are collectively known as Dachau.
Color photographs of life in the first concentration camp in 1933
In April 1945, following the Allied offensive against Germany, the Germans transferred prisoners of war from concentration camps near the front line to Dachau, leading to a general deterioration in conditions and an epidemic of typhus. On April 27, 1945, some 7,000 prisoners, most of them Jewish, were forced to begin a death march from Dachau to the distant Tegernsee in the south. The next day, many SS Guards abandoned the camp.
Ebensee prisoner in 1945
On 29 April, the 45th Infantry Unit liberated the main camp of Dachau after a brief battle with the remaining guards of the camp. As they approached the camp, the Americans found more than 30 train cars filled with various decomposing corpses. There were more bodies and 30,000 survivors inside the camp, the most severe being gaunt. Some of the Americans who liberated Dachau were so shocked by the condition of the camp that they shot machine guns at least two groups of captured German guards.
According to official reports, 30 SS guards were killed in this way, but conspiracy theorists claim that American liberators executed more than 10 times that number. German citizens of the town of Dachau were later forced to bury 9,000 death row inmates found in the concentration camp. Over the course of Dachau's history, at least 160,000 prisoners passed through the main camp and 90,000 passed through the sub-camp. Incomplete records indicate that at least 32,000 prisoners were killed in Dachau and its sub-camps, but countless others were transported to extermination camps elsewhere.
Wedding rings for holocaust victims near the Buchenwald concentration area...