62 Years Ago, Thunderbirds at Dachau

I was going to write something about the 62nd anniversary of Dachau, the former concentration camp of Hitler's regime located about 30 miles north of Munich in southern Germany. The story below is so good that I was humbled into just referring you to it. My father was a captain with a medical unit in the U.S. Army's 45th Infantry Division (the "Thunderbirds"), and as such he assisted with Dachau's liberation on April 29, 1945. He spoke to me about it once. Only once. It was too difficult to remember aloud. I know the sights and smells and sounds he heard during his days at the liberated Dachau haunted him until he died in 1993. I visited Dachau in October, 1974. It has been preserved as a memorial "park," and although I saw a cleaned up, sanitized version of the hellhole that was Dachau, the sense of walking where my father walked, of being in a place where pure evil once reigned, left a deep impression on me. Sure, I'd read about concentration camps and heard stories. But to walk through Dachau made it seem more viceral, more tangible. This wasn't a story in a book. It was the actual ground. Here is an excerpt from a story about the Thunderbirds. The story includes, but is not limited to, passages about the liberation of Dachau. It is important history. I hope you read it. I hope you take something from it. As the 45th Infantry Division completed its drive on Munich, the unit was ordered to liberate the Dachau concentration camp. On April 29, 1945, three U.S. Army divisions converged on the camp: the 42nd Infantry, the 45th Infantry, and the 20th Armored. When the three units arrived at Dachau, they discovered more than 30,000 prisoners in the overcrowded camp. Just days before, about 2,000 inmates evacuated on a death march from the Flossenbürg concentration camp had arrived at Dachau and the SS guards had forced almost 7,000 Dachau inmates to move southward. On April 28, the day before liberation, a train bearing about 40 or so railway cars arrived at the camp. It had left Buchenwald four weeks earlier on April 7 filled with more than 5,000 prisoners. With few provisions, almost 2,000 inmates died during the circuitous route that took them from Thuringia through Saxony to Czechoslovakia and into Bavaria. Their bodies were left behind in various locations throughout Germany. When U.S. troops arrived in Dachau on April 29, they found 2,310 additional corpses on the train. The 816 surviving prisoners were taken to barracks within the camp..... MORE