LIBERATION OF DACHAU
On May 3, 1945, two weeks after President Roosevelt’s death and days after Mussolini was killed in Italy and Hitler committed suicide in Berlin, two nurses from Minnesota entered Dachau concentration camp outside Munich with their units. The smell of rotting flesh hung in the air. Boxcars packed from top to bottom with dead bodies sat along the tracks and roads that had brought two hundred thousand people to enslavement and where nearly forty thousand prisoners died during the twelve years it was open. More bodies were stacked in piles outside the crematorium. Beads of rain ran off the motionless faces. Dead dogs lay in kennels, shot by American soldiers after prisoners warned them the starving dogs were trained to attack. The army restored water, light, and disposal systems that hadn’t been working for several days, contributing to the deplorable conditions. German people in the area helped load the bodies onto carts to take them outside the gates for internment in mass graves.
The 116th and 127th Army Evacuation Hospitals converted the German SS barracks, scrubbing them down with creosol, emitting another pungent smell that Dorothy Wahlstrom and Vera Brown would remember for the rest of their lives. Dachau began holding ten thousand prisoners, but by the time the Allied forces arrived, the camp had grown to thirty-five thousand prisoners, most of them severely undernourished and ill due to overcrowding and poor treatment. The 116th and 127th Evacuation Hospitals were set up to accommodate twelve hundred patients each. They brought X-ray equipment, a pharmacy, two operating rooms, a sterilizing unit, and a dental clinic.
Even the living looked near dead: skeletal, shaved heads, protruding eyes. Some did not move, either too weak or scared. Typhus was rampant. Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) teams dusted the patients and premises daily to try to stop the spread of typhus via lice and rodents. Patients were first dusted with DDT and six hours later given a thorough bath, dusted again, put in pajamas, cataloged, and assigned to a ward. In addition to typhus, nearly a third of the prisoners had tuberculosis. Malnutrition was the largest problem, and many prisoners developed diarrhea when they began eating nutritious food.
The wards within the hospitals each held one hundred twenty patients, with two nurses to staff them during the day and one at night. The patients were Polish, Russian, and French. Some were priests. Jews had been brought for experimentation and extermination. Forty nationalities were represented. Language barriers were sometimes challenging for the nurses and patients. Soon patients were well enough to serve as translators. In one ward an Austrian doctor, quite ill with typhus, helped translate. The patients also started assisting each other as soon as they were strong enough.
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Emma Dorothy Wahlstrom was born in Gibbon, a small farming community in south-central Minnesota, in 1918. Her family moved to Clear Lake, Wisconsin, in 1925, and she graduated from high school there. Dorothy completed her nurse’s training in St. Paul at Bethesda Hospital School of Nursing in 1939. After working at Gillette State Hospital for Crippled Children, Dorothy joined the Army Nurse Corps on July 23, 1941. She was assigned to the 127th Evacuation Hospital, which was activated in March 1944 at Camp Bowie, Texas, a unit of the Fourth Army Division. She and other recruits trained there, including caring for German POWs hospitalized in six wards of Station Hospital at Camp Bowie. They left for Europe by train on January 8, 1945, a trip that would eventually land them at Dachau.
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Vera Brown had been assigned to the Dachau liberation after being part of the 127th Evacuation Hospital. She had been in Paris for V-E Day and saw the celebration: people “swinging from the upper floors of the Opera House. They were so happy the war was over, they didn’t know what to do with themselves.” She also saw the French people dragging prisoners of war down the street unmercifully. She had been with the 103rd General Hospital in Perham Down, England, an hour outside of London, where the unit was set up in a rush, a sure indication that the invasion of France was about to take place. Two days after D-Day the hospital accepted a “flood of wounded young men.” Vera administered anesthesia, mostly sodium pentothal and relaxants, sometimes nitrous oxide. Some of the more effective gases were not available because they were explosive. Vera and her colleagues worked around the clock trying to save men whose arms and legs had been shot off. Those who had been shot in the abdomen usually died. The nursing quarters were cramped, cold, and damp. Several of the nurses contracted tuberculosis while they were there. It was after these intense assignments that Vera Brown joined the evacuation hospitals at Dachau.
Vera had wanted to be a nurse from childhood. She pretended to wear a uniform and took care of other kids. Her dad discouraged her, saying she would have a career of emptying bedpans. She did her nurse’s training at St. Joseph’s Hospital in St. Paul. She loved the work and was offered a job at graduation in 1942 that promised to pay seventy dollars a week. When she saw that amount in her paycheck and found she was struggling financially, Vera joined the army, where she could make seventy dollars a week and get her room and board. She was assigned to Fort Snelling, where she proudly wore her blue army uniform. She was at Fort Snelling until March 1943, when she was transferred to Fort Warren, near Cheyenne, Wyoming and then eventually posted overseas.
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During six weeks at Dachau, Dorothy and the staff of the 127th Evacuation Hospital cared for 2,267 patients, most of them requiring treatment for a combination of diarrhea, malnutrition, typhus, and tuberculosis; 246 of their patients died. The 116th Hospital admitted an additional 2,057 patients, almost all of whom had typhus and were malnourished; 190 of those patients died. Dorothy felt as if they could not escape death. In the mornings, as she came to the hospital, seven or eight stretchers were lined up in front of each ward with those who had died during the night.
Dorothy and the staff of the 127th Evacuation Hospital stayed at Dachau until June 17, 1945. In addition to everything they witnessed, they carried the knowledge that Dachau was only one of the Nazi’s twenty-seven concentration camps and eleven hundred satellite camps. And although nearly forty thousand people perished there from 1933 to 1945, more than 2.3 million men, women, and children—Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, resistance activists, homosexuals, and other perceived enemies of the Third Reich—were imprisoned, enslaved, tortured, and abused; 1.7 million of them died across all of the camps and satellites. More disturbing is that the 1.7 million people who died in the camps are only a portion of the 6 million Jews who were killed by Nazis, shot in their homes, in the streets, in ditches and fields.
Dorothy Wahlstrom. Clear Lake Wisconsin Historical Society
The evacuation hospitals were there while others celebrated the liberation of Paris and V-E Day throughout Europe. During their posting, the American flag flew at half-staff for President Roosevelt. Dorothy, Vera, and the other nurses were not the only women at Dachau when it was liberated. Elisabeth May Adams Craig, a journalist writing for the Portland (Maine) Press Herald, originally from Coosaw Mines, South Carolina, was there. Elisabeth May began as a super model for Vogue magazine and then studied photography. From behind the camera, she became a US Army correspondent for Vogue during World War II and visited four concentration camps, including Dachau when Dorothy and Vera were there.
On June, 17, 1945, the 127th Evacuation Hospital moved by motor and train to Camp Philadelphia in France, where its staff was stationed for two months caring for war casualties as troops began returning to the United States. They returned to Camp Patrick Henry, Virginia, and the unit was deactivated on November 30, 1945, in Fort Benning, Georgia. Dorothy remained with the Army Nurse Corps for another year, until August 3, 1946, completing five years of service before being discharged at Fort Sheridan, Illinois.
Vera remained at Dachau for three months before she was reassigned to a women’s hospital near Wiesbaden. Finally, in December 1945, she had enough points (a measure of age, time served, service overseas) to be discharged. She boarded an Italian freighter so full the passengers had to sleep in shifts. They encountered a severe storm in the north Atlantic, and the ship pitched back and forth. They could see the propellers come out of the water, and one of the portholes burst. They landed in New York after fourteen days, and Vera took a train to Fort Des Moines for discharge. By the time she arrived, she had the flu, but once her paperwork was complete, she left in a car with her sister and brother, who had come to get her. On their way to Morris, they were caught in a terrible snowstorm. They drove as far as they could but eventually had to abandon the car and walk the last three and half miles in the storm. A big celebration had been planned to welcome Vera, but it was three o’clock in the morning when they arrived, and everyone had gone home.
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The war did not end on V-E or V-J day for Dorothy Wahlstrom. Upon retiring in 1981 due to arthritis, she concluded a thirty-five-year career with the Veterans Administration, St. Croix County, and other employers. Dorothy read about a Holocaust commemoration event being planned in St. Paul, Minnesota. She contacted a man mentioned in the article and was invited to speak at the event, held on April 18, 1985, at B’nai Emet Synagogue. Candles were lit in memory of the six million Jewish people who lost their lives in the Holocaust. A tribute was given to the liberators, and veterans responded. Dorothy also spoke:
I am aware that I am looking into the faces of many who survived the unimaginable darkness of these death camps…. I could describe the smells and sights and silence of death [in Dachau]. Only those who were there can truly recall them in all their vividness. In truth, one cannot escape from these thoughts even when one desires to do so. It was certainly a calculated attempt by the Nazis to desecrate not only the body, but also the mind and spirit! … It was truly a humbling, distressing experience to see our brothers and sisters in this terrible dehumanizing state.
I share with you vicariously that sense of profound sadness that seems to be touched off like a computer in the mind at similar sights and sounds around us, at any time and in any place…. Yours was the unmitigated pain and suffering and sorrow and loss and anguish and degradation—mental, emotional and physical. Truly you are living memorials to the fact that you have been sustained and have taken the victory over your suffering and anguish. You have raised sons and daughters, you have excelled in the professions and the arts and in the world of business and commerce. You have risen above tragic circumstances and blessed a world that hasn’t dealt kindly with you … flashbacks of the terror of the “Holocaust” victims have endured…. I find no comfort in what has happened, but rather that Sacred Scriptures record that the Lord will vindicate His Israel and that there will always be a House of David. I am truly grateful to the Lord for having allowed me to serve you, His people. Thank you for letting me come to you tonight to mingle my tears and my memories with yours. The Lord of Heaven and earth bless you and keep you and protect you now and forever.
Dorothy’s words that day reveal the pain and sorrow she felt for decades after her service, suggesting that nurses were susceptible to post-traumatic stress disorder. She died the following year and was survived by her brother and sister and several nieces and nephews.