CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
THE HOUNDS OF HELL
The effect of it just opened up a flood of raw emotions.
—FELIX SPARKS
The kennels at Dachau on April 29, 1945. [National Archives]
SPARKS SAW MANICURED LAWNS and rosebushes in full bloom, clearly well tended. To his left there was the sound of firing. He and his men carried on, keeping close to doorways in case of snipers, not bunching. He reached a central building with a large lobby. At one end were glass cases containing antique firearms. He again heard firing. He left the building but could not see where the shots were coming from. Poplar trees in spring bud and buildings obscured his view. Then he saw Lieutenant Bill Walsh emerge from between a couple of buildings. He was chasing a German.
“You sons of bitches,” Walsh was screaming repeatedly.
Walsh began to beat the German over the head with the barrel of his carbine.
“Bastards. Bastards. Bastards.”
Sparks ordered Walsh to stop, but Walsh ignored him. So Sparks pulled out his .45 and clubbed Walsh on the head with its butt, stunning him and knocking him to the ground.
Walsh lay there, crying hysterically.
“I’m taking over command of the company,” yelled Sparks.
One of Walsh’s men, Sidney C. Horn, recalled that seven men were needed to take a hysterical Walsh into a room and “get him quieted down. He really lost it there.” Walsh had gone “crazy,” as Sparks would later put it, overwhelmed like many of his men by the scenes of atrocity. Walsh later confessed: “I’ll be honest with you. I broke down. I started crying. The whole thing was getting to me. This was the culmination of something that I had never been trained for.”
A FEW HUNDRED yards away, Robert Antelme, the courageous French writer and resistance worker, still lay in his lice-infested cot, close to death. His barrack, one of thirty-four in KZ Dachau, had been designed for around two hundred and fifty people but now contained more than a thousand. He had been at the mercy of the Gestapo and then the SS since July 1944, having arrived at Dachau from Buchenwald on the same train, it is thought, that the Thunderbirds had just discovered.
There was the sound of gunfire not far from his barrack.
“They’re here!” someone cried.
Antelme found the strength to sit up. He glimpsed a green helmet out of the window. An American was walking past. Antelme propped himself up on his elbows. His internal organs were visible through his parchment-thin skin. He listened to his fellow inmates as they figured out what was happening.
The barrack soon filled with mad voices.
A man screamed.
Another clutched his head.
“Don’t you understand?” he cried. “We’re free! We’re free!”
Over and over, the man clutching his head shouted that they were free. Then he screamed and stamped his feet on the floor. Antelme saw more American helmets pass by outside. There was an old man lying beside him. Antelme was determined that he should glimpse freedom—an American helmet—before he died.
Antelme kicked at the old man’s feet.
“We’re free! Look, will you! Look!”
Antelme hit the man’s foot again, this time as hard as he could. The old dying man had to see freedom. He must see the Americans’ green helmets.
The man managed to move his head and turn toward the window. But it was too late. Sparks’s men had passed by.
Antelme fell back on his bunk. He knew he was dying. He had no strength, nothing left in reserve now. He was too weak to sing like the others, too emaciated to even crawl toward his liberators and embrace them. But at least he had seen it. He had seen freedom. He had glimpsed the green helmets of Felix Sparks’s men.
SCOUTS FROM I COMPANY discovered a building at the center of the Dachau complex. It was a hospital of some kind. A red cross had been painted on its roof. The scouts pushed their way into the building and discovered it was an infirmary for SS guards and soldiers, not for camp inmates. It was maddening to see well-cared-for SS men lying on clean white sheets.
Lead scout John Degro and others ordered the Germans lying in beds to get outside, where many soon cowered, hands in the air, some still bandaged. Then Degro and others hustled the SS men toward a nearby coal yard. “We kicked all the Germans into the yard,” recalled Degro. One of the men taken from the infirmary was Hans Linberger, a Waffen-SS veteran who had been wounded in a battle near Kiev when an anti-tank gun shell had exploded and blown off his left arm. He had also suffered shrapnel wounds, his fourth serious injury in combat, before arriving at the Dachau infirmary on March 9, six weeks before.
After hearing gunshots, Linberger would later claim, he had taken a Red Cross flag and gone to the infirmary’s entrance to tell the Americans it was undefended. A GI had stuck a gun to his chest, Linberger would also tell the German Red Cross, and then hit him in the face. Then the Americans had emptied the hospital and separated the SS from other Germans.
Linberger now stood with other SS against a stucco wall in the coal yard, adjacent to the Dachau complex’s heating plant. The men rounded up with Linberger were indeed SS, but few, if any, had served in a concentration camp—they did not belong to the SS-Totenkopfverbande (SS-TV) that administered camps in the Third Reich. In fact, very few of KZ Dachau’s actual guards were now in the Dachau complex—the vast majority had fled the day before, leaving other SS men quartered nearby to surrender the camp.
As far as I Company’s men were concerned, Linberger and the young men holding their hands above their heads were SS-Schutzstaffel, the “Protection Squadron,” their insignia of two lightning bolts indicating they were Hitler’s most fanatical troops. That was all that mattered. They had massacred defenseless GIs at Malmédy. They had ruthlessly employed flamethrowers to scorch the men’s fellow Thunderbirds to death at Reipertswiller that January. Always, they had fought hardest to kill the Americans, to slow their advance, most recently in Aschaffenburg and Nuremberg. They had, it appeared to the Thunderbirds, also overseen the unimaginable atrocities at Dachau.
SPARKS MOVED DEEPER into the Dachau complex. He and the platoon with him were “extremely cautious,” he recalled, as they searched every building. He heard rifle shots punctuating the strained silence with an almost reassuring familiarity. Then he discovered the source of the firing: His men were shooting guard dogs in a nearby kennel, which had at one time held as many as 122 “hounds from hell.” Other than Alsatians and Dobermans, there were Great Danes, boxers, and wolfhounds. Sparks’s men killed two dozen of the dogs that a former camp commandant, Egon Zill, had trained to attack inmates tied to metal poles. The SS had made prisoners strip at gunpoint, tied them to the poles, and then tapped the men’s testicles with sticks and urged the dogs to jump up and rip them off. When the victims had been neutered, the SS roared with laughter and rewarded their hounds with red meat.
The dogs died quickly, howling and whimpering as the Thunderbirds gunned them down. A soldier apparently used a dagger to cut a dog’s throat after it had been shot but stubbornly did not die. Just one of the dogs would survive, to be found a week later with a bullet wound, hiding in an SS barracks.
The dogs’ corpses now joined human ones littering the camp. Due to a shortage of coal, the SS had not been able to cremate the recent dead. So blue- and green-tinged carcasses lay piled in their scores outside barracks and, to Sparks’s utter horror, stacked to the ceilings in rooms near a crematorium. Hundreds had died in the last few days. “Since all the many bodies were in various stages of decomposition,” recalled Sparks, “the stench of death was overpowering.”
AGAIN THERE WAS a haunting silence. There were no more gunshots. Finally, the tens of thousands of inmates realized that the Americans had liberated the camp. The SS had clearly been dealt with. At last, it was safe to venture from their barracks. A prisoner called Kupfer-Koberwitz lay wounded in the inmates’ sick quarters and noted the reactions of his fellow survivors in a secret diary: “Everyone starts to move—the sick leave their beds, the nearly well and [others] jump out of the windows, climb over the wooden walls. Everyone runs to the roll-call place. One hears yelling and cheers of hooray.…”
The camp then erupted. Inmates began to shout and scream, producing a spine-chilling roar, a sound Sparks would never forget.
Inmates soon surrounded some of Sparks’s men. A Pole called Walenty Lenarczyk, inmate no. 39272 at Dachau, helped others grab Thunderbirds and lift them up. There were soon more than a hundred prisoners clustered around the Americans, trying to kiss their hands and their uniforms with the soft felt Thunderbird patches on their shoulders. “All we could think about were Americans,” recalled Walenty. “For the past six years we had waited for the Americans, and at this moment the SS were nothing. It was truly our second birthday.”
Lenarczyk saw four German SS guards making a run for it. The Americans could not open fire because prisoners surrounded them. Other inmates swarmed around the fleeing SS men, one of whom elbowed a prisoner out of his way. The inmates then attacked en masse and the SS men were killed, in all likelihood stamped to death.
Elsewhere in the camp, victims suddenly became victimizers and in several instances beat other SS men, their Kapos and informers, to pulps with fists, sticks, and shovels. It was as if with every stabbing action, every limb broken, every punch and kick, they were repaying each day of suffering. The Thunderbirds did little to intervene, turning their backs on two inmates beating a German guard to death with a shovel. The German, it was later learned, had castrated a prisoner. In another incident, Russian prisoners grabbed a German by his legs and tore him apart, his bones cracking loudly.
TWENTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD MARGUERITE HIGGINS and men from the 42nd Rainbow Division arrived that afternoon from a different direction to the Thunderbirds’. At the main entrance to the Dachau complex, they encountered tall and slim SS Second Lieutenant Heinrich Wicker of the Totenkopfverbande. Twenty-three-year-old Wicker had earlier that morning met with his mother, sister, fiancée, and two-year-old son inside the Dachau complex. They would never see him again.
Accompanied by Victor Maurer, a Red Cross representative, Wicker formally surrendered the Dachau complex to Brigadier General Henning Linden, the 42nd Infantry Division’s assistant division commander. It is assumed that Wicker was killed later that afternoon, either by inmates or by the liberators he had surrendered to.
Linden and his party then entered the complex itself. Higgins later described in a world exclusive how inmates called out to her in several different languages.
“Are you Americans?” asked one.
Higgins nodded.
Starving men, many in tears, swept forward.
“Long live America!” they cried.
Some were too weak to walk, so they crawled toward Higgins. The first to reach her was a Polish Catholic priest. He threw his arms around her neck and kissed her several times. She did not resist. Then she stepped back and pulled off her helmet and goggles. Her blond hair fell free. Her pretty young face with its slightly snub nose was visible.