CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
THE COAL YARD
To me belongeth vengeance and recompense; their foot shall slide in due time: for the day of their calamity is at hand and the things that shall come upon them make haste.
—DEUTERONOMY 32:35
Men from I Company, 157th Infantry Regiment, 45th Division, shortly after SS soldiers were shot in the coal yard at Dachau. [National Archives]
SPARKS DID NOT KNOW that Higgins and soldiers from the 42nd Infantry Division had entered the Dachau complex. Buildings and barracks blocked his view as he made his way to the coal yard where his men had lined up SS men against an eight-foot-high stucco wall. Lieutenant Bill Walsh was present, having calmed down somewhat and been restored to his command by Sparks. I Company’s Lieutenant Daniel Drain set up a machine gun. A corporal, Martin J. Sedler, stood next to the gun. Nineteen-year-old Private William C. Curtin lay down behind the gun and aimed it at around a hundred SS men standing against the stucco wall.
To Sparks, the situation now seemed to be firmly under control. The SS were under guard. Others were being rounded up elsewhere. Thunderbirds had been posted at various places around KZ Dachau to prevent anyone getting in or out, including at the main gate.
A private approached Sparks.
“Colonel, you should see what we found,” said the private.
Sparks left with the soldier.
Once Sparks had departed, time seemed to speed up as if in a dream, according to one of the I Company officers in the coal yard, twenty-five-year-old Lieutenant Jack Busheyhead, a Cherokee Indian.
Lieutenant Walsh ordered a private to keep his BAR machine gun trained on the SS troops lined up at the wall. If they didn’t stay back, the private was to open up on them. Some of the SS arrogantly refused to stay back against the wall, another Thunderbird recalled, and to keep their hands above their heads.
“Keep your goddamn hands up and stay back,” someone shouted.
Lieutenant Walsh then lined up riflemen and called for tommy gunners.
Private Curtin began to feed the belt into his machine gun. He pulled back a lever to cock it. It was ready to fire.
“Let them have it,” said Walsh.
Walsh opened up with his pistol.
Curtin fired three bursts, he later claimed, maybe fifty rounds in all. Then his machine gun jammed.
A medic called Peter Galary spotted an SS man, clearly an officer, who had not been hit.
“Drop to the ground,” shouted the SS officer.
Most of the SS did so, but three still remained standing, utterly defiant.
Galary grabbed for a fellow Thunderbird’s gun.
“Fire it over here.”
Galary wanted to kill the SS officer because he seemed to be the leader, but Galary’s fellow Thunderbird wouldn’t let go of his gun.
The firing continued.
Lieutenant Busheyhead also opened up on the SS, spraying them with his carbine. The firing lasted probably no more than a few seconds but it seemed like much longer. The Thunderbirds fired from left to right and from right to left.
An SS man beside Hans Linberger fell on top of him.
“The pigs are shooting at my stomach,” the man cried.
Blood from the man covered Linberger’s face.
An SS officer called Weiss was not far away.
“Stay calm, we die for Germany,” he said.
Sparks was by now around ten yards beyond the stucco wall. At the sound of gunfire, he wheeled around and ran back toward the coal yard. It took him perhaps five seconds to realize what was going on. Meanwhile, Arland B. Musser from the 163rd Signal Photo Corps snapped photographs. A film cameraman, Henry Gerzen, was also present and also recorded Sparks as he ran to the middle of the coal yard, pulled his .45 from his holster, thrust out his palm, shouted for his men to stop, and fired shots into the air.
The firing got everyone’s attention and stopped the shooting.
Sparks’s men looked at him.
“There will be no more firing,” said Sparks, “unless I give the order.”
He saw Curtin behind the machine gun. He ran over and kicked him in the back, knocking him forward onto the coal-dusted ground. Then he grabbed him by the collar and pulled him away from the gun.
“What the hell are you doing?” shouted Sparks.
“Colonel,” he blurted, “they were trying to get away.”
There were a few moments of silence.
Sparks turned to Lieutenant Drain. He was in charge of the machine-gun squad and now stood nearby in a state of shock.
“Lieutenant,” said Sparks, “let’s not have any more firing here.”
The Germans lay in piles at the wall. At least seventeen had been killed. As many as seventy-five men were on the ground, and many looked badly wounded. A Thunderbird ordered the surviving SS to stand up. Most were able to get to their feet. A private standing in the coal yard could not understand how they had survived with so many shots fired. Only now did other bystanders realize the enormity of what had just happened. It was wrong to shoot the Germans as they stood with their hands in the air, no matter what they had or had not done.
Corporal Henry Mills, standing nearby, was sickened by the killings.
I’ve been here too long. I’ve to go home now.… I want to see my mom.
Twenty-two-year-old Mills had not seen his mother for three years.
We came over here to stop this bullshit, and now here we got somebody doing the same thing.
It was not the American way of fighting.
Sparks ordered his men to help the wounded get to the infirmary. Some men began to do so. Others did not. They included medic Peter Galary, who later admitted that he refused to patch up the Germans who had been shot. Colonel Howard Buechner, the battalion surgeon, also failed to treat any of the wounded, according to a subsequent investigation.
Among the SS, a man named Jager asked Hans Linberger if he had been hit.
No, said Linberger, he had not.
Jager had been shot in his forearm.
Linberger gave Jager some chocolate. He was convinced they were about to be finished off. Then a Thunderbird medic, claimed Linberger, threw some razor blades toward him and others.
“There, finish it yourself,” the medic said.
Jager took a blade and slit his jugular vein.
LEAVING HIS MEN to deal with the wounded SS, Sparks moved on toward KZ Dachau’s confinement area with Johnson and Mann. After several minutes, they reached the area’s wire fence. Beyond it, thousands of inmates were cheering the Americans.
In a nearby barrack, twenty-one-year-old Jack Goldman listened to the commotion. When the Americans came, he did not have any clothing, just a soiled blanket he wrapped around himself to try to fend off the cold. He knew English, but when he tried to talk he couldn’t say a word. He was mute, too affected to speak. He saw a young Jewish Hungarian woman take off her shirt, pull out a needle and thread, and begin to sew it into a pair of underpants for him, his first clothes as a free man. More than four hundred thousand of her fellow Hungarian Jews had been killed in less than two months in 1944 alone.
Sparks’s men would later bring Goldman and others some scraps of food they found in a nearby warehouse. Goldman was also handed a discarded Waffen-SS uniform to put over his underpants. He refused to take the black jacket and trousers. So they found him a green uniform. That felt a lot better.
Goldman and his fellow inmates were no longer considered vermin. Sparks’s men asked him his name. He was no longer a number. He was a human being.
MEANWHILE, LIEUTENANT WALSH and other Thunderbirds from I Company had left the coal yard and moved toward the entrance to KZ Dachau. They found the main gates closed and guarded by other men from I Company. An inmate called Albert Guerisse, who represented the camp’s International Prisoners Committee, was standing near the entrance when Walsh approached. Guerisse was in fact a thirty-three-year-old Belgian resistance member who had operated an escape line, under the alias Patrick Albert “Pat” O’Leary, for downed Allied pilots until he had been betrayed to the Gestapo in March 1943.
Walsh was introduced to Guerisse.
“Are there any Americans in here?” asked Walsh.
“I don’t know,” replied Guerisse. “I think so, but there may be only one or two.”
“I can’t open the gates,” said Walsh, “but I want you to know there’s all kinds of medical supplies and doctors and food and stuff like this coming behind us, and they’re going to take care of you.”
“I want you to come in here,” replied Guerisse. “I want you to see what was going on.”
Guerisse was insistent.
“Okay, I’ll go in,” Walsh finally agreed.
He walked toward the gate with Lieutenant Busheyhead, the Cherokee Indian with dark swept-back hair, and a sergeant from I Company. The gate was partly opened and they squeezed through. Walsh followed Guerisse. He saw two or three men, perhaps Kapos or guards, who were surrounded by inmates and being battered to death with shovels. Walsh did not stop the killings.
Guerisse took Walsh to an area where the Germans, including the infamous Dr. Sigmund Rascher, had performed fatal medical experiments, testing hundreds of inmates for reactions to exposure, frostbite, and high altitude. Bodies were laid out on a walkway outside the building. They entered a barrack. Walsh saw an old man on the second tier of a bunk. He had a cigarette, a German one. It had water stains.
The man offered it to Walsh.
“Oh, no, you keep it.”
Hundreds of men were now staring at Walsh from their bunks.
“Take it,” said Guerisse. “That’s the only thing that guy owns in this whole world. That’s his everything … a cigarette. Take it.”
Walsh did so.
A FEW HUNDRED yards away, Colonel Felix Sparks walked toward the entrance of KZ Dachau, passing a guard tower at the edge of the confinement area. The tower was later identified as “Tower B” in an official investigation into the killing of guards that day. Sparks saw several bodies of SS guards, laid neatly in a row. They had been shot. Other SS men’s corpses floated in a nearby moat on the outside of the confinement area’s electrified fences.
Sparks finally reached the Jourhaus, a building at the actual concentration camp’s entrance, whose famous wrought-iron gate had a sign above it—Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Sets You Free). He saw that inmates were crying, laughing, singing their national anthems—there were more than forty nationalities in Dachau—and dancing with joy.
“America!”
“America!”
“Hurrah for the United States!”
Some were pushing against the barbed-wire fence. Hundreds climbed onto the roofs of barracks and other buildings and waved. A few were utterly dazed, others looked vacant, too overcome with emotion to even speak. Then Sparks saw scores of dirty, emaciated hands—clawing maniacally at other prisoners, ripping them apart.
Bodies flew through the air, prisoners tearing at them.
Sparks asked Mann to find out what was happening.
Mann returned a few minutes later. “They’re killing the informers.”
Sparks told Mann to tell the inmates to send their leaders to the fence.
“You must remain here,” Sparks told them. “We’re bringing food, water, and medical attention to you as rapidly as possible.”
Sparks was relieved when they listened to his instructions.
Some of Sparks’s men, taking pity on the inmates, began to throw them food. Sparks figured the starving survivors would soon begin to fight over the scraps.
“Don’t throw them any food!” he yelled.
A man appeared at the gate and said he was an American. Sparks’s men allowed him to exit. The man explained that he was in fact Major Rene Guiraud, an American OSS agent, one of an estimated seven Americans in the camp. Guiraud told Sparks that he had been captured on a secret mission and sentenced to death as a spy, but the Germans had not got around to carrying out the sentence. Guiraud was one of 31,432 people still alive inside KZ Dachau. The largest contingents of survivors were Polish (9,082) and Russian (4,258). There were more than 1,000 Catholic priests and 2,539 Jews. Hundreds of their fellow inmates, most of them victims of a typhus epidemic that had raged since the previous fall, had been left to rot in piles and pits.
Some of these corpses would later be buried, recalled Sparks, with the “forced assistance” of the people of Dachau, who had been indifferent to the suffering just downwind from them for more than twelve years. A few of these Germans would actually be made to handle the bodies. They all claimed they did not know what was going on inside the camp. This willful blindness would be the subject of much debate among shocked and nauseated correspondents who would visit the camp in the coming days and weeks. One even reported seeing locals scurrying past the thirty-nine boxcars packed with putrefying corpses, toward the SS barracks, where they stole what supplies they could find. Young children cycled past the rotting corpses, chattering away, excited, looted SS clothing hanging from their handlebars.