CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
THE LINDEN INCIDENT
ES GIBT EINEM WEG ZUR FREIHEIT. SEINE MEILENSTEINE HEISSEN: GEHORSAMKEIT, SAUBERKEIT, NUCHTERNHEIT UND FLEISS. (THERE IS A ROAD TO FREEDOM. ITS MILESTONES ARE: OBEDIENCE, CLEANLINESS, SOBRIETY, INDUSTRY.)
—MESSAGE ON A SIGN AT DACHAU
An inmate helps GIs pull a dead German soldier from a canal at Dachau. [National Archives]
SPARKS STOOD NEAR KZ Dachau’s gated entrance. It was now about an hour after he had arrived at the camp. Three jeeps carrying 42nd Division personnel appeared and pulled up a few yards from Sparks. In the first was General Henning Linden, the 42nd Division’s fifty-three-year-old assistant commander. In the second was reporter Marguerite Higgins, described by an inmate as “carrying the faintest hint of perfume among the smells, the disease … a miracle very difficult to accept.” Her blond hair was held in a scarf.
Higgins’s report of that day’s events in a front-page world exclusive for the New York Herald Tribune would be the greatest coup of her career. “It was one of the most terrible and wonderful days of the war,” she recalled. “It was the first and the worst concentration camp in Germany.” To avoid embarrassment and censure, however, her vivid account would make no mention of what happened next.
Linden and Higgins got out of their jeeps.
Linden was a short, rather chubby man and was carrying a riding stick. He walked over to Sparks.
“This lady would like to interview some of the prisoners,” said Linden. “She wants to go in there.”
Sparks looked at Higgins. She had a pretty face and large eyes. He had not seen an attractive American woman for quite some time.
“No,” Sparks said. “She can’t open that gate.”
Linden far outranked Sparks and was twice his age. He didn’t like this Thunderbird officer’s attitude one bit.
“I’ll take responsibility,” said Linden.
“General,” replied Sparks, “you’re not in your area of responsibility. You’re out of your combat zone. This is my area. I take my orders from my commanding general.”
Who the hell did Sparks think he was talking to?
“Colonel, there are some famous people in there,” Higgins explained. She named the Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller and the French premier Léon Blum. She had a list with her of what the Germans called Prominenten—“famous prisoners.”
“Lady, I don’t give a damn who’s in there.”
Higgins persisted.
Were any of the people on her list inside?
“I don’t know whether they’re here or not.”
It had been a long, emotionally exhausting day. Sparks was dead tired and fast losing his patience.
Higgins wouldn’t take no for an answer.
“Look at all those people pressing against the gate,” explained Sparks. “You can’t go in there.”
Linden had heard enough. He began to argue with Sparks, stating that he had greater authority because of his rank. Besides, he had earlier accepted the formal surrender of the entire Dachau complex from SS second lieutenant Wicker.
Sparks said his orders were to let no one in or out. He certainly wasn’t going to make an exception for a pompous general escorting a journalist, no matter how pushy and attractive she was.
“That woman’s not going to open that gate.”
To Sparks it seemed that Linden was only with Higgins so he could get his name and that of the Rainbow Division in the headlines. Sparks had lost good men because of the division’s actions and must have deeply resented Linden interfering in his sector of command. That very morning, I Company had reported being fired on accidentally by Linden’s men.
Sparks was now red in the face. In more than six months with Sparks, his interpreter Karl Mann had never seen this. He had never lost his temper, not once, although there had been plenty of reason to do so.
Linden and Sparks started to shout at each other. “There was a brigadier and a colonel arguing,” recalled one eyewitness, “ready to shoot each other over who had liberated Dachau first.” Sparks and his men had entered the complex first, but Linden and his party had accepted its surrender, hence the confusion and now violent disagreement over jurisdiction and command.
As Linden and Sparks shouted at each other, Higgins seized her chance. She ran toward the gate and then started to pull it open.
There was pandemonium. Prisoners surged forward.
“Shoot over their heads!” Sparks ordered his men. “Shoot over their heads!”
They did so.
“Charge the gate and close it!” added Sparks.
Again his men did as ordered.
Higgins ran back to her jeep in fear.
Sparks turned to Linden.
“General, collect your party and get out of here.”
“I’m relieving you,” replied Linden.
“No, you’re not,” said Sparks. “You don’t have the authority to relieve me. I’m in my territory.”
At a loss for words, Linden apparently then shook his fist at Sparks.
Sparks turned to one of his privates. “Escort the general and his party out of here.”
The private hesitated before he stepped forward and then raised his rifle.
Linden was understandably outraged. As Sparks recalled: “[He] had this little riding crop, carried I guess as his badge of authority. He whacked the kid over his helmet with it. Didn’t hurt the kid, rang his bell a little bit.” The blow was more than enough, however, to send Sparks over the edge: “That did it, I just exploded.”
Sparks drew his .45 and pointed it at Linden.
“You son of a bitch! You touch another one of my men, I’ll kill you right here.”
Sparks aimed at Linden’s head.
“If you don’t get the fuck out of here,” said Sparks, “I’m going to blow your brains out.”
Linden sat down in his jeep.
“All right,” he seethed. “I’ll leave, but I’ll see you before a general court-martial.”
An officer in Linden’s party, Lieutenant Colonel Walter Fellenz, then approached Sparks and began to argue with him.
“I’ll see you after the war,” threatened Fellenz.
“You son of a bitch,” Sparks shot back. “What’s the matter with right now?”
Fellenz backed off, returned to his jeep, and left, following behind Linden and Higgins.
Once Sparks had regained his composure, he issued further orders and made certain the concentration camp was secure as he had been ordered. Then he walked with Mann and Johnson to where his driver, Turk, was waiting nearby in their jeep.
Sparks got on the radio.
“We need food and medicine up here quick,” Sparks said. “Quick. Quick.”
At 4:35 P.M., Sparks also contacted his regiment and informed Colonel O’Brien that he had set up a command post in an administrative building inside the camp. Not long after, one of Sparks’s men entered the command post and said an officer was requesting Sparks’s presence. Sparks left his command post and in a nearby room met with a lieutenant colonel who told Sparks he was from the inspector general’s office with the Seventh Army. He wanted to question Sparks about his altercation with Linden.
There was a large crash. A soldier from an artillery unit attached to Sparks’s regiment had smashed a glass case holding antique weapons nearby.
Sparks angrily turned on the man.
“Get your ass out of here!” shouted Sparks.
“Can’t you control your own men?” said the officer.
Sparks said the man wasn’t under his direct command.
“Colonel, I want you to explain to me what happened with General Linden.”
“I don’t have time to sit around here,” Sparks shot back, “and gossip with you.”
Sparks returned to his command post. Later that afternoon, he met with General Frederick and Colonel O’Brien. Frederick was dressed in a winter combat jacket with a fur-lined collar. The sky was still gray. There was a chill in the air as Sparks gave his commanding officers a tour of Dachau. A Polish inmate explained some of the more notable sights.
The first stop was the dog pen. In an adjacent kitchen, guards had prepared meals for the camp’s canines. The meals were of far greater nutritional value than the thin cabbage soup and lumps of sawdust bread given to the inmates.
The Thunderbird commanders moved on to the next sight—the crematorium.
“Here, about one hundred to one hundred and fifty men were put to death each day,” the Pole explained. “Workers with grappling hooks dragged them into a waiting room next to the furnaces. There they waited to be cremated.”
The Pole then moved on to some gravel pits. Countless enemies of the Reich had been shot here, he explained. Not far away was an embankment, and along its base was a ditch covered by a wooden grating.
“Men were forced to kneel like this,” said the Pole as he knelt down to demonstrate, “and then be shot. Their blood drained into the ditch.”
Some of the victims that spring had been German officers suspected of plotting against Hitler. They had been dispatched with a single shot in the back of the head.
As they toured the camp, Sparks explained to Frederick what had happened earlier that day at the coal yard. He also told him about the confrontation with General Linden.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Frederick. “I’ll take care of that.”
Sparks took Frederick at his word.