In the winter of 1944-45, the conditions in the protective custody camp at Dachau went from terrible to horrific.
The full military and political collapse of Nazi Germany was only a matter of a few months away. The incursion of the Allies into German territory meant that the Nazi regime was hastily evacuating other concentration camps to Dachau. These evacuations swelled the camp population, resulting in a huge influx of exhausted and near-dead prisoners. Typhus wreaked havoc in the camp, with 3,000 prisoners dead from the disease by early 1945.95
When the Nazi state figuratively crossed the Rubicon in the early months of 1945, determined to fight to the very last man, the fate of a huge number of prisoners held in awful conditions in Dachau hung in the balance. Allied aircraft were flying over the SS complex and the prisoner camp, whilst the SS were scurrying to cover up the documentary evidence of their crimes, with many SS preparing to make good their escape. Himmler wanted the prisoners killed, and rumours circulated in the camp as to how this would be carried out. Bombing, gassing and shooting were all possible.
The prisoners’ leaders were desperately trying to devise plans to cope with this dreadful scenario. It was clear that the Nazis could try and kill the prisoners or that they would force the prisoners to march from the camp to an unknown destination. The best hope for the prisoners was to remain in the camp and pray that the Allies would be able to liberate them before Himmler’s plans were put into action. Many thousands of prisoners stayed in the camp, but for thousands of others, so close to liberation, a final and terrible ordeal was about to begin.
On 26 April 1945 at 10 p.m., after hours of confusion, a march of around 7,000 prisoners left the camp at Dachau.96 The SS escorted this column of exhausted and bedraggled prisoners as it slowly moved southwards towards the Alps; those who could not keep up the pace were murdered with a bullet in the head. The prisoners on the death march, who were physically shattered, with many on the very brink of death, expended the last of their energies in a desperate struggle to stay alive. The United States Army eventually liberated this death march on 2 May 1945,97 yet for many this came hours too late, and it is estimated that this death march claimed the lives of over 1,000 prisoners.
Plate 36: Liberated prisoners ‘On the Edge of Freedom’ (photograph courtesy of the Hulton Archive and Getty Images)
For those prisoners who remained in Dachau Concentration Camp, liberation came a few days earlier than their comrades on the death march. At 3.15 p.m. on the afternoon of Sunday 29 April 1945, the first US troops began to enter the camp. Some SS men were shot, and the prisoners celebrated their first taste of freedom with a show of flags, proudly depicting their home nations. To the cheers and tears of the prisoners, the liberation of thousands had been achieved.98 Despite the joy of liberation, there still remained some hugely important challenges to be dealt with – ensuring that the overcrowded camp did not descend into anarchy, burying thousands of corpses and containing the typhus epidemic which was rampaging through the prisoner population. Despite the best medical efforts of the American liberators, a further 2,221 former prisoners died from typhus and other serious conditions in the weeks following their release from tyranny.99
Plate 37: In the Machine by Nandor Glid
The centrepiece of the Memorial Site, commissioned, designed and erected to remember all the victims who met their fate in Dachau is the non-denominational International Memorial, which dominates the area in front of the museum building. This work is called In the Machine by the Yugoslavian contemporary sculptor Nandor Glid, himself an orphan of the Holocaust.100 The commission to design the International Memorial was allocated by way of a competition, which was won by Glid.
Inherent in the piece are three crucial motifs forming the brief that the competing artists had to work towards; suffering of the victims, solidarity, and optimism for the future. This sculpture, unveiled and dedicated on 9 September 1968, is 16 metres long and 6.3 metres high,101 made of black bronze, with a mêlée of figures appearing as if caught in barbed wire, their mouths open in cries of anguish. Barbed wire formed an important motif in the camp; it physically enclosed the prisoners, yet some prisoners ran into the barbed wire to commit suicide, the ultimate act of self-determination and resistance to Nazi terror.102 Close to the barbed wire and human-looking shapes in black bronze there is a colourful sculpture that also forms part of Glid’s work. The three large links are designed to evoke images of solidarity in the concentration camp between the prisoners. The triangles symbolise the prisoner patches, which the SS designed and forced the prisoners to wear by way of identification. These prisoner patches were a crucial part of the humiliation that the prisoners suffered, in that their identity was reduced to a number and a coloured cloth patch on a striped uniform.
Plate 38: In the Machine by Nandor Glid