CIC Investigates Dachau Concentration Camp

Photo By Lori Stewart | Survivors of the Dachau concentration camp cheer their American liberators. (Courtesy USHMM)  

UNITED STATES

04.24.2023

Story by Lori Stewart 

U.S. Army Intelligence Center of Excellence

by Lori S. Stewart, USAICoE Command Historian

29 APRIL 1945
On 29 April 1945, elements of the 42d and 45th Infantry Divisions and the 20th Armored Division reached the Dachau concentration camp northwest of Munich. After the Americans liberated the 32,000 prisoners held there, a team from the 307th Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) Detachment began screening prisoners to locate Nazi perpetrators. Investigations continued for several months.

Dachau was the first regular concentration camp established by Nazi officials. The first inmates, primarily political prisoners, arrived on 22 March 1933 and, throughout the course of the war, more than 200,000 prisoners—political, criminal, religious, and “asocial” (other elements of society the Nazis deemed undesirable)—cycled through the camp and its subcamps. For twelve years, the prisoners were subjected to harsh punishments, forced labor, and executions. Nearly 40,000 died during internment.

In late April 1945, the Seventh Army advanced toward Munich, the capital city of Bavaria. As the soldiers entered the town of Dachau, they heard about a labor camp in the northeast part of town. Elements of the 42d and 45th divisions arrived at the camp from different directions almost simultaneously. Met by sporadic sniper fire, the assistant commander of the 42d “Rainbow” Division, Brig. Gen. Henning Linden, entered through the main gate and accepted the surrender of the Schutzstaffel (SS) officers.

The Seventh Army’s official report stated, “When the first American soldiers broke through the gates, there were more than 30,000 prisoners of every nationality, religion, and political allegiance.” Another 25,000 prisoners had, only days earlier, been forced to march to camps further from the Allied advance. This was in response to SS leader Heinrich Himmler’s orders that “Not a single prisoner must fall alive into enemy hands.” In addition to the survivors in the camp and from the march, thirty railroad cars on a siding near the camp contained corpses of prisoners transported to Dachau for disposal.

According to 12th Army Group CIC directives, upon the liberation of a camp, investigations and reviews of inmates’ cases were to begin “with the least practicable delay.” Lt. Col. G. Kenneth Crowell, the commander of the Seventh Army’s 307th CIC Detachment, immediately dispatched a two-man team to Dachau. While Military Government officials arrested the camp guards and staff, the CIC agents looked for the camp records. These, they found, had been burned just weeks before.

To get a true accounting of the camp’s population, the agents established committees which organized internees based on nationality. Then began the inventory of every individual. Over the next few months, several different CIC teams continued the inventory. The final count of 31,432 documented internees of forty nationalities and included six American and eight British men. More than 9,000 of the prisoners were Polish, and sizeable numbers of French, Italians, Slovenians, and Russians were present as well. More than 2,500 Jews were in the camp, as were nearly 400 women.

The CI agents were expressly looking for SS and Nazi officials and others who had perpetrated crimes against the prisoners. While many of the guards and administrators, including the commandant, had fled the day before American forces arrived, some who remained behind tried unsuccessfully to disguise themselves in prisoners clothing. The agents also apprehended several enemy spies, who snuck into the camp after its liberation to gather information on the proceedings and sow misinformation, and fifty-seven prisoners who were themselves guilty of atrocities. In a mass trial held from 15 November to 13 December 1945, forty people charged with war crimes in connection with the Dachau camp and its subcamps were convicted. Thirty-six defendants were sentenced to death, although only twenty-eight were executed.

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• Date Taken: 04.24.2023
• Date Posted: 04.24.2023 11:02
• Story ID: 443220
• Location: US