You should post it here. Especially for some of our young posters that lack education on WWII.
Excerpt account of Lt Toolan:
After the battle of Munich, which wound up on 1 May, the 45th Division doughboys overran Dachau, one of the infamous German ROW extermination centers. This was a camp for civilian political prisoners which originally accommodated 60,000 people. Lt. Toolan landed outside the compound just as the GI's hit the camp. The first sight that greeted them was a train of gondola cars, on a railroad siding, loaded with bodies ready for the crematorium. Some of them were still alive and moving. The GI's went beserk and killed every German in the camp that they could find. I saw one sergeant stop a German and fire an entire clip from a Thompson MG into him. There were no enemy prisoners taken. Moving into the prison compound, we found only scarecrows left, which later numbered 20,000. The stench of death permeated the air. The filthy striped uniforms hung on the specters like limp sacks. Their eyes protruded from their sockets and their hands were bony claws. Outside the ovens were carts stacked with naked bodies waiting to be cremated. Prior to this all jewelry and gold from teeth had been removed. It was said that lamp shades had been made from the skin of some prisoners. The fetid smell of death remained in my nostrils and clothes for a long time. The traumatic experience of seeing what Hitler had done to these people made the war effort more plausible.
The Dachau horror was terrible. There were bones in the crematorium, rooms had bodies stacked 8 10 10ft high and there were boxcars of bodies. We were only about 15 miles from Munich- the battalion's next move.