Posted on 10/13/2020 4:04:21 AM PDT by Kaslin
“The worst sight and the last place we visited were the cremation chambers at Dachau,” wrote American soldier Leon Morin on July 9, 1945, in a handwritten letter to his family.
“… I think it is wors[e] than Buchenwald …”
U.S. soldiers liberated the Nazi concentration camp Dachau on April 29, 1945. What the Americans discovered shocked their conscience. Some U.S. troops were so overwhelmed and enraged by the horrors of this death camp that they executed dozens of Nazi camp guards.
Dachau was hell on earth.
“Nothing you can put in words would adequately describe what I saw there … All the stories of Nazi horrors are underestimated rather than exaggerated,” division assistant Chaplain (Maj.) Eli Bohnen, present at the liberation of Dachau, described in a letter to his family dated May 1, 1945.
American troops arrived earlier than the Germans expected them, writes Leon Morin, “they were caught with their pants down.” Nonetheless, Morin laments that the Nazis succeeded in killing 9,000 prisoners in anticipation of the U.S. arrival. “The S.S. were told to kill and cremate everybody before the Americans got there … they succeeded in killing 9 thousand and c[r]emated or rather half cremated more [than] half then they ran out of coal for the furnace …”
According to an official report on Dachau by Lt. Col. Walter Fellenz, commander of the 1st Battalion, 222nd Infantry, “There were over 4,000 bodies, men, women and children in a warehouse in the crematorium. There were over 1,000 dead bodies in the barracks within the enclosure.” Tech. Sgt. James Creasman, a division public affairs NCO in the 42nd Division World News, wrote on May 1, 1945: “Riflemen, accustomed to witnessing death, had no stomach for rooms stacked almost ceiling high with tangled human bodies adjoining the cremation furnaces, looking like some maniac’s woodpile.”
The gruesome reality of the scene at Dachau was described by Leon Morin like this: “… it will take 12 pages like this one to just give an idea about the best organized butchery in the world.”
“I shall never forget what I saw, and in my nightmares the scenes recur. No possible punishment would ever repay the ones who were responsible,” wrote Chaplain Bohnen. “The Jews were the worst off. Many of them looked worse than the dead. They cried as they saw us. They were emaciated, diseased, beaten, miserable caricatures of human beings. I don't know how they didn't all go mad. Even the other prisoners who suffered miseries themselves couldn't get over the horrible treatment meted out to the Jews.”
Leon Morin does not identify the plight of the Jews and their children individually in his letter. He refers to all Dachau victims as “prisoners,” “people,” and “victims.”
“The gruesome part of was how they killed those people. Either by torture by the firing squad, mutilation with starved bloodhounds of which each camp had about fifty or sixty, and by mass gas poisoning …” wrote Leon Morin. He described the crematoria and gas chambers in detail. “The unsuspecting prisoners were marched in formation to this room which was supposed to be a shower room. Inside, the ceiling was all fixed with sprinklers nicely polished which had never beem used for water but nice jets of chlorine gas were forced through controlled by an S.S. guard who had a little window through which he could look over the victims without them seeing him … After five minutes there wasn’t one of them alive, or if there were it was just tough luck because all the bodies were thrown in the next room next to the crematory and a minutes they were all burned. That ‘Shower Room’ could hold 250 persons at one crack.”
Leon Morin was 29 years in 1945 when he wrote this letter to his family. The 10-page letter has never before been published. Leon’s sister Lorraine McAleavy and her son Tim McAleavy sent this very special letter for me to share with our readers. I will be dedicating the next few columns to Leon Morin’s historic letter.
Our American Holocaust!!
He didn’t know that they were. They may have been working people to death, or hadn’t geared up for the final solution. Sounds like bullets were used to kill prisoners before the arrival of the US forces.
I doubt that Hitler considered it damage of any kind.
24 million of these "refusenicks" are armed, most are heavily armed, with their backs against the wall. Nowhere to turn but to fight it out.
I believe that most Germans, at first anyway, bought the resettlement in the East ruse. But never doubt the power of denial.
Read the book The Rape of Nanking, the author does a pretty decent overview of how the education system along with social darwinism led to both Japan and Germany being killing machines.
“By the time that Baracke X was finished in 1943, millions of European Jews had already been killed in the gas chambers at Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor after being transported to the East, and millions more were destined to be sent to the death camps at Auschwitz and Majdanek.”
https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/why-did-the-nazis-build-a-gas-chamber-at-dachau-if-they-werent-going-to-use-it/
Dachau may not have used the “shower room” to kill but the killing and torture did happen.
Same here sort of. I did a trip to Israel and then a couple of months on a Eurailpass. I visited Yad Vashem the holocaust memorial/museum in Israel and that was enough for me so I passed on the opportunity to visit any of the camp sites in Europe after. The funny thing was after the visit I shared a taxi back to our tour group hotel and the driver was an Arab and he said to us it was all lies. Yeah it could happen again.
Leon Morin helped liberate Dachau according to this letter he wrote home.
According to Morin’s description the prisoners were gassed.....
If you were there, Gitmo and gundog I would give you the benefit of the doubt....
But Morin was truly there.....I believe the letter......there is too much history of Dachau not to
Also coming into Dachau that afternoon were elements of the 42nd ID (Rainbow) whose Assistant Division Commander Brigadier General Henning Linden met with a Swiss Red Cross representative and several Germans claiming to be relief commanders of Dachau and wanting to surrender the camp. The number of guards and prisoners became near unknowable with prisoner executions happening almost to the end and guards departing by orders and desertion.
What is undeniable is that there were post-surrender killings of some German guards, especially ones found in the corpse-filled railroad cars and near the execution chambers. The count of these deaths is disputed as a single eyewitness author put the number in the hundreds while almost every other account goes no higher than 70.
There was strong pressure to press forward with a court-martial of Lt.Col. Felix Sparks and subordinates on these offenses but General George Patton, new Military Governor of Bavaria following Hitler's suicide on 30 April and German Surrender (VE Day ) on 8 May, quashed those efforts. In followup investigations it was found that several guard deaths were by the prisoners and some were killed when actively attacking GIs, ie. not surrendered!
Recommended book on Felix Sparks, retired as Brigadier General and later Colorado State Supreme Court Judge, is Alex Kershaw's "The Liberator". NB: My Dad was 45th HQ Staff and went through Dachau at that time but was only transiting on way to Munich to setup a Division Command Post. He chose the German Beer Hall that was Hitler's HQ for the November 1923 failed revolt, a fitting reversal.
And is that claim to justify the vile and despicable treatment of those in the camp. I visited the camp 3 times while stationed in Augsburg GE and active gas chambers or not - dismissing it if repugnant.
An overly broad statement.
I’ve been to Dachau. It was the most somber depressing place I’ve ever seen.
Netflix has a new movie - The Eichmann Trial just came out, it is heartbreaking and amazing to hear what happened in Germany at that time.
Partially incorrect, Dachau was not an extermination camp, but they built the prototype gas chambers there and tested them out, if I understood the guide correctly, they periodically tested modifications and updates as well. So while they did gas people there, it was not systematic.
However, over 30,000 people died in Dachau, mostly through brutality, neglect, starvation, and simple indifference to human suffering. You don’t need systematic execution to be a Nazi horror.
We visited Dachau about 18 months ago, once you see something like that place, you don’t forget. Virus permitting, my wife and I want to visit Auschwitz before we return home.
Nice of the SS to demonstrate the process for him. Please cite something in the original post to confirm that the showers had been used. The carnage Morin witnessed was not the result of business as usual in the camp. It was the hurried execution of prisoners to hide their very existence from liberating forces. Certainly the “showers” would have been used, but nothing I read in the post indicates that they had been. Gitmo may be able to provide citation for his/ her claim.
I visited Dachau in 1976. What struck me the most was that, unlike sites like Auschwitz and Sobibor in the East that German citizens would not be close to and could claim they didn’t know what was going on there, Dachau was in suburban Munich surrounded by nice houses that looked like were of pre-war construction. And while it wasn’t a mass extermination camp, if you lived down the street you couldn’t plausibly say “oh, nothing bad is going on there” since the crematorium was up and running.
Per my post 35 above, a German historian and guide at Dachau explained to me how the SS used Dachau to test out prototype gas chamber systems and processes. It was there that they determined that camouflaging the gas chambers as showers was the most effective way to get the prisoners into the chamber without a fight. To be clear, thousands of prisoners died as part of these tests.
Perfecting the execution mechanisms and processes for the actual death camps was part and parcel of the Dachau camp’s “business as usual.”
I visited Dachau in May 1990.
a) I was told by a care taker that there was a ravine about 5 km away where the guards would take a truck load of prisoners every day for target practice.
b) I got locked in the crematorium area by myself at closing time while, unbeknownst to me, the care taker went around to lock up the crematorium buildings. He finally came back to let me out. For 5 min or so I thought I was in there for the night; not a happy memory.
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