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.
It sounds like the prisoners executed prior to the liberation were residents of the camp. They would have been under no illusions as to the purpose of the “showers.” They may have been the labor used to empty the showers and feed the crematorium.
Hearty and unrestrained media approval. Sounds familiar
I visited twice in 1975. My uncle was one of the liberators and he took pictures. Scared me to nightmares when I was a kid. Affected his mental outlook for the rest of his life.
The terrible thing is the camp is on the flat land below the town of Dachau itself and close. The stacks of the ovens were at roughly the same hieght as the town walls so there was no way the residents didn’t know what was happening.
The list of recorded inmates of the camp was horrible too with lots of ordinary people besides the Jews who of course were in the majority.
I agree with you in that even before you enter you get a feeling of dread. It is truly a scary place...but you have to go.
The horror is unimaginable.
So horrible was it that I had a brief, transient psychotic episode: Staring from one of the barracks windows, I was afraid to turn around for fear that I would find the nightmare real and my wonderful life an illusion.
The human mind cannot grasp the horror.
No argument from me. But the soldiers description was a case of hearing something, it gets embellished and passed on...with 3 teenaged daughters I am quite “sensitive” to it!
I visited there in 1953 while stationed at Munich. I saw the “shower room” with names scratched in the walls. We were told how the bodies were stacked in layers as they died. The smallest and weakest were on the bottom. The strongest were nearest to the ceiling Survival of the fittest in action. I also saw the opened ovens. They had been running 24 seven but couldn’t keep up with the work load. There were many more examples. DO NOT assume Americans would never commit such atrocities. Just look at the situations happening NOW
visited there in 2010
my experience was similar...eerie...especially the crematoriums and the subsequent chimneys.
It was a rainy drizzly day, which added to the effect.
haunting.
Even the Jewish Holocaust organizations say they were not used.. although one poster here said they were used to test.
“And is that claim to justify the vile”
Ummm no...I make no such claim. Why would you think that?
I just like to sticking to facts. The soldiers letter gives the impression there wass mass routine gassings which was not the case. Dachau was not a “death camp”
In 1942, the crematorium area was constructed next to the main camp. It included the old crematorium and the new crematorium (Barrack X) with a gas chamber.
There is no credible evidence that the gas chamber in Barrack X was used to murder human beings.
Instead, prisoners underwent “selection”; those who were judged too sick or weak to continue working were sent to the Hartheim “euthanasia” killing center near Linz, Austria.
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/dachau
In my earlier post of my visit to Dachau in 1953 I need to mention my recent You Tube “visit”. It showed a glossy image of the camp. It is a shameful PR version
Public schools spend much of the time of students on Martin King and mythology about Sacagawea and Susan Anthony. But most children are not taught about the Shoah, which was more commonly taught during the 1970s and before. Fascism has been replacing fact in public schools.
George Soros who owns the democrat party sent over 100 people by his own admission to the nazi’s just so he could sell their belongings.
Also:
“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”
False. Showerheads where fake, but no chlorine gas was pumped thru. Zyklon B would be dumped from the side wall:
“https://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/dachau-gas-chambers/photo38.html";
Edward R. Murrow on Buchenwald
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlhQvPfYSXk
Germans preferred to do the mass killings in the East away from the German population.
The NKVD converted Buchenwald into their own prison with pretty much the same conditions after the war.
My uncle had a stack of black and white photos of death camps that he showed me as a small kid. I remember the pictures of dead piled high, awful to view .
They were just some of the memories he and many others brought back after the war. He lived a long life and first worked hard at his own tire business and then as a farmer.
To this day, those images remain clear and the message sent, even clearer.. Never again.
Is the Olber-moron still around?
I remember seeing plans for a crematorium. The drafter bragged at how efficient it was as it channeled melted fat from the corpses back into the furnace, saving fuel.
I read that and wondered how anyone brought up in the West could calmly sit down and design something like that, let alone brag of its efficiency.
Had I run into that person, I would have had no qualms in cold bloodedly executing him.
Bfl
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