April 29, 1945. A Sunday morning. The sky was gray. The air was cold. Soldiers of the U.S. 45th Infantry Division, the “Thunderbirds,” were advancing toward a large complex near Munich. They thought they were attacking a supply depot or perhaps a factory. They had no idea they were walking into the nightmare of the century
They reached a railway line outside the complex. A train was stopped there. Thirty-nine cattle cars, silent and motionless. The soldiers approached the train. They sniffed it before they saw it. A lieutenant peered into one of the cars and shouted.
Inside the train were bodies, thousands of them. Men, women, children. Starving, beaten, piled on top of each other like garbage. They had been left there to die of thirst and exposure. Some of the bodies had bite marks because the living had tried to eat the dead to survive.
The American soldiers were veterans. They had fought in Italy. They had fought in France. They had seen friends blown to bits. But they had never seen this. One soldier, a tough 19-year-old from Oklahoma, sat in the snow and began to weep uncontrollably. Another soldier vomited. But for most of them, the sadness quickly turned into something else. Rage. A cold, trembling, murderous rage. They stared at the SS watchtowers in the distance. They tightened their grips on their rifles. And in that moment, the rules of war evaporated. The Geneva Convention no longer mattered. The only thing that mattered was revenge.
This is the true story of the reprisals following the liberation of Dachau. The day American soldiers lost their minds. The day they lined up SS guards against a wall. And the day General Patton decided that, sometimes, murder is justice.
The men of the 45th Infantry Division weren’t killers. They were farm boys, factory workers, students. They were the liberators. Before April 29, they had a reputation for being professional. They took prisoners. They treated the wounded. But Dachau changed them in an instant.
Lieutenant Colonel Felix Sparks was the commander on the ground. He tried to maintain control. He shouted orders:
—Keep moving. Don’t look at the train.
But you couldn’t look away. There were 2,300 bodies on that train. Soldiers walked past them. They saw the eyes of the dead staring right at them. They saw the skeletons. Private John Lee later said, “We were furious. We were so furious we wanted to kill every German in the world.”
They arrived at the camp’s main gate. The SS guards were still there. Commandant Martin Weiss had fled, but he left behind a young lieutenant named Heinrich Wicker and about 500 SS men. Wicker knew the war was over. He wanted to surrender. He put on his best uniform. He polished his boots. He came out with a white flag. He expected to be treated like an officer. He expected a salute. He expected respect. He walked up to the Americans and said:
—I surrender this field to the United States Army.
An American officer looked at the clean, well-fed Nazi. Then he looked at the pile of starving corpses behind him. He spat in the German’s face. The surrender didn’t go as planned.
The Americans entered the camp. Chaos erupted. The prisoners saw the Americans. 30,000 skeletons ran toward the fences. They shouted with joy. They wept.
—Americans! Americans!
But while the prisoners cheered, the soldiers were hunting. A group of SS guards tried to surrender near a coal depot. They raised their hands. They shouted:
—Hitler kaput. Hitler is finished.
They thought this magic phrase would save them. It didn’t. An American lieutenant—we believe it was Lieutenant Jack Bushyhead, a Native American officer—was watching them. He was trembling. He had just seen the crematorium. He had seen the oven still full of human ashes. He looked at the SS guards standing there, healthy, arrogant. He looked at his men. He didn’t give a verbal order. He simply gestured with his Thompson submachine gun.
Line them up.
The Germans were confused. They lined up against a brick wall, about 50 of them. They began to panic
“Nein! Nein! Geneva Convention!” shouted one.
An American machine gunner nicknamed “Birdeye” mounted his .30 caliber machine gun on a tripod. The sound of heavy metal clicking. He glanced at the lieutenant. The lieutenant nodded. Massive, sustained machine gun fire erupted, followed by screams. It lasted about 10 seconds. When the smoke cleared, SS guards lay on the ground. Most were dead. Some writhed. The snow was black with coal dust and red with blood.
Lieutenant Colonel Sparks heard the gunshots. He came running. He saw his men firing toward the pile of bodies. He drew his pistol and fired into the air. The sound of a gunshot.
“Stop!” he shouted. “Stop! What the hell are you doing?”
The machine gunner looked at him. His eyes were empty. He wasn’t sorry. He was crying.
“Colonel,” he wept, “they deserved it.”
That wasn’t the only incident. It was happening everywhere. In B Tower, the SS guards tried to surrender. They came down the ladder with their hands up. The American soldiers didn’t wait. They opened fire, knocking them off the ladder. Fire, fire, fire. The bodies fell into the moat. The Americans then walked to the edge of the moat and emptied their magazines into the water just to be sure. One soldier later wrote home: “It wasn’t war. It was an execution. And I felt nothing. After what I saw in those freight cars, they weren’t human to me anymore.”
But the Americans weren’t the only ones killing the prisoners. The victims wanted their turn. Somehow, the prisoners got out of the barracks. They were weak. They could barely walk, but they had adrenaline. They found an SS guard hiding in a watchtower. They dragged him down. They had no guns. They had shovels. They had sticks. They had their bare hands. The American soldiers stood and watched. They were smoking cigarettes. An officer asked:
—Should we stop them?
A sergeant replied:
—No, let them finish
The prisoners beat the guard to death. They tore him to pieces. It was primitive. It was savage. It was justice. Elsewhere in the camp, the prisoners found a German kapo, a prisoner who worked for the Nazis and beat other prisoners. They drowned him in a latrine.
For an hour, Dachau was a lawless zone. The victims became judge, jury, and executioner, and the U.S. Army simply looked the other way. Eventually, order was restored. Lieutenant Colonel Sparks stopped the killing. He locked up the surviving Germans to save them from their own men.
But the secret couldn’t be kept forever. Photos had been taken. Photos of American soldiers standing over piles of executed Germans. Photos of the massacre at the coal depot. A few days later, an investigative team led by Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Whitaker arrived. They interviewed the soldiers. They collected the photos. They wrote a report: “Investigation into the Alleged Mistreatment of German Guards at Dachau.”
The report was damning. It concluded that U.S. troops had violated international law. It recommended courts-martial. It recommended that the heroes of Dachau be treated as criminals. The report was sent through the chain of command. It landed on General George S. Patton’s desk.
Patton read the report. He looked at the photos of the dead SS guards. He looked at the photos of the death train. Patton was a strict disciplinarian. He usually punished soldiers for having unpolished boots. But this, this was different. Patton knew what his men had seen. He knew the SS were monsters. He called the SS “the scum of the earth.” He summoned the investigating officer. He held the report up.
—What is this garbage?
The officer said:
“Sir, this is evidence of war crimes.”
Patton threw the report onto his desk
“War crimes? You walk into a place like that, see 2,000 dead bodies on a train, and expect my men to follow the rules? Hell no!” Patton supposedly said. “These men were unhinged. They had nervous trigger fingers. It happens in war.”
Then he did something legendary. He didn’t sign the court-martial papers. He took the report and burned it. Or, according to some sources, he ordered it buried in the deepest, most secret archive, never to be opened. He told his staff:
—There will be no trial. The SS got what they deserved.
Stand down.
Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander, agreed. He saw the pictures of the death train. He realized that putting American heroes on trial for killing Nazi monsters would destroy morale. So the order came down. Cancel the investigation. The charges were dropped
Lieutenant Jack Bushyhead, who ordered the shooting, returned home to Oklahoma. He never spoke about it. He died in 1977, a silent hero with a dark secret.
The Dachau reprisals remain a controversial topic today. Neo-Nazis use them to say, “Look, the Americans were bad too.” But historians see it differently. It wasn’t a planned genocide. It was a human reaction. It was the eruption of the human mind confronted with pure evil. When you see a starving child, when you see a room full of bodies, can you remain a professional soldier or do you become a vengeful one? The soldiers of the 45th Division made their choice. They chose vengeance, and General Patton chose to protect them.
Today in Dachau, there is a memorial. It honors the 30,000 victims of the camp. But there is no memorial for the 50 SS guards who died against the wall. Their bodies were buried in unmarked graves, forgotten. History has judged them. They were the architects of hell. And on April 29, 1945, they met the devil.
As for the American soldiers, they carried the memory of the death train for the rest of their lives. They tried to forget the shooting, but they never regretted it. One veteran said years later, “I know killing prisoners is wrong, but that day, in that place, it felt like the only right thing to do.”
This is the toughest question in war. If you had seen the death train, would you have pulled the trigger? Be honest. Let me know in the comments.
Share it, and if this story makes you think, consider sharing it. You never know who might need to hear this.