April 29, 1945, was a cold, sunny Sunday afternoon as Soldiers of the U.S. Army's 42nd Infantry Division came face to face with the worst of Nazi Germany at the notorious Dachau Concentration Camp.
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In 1945 the division was made of up draftee Soldiers from across the country. Today it is part of the New York Army National Guard.
That day, the 42nd Infantry, 45th Infantry and 20th Armored Divisions were advancing southeast towards Munich. It was the birthplace of Nazism and these Soldiers, part of the U.S. 7th Army, wanted the prize.
Troops riding in trucks or armored vehicles barely noticed the town of Dachau on their maps.
But leaders of the 42nd Division, known as the Rainbow Division for its service in World War I as a multi-state National Guard division, understood what Dachau had in store.
The division's front line Soldiers knew there was a Nazi prison camp at Dachau, a small town 10 miles from Munich. But most of the Soldiers knew little more than that.
"Up until April 29, 1945, the majority of us in my unit were not aware of the Nazi efforts to exterminate the Jews - certainly not its scope, nor its effect on the world; and certainly none of us were aware of the Dachau Concentration Camp,” said Lt. Jack Westbrook, a member of the 222nd Infantry Regiment in the 2015 Sam Dann collection of memories in “Dachau 29 April 1945: The Rainbow Liberation Memoirs.”
There were actually three Dachaus ahead of the advancing Americans. There was the German village of Dachau, a Nazi SS training compound and barracks, and the concentration camp itself.
The first concentration camp in Nazi Germany; Dachau, opened in March, 1933 at the site of a former munitions factory. It first held 5,000 political prisoners.
German newspapers reported "the removal of the enemies of the Reich to concentration camps."
In 1946, Morris Janowitz wrote that just a few years after opening the camp, Germans feared the place.
A German jingle went: "Lieber Herr Gott, mach mich stumm, Das ich nicht nach Dachau komm," Janowitz wrote. "Dear God, make me silent, that I may not come to Dachau."
Clergy, homosexuals, gypsies and Jews, along with French, Pole, Czech, Yugoslav and Russian nationals were housed at Dachau and its 30 major subcamps.
There were also 123 even smaller camps, holding forced laborers for work in underground munitions factories.
“We had been briefed stateside on the unjust imprisonment of large numbers of people by the Germans, and their being forced into a kind of slavery. But nothing could have prepared me for what was to unfold in that small dorf north and west of Munich in Bavarian Germany," Westbrook said.
“Somebody up at division headquarters may have known,” said Sgt. Olin Hawkins, assigned to the Fox Company, 2nd Battalion, 222nd Infantry in the Dann memoirs. “But we didn’t know anything.”
Deputy Division Commander Brig. Gen. Henning Linden was aware of the camp and the significance of its liberation.
Linden understood the capture of Dachau would be a significant news event. With a team of reporters already accompanying the division in its advance on Munich, he directed the 222nd Infantry Regiment to Dachau and set off with his command element in three jeeps.
Sgt. William “Hap” Hazard, a public affairs sergeant with the division headquarters, described how news reporters provided insight to his team before departing for Dachau.
“Usually a writer, a photographer and a G-2 (intelligence section) jeep driver would be assigned to a team to accompany a battalion on a particular mission, or occasionally, we would go out on our own without orders, if requested by a well-known correspondent,” Hazard described in the Dann memoirs.
“To the very best of my recollection, this was the case on April 29. I believe Sid Olson of Time-Life asked for an Army photographer soon after he had heard that the 222nd Regiment was to “take” Dachau.”
The advance was surreal, Hawkins remembered. They moved towards Dachau in haste, bypassing German resistance.
“The I&R (Intelligence and Reconnaissance) platoon was in front,” Hawkins said in a 1994 oral history recording. “I was platoon leader, 3rd platoon, Company F, 2nd Battalion, and our battalion commander, (Lt. Col.) Downard, was leading the way. We ran into little pockets of resistance, and the I&R gave them machine-gun bursts and we drove right through them.”
“The Germans just looked at us. They couldn’t understand it,” Hawkins said. “Why didn’t we want to stop and fight?”
Pvt. Richard Marowitz, part of the I&R Platoon recalled a similar incident.
“We cut a German convoy in half that was going across a road that we were on, firing as we went through,” Marowitz said of their rapid advance. “They didn’t know what happened because we weren’t supposed to be there and they were driving off the road.”
“We did the same thing with another convoy that was going on a road in the opposite direction and parallel to ours, and we just fired on them as we went,” Marowitz sai