Dachau 29 April 1945: The Rainbow Liberation Memoirs
Dachau concentration camp, nine miles from Munich, was opened in 1933. It could accommodate 5,000 prisoners--political opponents of the Third Reich. Before liberation in 1945, the camp held more than 200,000 inmates, mostly Jews, and thousands died from starvation, exhaustion, torture, disease, and the crematorium. More than 30,000 survivors were liberated by several hundred men of the U.S. Army's 42d Rainbow Division. Those young soldiers' eyewitness accounts are recorded here. The soldiers tell of giving the survivors their rations, which was a mistake; some died as a result of too much food at one time. One soldier tells of refusing to intervene when a survivor killed his Nazi tormentor. Many soldiers write that they are still haunted by this grotesque spectacle beyond human imagination. These vivid recollections, complemented by 50 black-and-white photographs, give poignant testimony to the horrors of the Holocaust.George Cohen