TRIGGER POINT

On April 29, 1945, just as the U.S. Army’s 42nd and 45th Infantry Divisions were poised to capture Munich, birthplace of the Nazi Party, men from each outfit were ordered to split off and secure a concentration camp 10 miles from the city. Neither the camp’s name—Dachau—nor the term “concentration camp” meant much to these soldiers. The Nazis had hidden the full magnitude of the Holocaust, and rumors of the mistreatment of Jews and political dissidents were so incredible that “when I heard such stories back in the States I never believed them,” Lieutenant William J. Cowling III explained. Lieutenant William P. Walsh expected Dachau to be akin to an American POW camp he had seen in upstate New York, and from a distance, the compound looked benign—neat and orderly. It reminded Lieutenant Colonel Walter J. Fellenz of “a wealthy girls finishing school in the suburbs.”

When a 45th Division company under the command of 25-year-old Lieutenant Walsh approached the camp, the men spotted 39 railcars, mostly boxcars and gondolas, parked on a siding. At first glance, the cars appeared to contain piles of dirty clothing, but as the men drew closer, they saw that the soiled laundry was actually the corpses of hundreds of concentration camp inmates—2,310 of them, as it turned out. Some had been shot or beaten, but most had died of starvation. The emaciated bodies shocked these battle-hardened veterans. “Honest,” Lieutenant Cowling wrote to his parents, “their legs and arms were only a couple of inches around and they had no buttocks at all.” Colonel Fellenz, a 28-year-old 42nd Division battalion commander, estimated the bodies weighed only 50-60 pounds each. What haunted these soldiers most, however, were the eyes of the dead. To Private John P. Lee, their death stares seemed to ask the G.I.s: “What took you so long?”

The instantaneous reaction was rage, and incensed soldiers swept through the camp, exacting revenge against the German guards they held responsible.