Cologne, Germany, 1945
Dachau, Germany, 1945
I usually don’t provide context for photos because if viewers know the history, I don’t want to influence their emotional response, and if you don’t know the history, I want to encourage you to seek it out. But I want to explain a bit about what you are looking at in this photo. The two men standing in the foreground were prisoners in the Dachau Concentration Camp. The man on the ground was a notoriously sadistic German SS guard. The soldier who is markedly keeping his back to what is about to happen with that shovel is an American marine who just liberated the camp. Much of what happened after Allied forces liberated Dachau remains a mystery, but all who were there agreed the Americans were horrified by the sheer and wanton carnage they discovered. It wasn’t just the tens of thousands of corpses that had obviously be piling up for years, but prisoners had been systematically tortured, experimented on, sexually assaulted, humiliated, and forced to watch all of this done to their loved ones. There are many gruesome specifics, but I’ll only give one here that has stuck with me - many prisoners told of guards ripping babies from mothers’ arms to be thrown into the air as target practice. Some accounts contend that more than 500 Nazi guards were executed by soldiers and prisoners after being captured, but the official estimate is that only about 30 to 50 guards were killed. An American chaplain suggested some of the freed prisoners left the camp immediately after the liberation in order to the hunt down guards who were attempting escape.