Charging Across Nazi Germany and Liberating Dachau Concentration Camp | Alan Lukens

The larger part of our unit was to the east, which were about 10 miles east of Dachau. We had no idea that this camp was there. And we moved ahead and suddenly we came along and saw the barbed wire and the big moat around the ditches. There was a large building inside, which housed the SS headquarters, and there were white flags on it. And so we thought, well, okay, it's easy just to get into the camp. It wasn't easy in two ways. The first way, there was an enormous moat around it with barbed wire, and that had to be attacked. As we were starting to do that, shots came out from snipers on top of this big building. Several people were killed, including our poor colonel, who stood up in his Jeep at that point to see what was going on. So at that point we realized that the white flags were phony. You are about to embark upon the great crusade to meet this mounting aggression. And make no mistake about it, good will prevail. I was born and raised in Philadelphia. My father was a lawyer there, my mother an architect. I went to the Episcopal Academy, a private school. And in 1942 I graduated from there with honors, and then I went on to Princeton. We had an accelerated course there, because of the war. The first half of the freshman year was the summer of 1942. The second half was the fall, and then I volunteered at that point for the Army. I was president of the ski club, thought I was a great skier and all that. And I joined the 10th Mountain Division out in Colorado. Along with a lot of other Ivy League skiers that thought they were pretty fancy stuff, until we got out there. What happened in training? Well, they brought in a bunch of non-coms from Hawaii who had never seen snow or anything. And then they said, we are going to whip these smart alecks into shape. So they came up, they had never seen snow. And so most of the week, instead of practicing and learning something about skiing in the mountains, we had to learn first order drill and all of that stuff. But we were able to ski on weekends, and as it got better later on, we did an awful lot of actual rock climbing and skiing. And it was very exciting, very rigorous. So I was there almost a year, and then there came a kind of a questionnaire, SAT, would anybody like to go and learn languages? And I signed up. They said one person from the division would win. Forgot all about it until one day suddenly a sergeant came up and said, hey, you got to get on the train this afternoon. And I said, where? To Hawaii. And it was because I had been selected to go learn Turkish at the University of Indiana. But what they did was send me and some people from other places for a couple of weeks at the University of Nebraska, which was kind of a lark after the ski troops. And then we went on from there to Indiana, and they said all the languages had been abolished. They needed cannon fodder, and so we need to be engineers. And a couple of weeks after that the entire program, which was called ASTP, it was supposed to be a kind of a junior OCS originally, the whole thing was abolished. And so all of us there at Indiana were sent down to Camp Camel, Kentucky, to the 20th Armored Division. By that time it was the beginning of 1944. We trained down there, sometimes at Fort Knox for a couple of months, but mostly at Camp Camel. And we were well enough trained, very itchy to get going, and it seemed to take an awful long time. But finally, toward the end of 1944, we were sent up to Massachusetts to get ready to board ships to go over, which we did at the very beginning of 1945. Long convoy, it took almost three weeks, zigzagging, because the Nazi submarines were still operating. And we landed in France at the beginning of, in January of 1945, and taken by truck to a village, my group, just near Rouen. Well, after sitting around the village for a while, we suddenly got the order to go in February. And the village had already been, that area had been liberated by the Canadians, so we were able to do that. And we started for this, all our complicated material driving up, and we did manage to liberate a corner of Belgium and Holland, where we were greeted very eagerly. And then suddenly we moved into Germany, where it was very quiet. Nobody peeked at us. There was no sign of anything, almost, because all the locals hid at that point. We had a couple of short battles. It didn't seem to, we moved pretty quickly. It didn't seem to bother us too much. And then we had just taken the Rhine, or people ahead of us, engineers, and built a floating bridge. And we went across this bridge, across the Rhine. I'll never forget that, because it was very, we had these big tanks, and we were going along in the, wobbling along over the Rhine. It was quite exciting. Our weapons were called M7s. They were 105 howitzers sitting on top of Sherman tanks. A very awkward, unwieldy weapon. We had four of these in each battery. Our battery was the same size as about 100 people. And the battalion consisted of four of these companies, batteries. And that battalion was the 413th Armored Field Artillery, and we were put into the 20th Armored Division. We moved quite quickly. We were first supposed to be in the 1st Army, which was the one in the north. Then we kept going so fast that they put us in the 3rd Army, which was under Patton. And we kept moving south quite rapidly, past the 3rd Army, so they ended up putting us in the 7th Army. So we took Frankfurt, Bonn first, and Frankfurt. We had a few skirmishes along the way. We lost a few people, not very many. There were quite a few attacks by the German 88s. That was their sort of equivalent to what we had. Did you get the sense that their resolve was starting to lessen at that point? That they knew the war was almost over? I don't think so at that point. It was sort of a last ditch thing. The people we were fighting, there were a lot of SS units. And if they were ready to give up, they didn't show any signs to us at that point. You've heard maybe of Bedchek Charlie. That was a German plane that flew over all the American camps at night just to bug people and occasionally drop a bomb. And then our anti-aircraft would go after them. It was more of a nuisance and an amusing thing than any real danger. Then we continued further south. And our big objective was Munich. And the thought was if we could, in the larger picture, if we could take Munich, then they would collapse. We didn't know much about anything at all. We knew that there was the SS headquarters. We knew that the Germans were bragging about the fact that they would never give up. But we, at a lower level, didn't know very much. So as we approached there, the small part of our 20th Armored Division, which I was called Combat Command B, consisted only of our artillery battalion, a tank battalion, and a very few infantry people. The larger part of our unit was to the east, to most of it, the 20th Armored, going after the enormous SS headquarters, which were about 10 miles east of Dachau. And we had no idea that this camp was there. And we moved ahead and suddenly we came along and saw the barbed wire and the big moat around it, the ditches, and there was a large building inside, which housed the SS headquarters, and there were white flags on it. And so we thought, well, okay, it's easy just to get into the camp. It wasn't easy in two ways. The first way, there was an enormous moat around it, and it was barbed wire, and that had to be attacked or taken by our tanks, just going through it. But as we were starting to do that, shots came out from snipers on top of this big building, despite the fact that they had the white flag out. And several people were killed, including our poor colonel, who stood up in his Jeep at that point to see what was going on. And that was very tragic. So at that point, we realized that the white flags were phony, and we took our artillery across the moat and break the barbed wire and get into the camp. We were only a small part of it. At the same time, you had the 42nd and 45th Divisions converging. We at our level, and theoretically even up to our colonel, didn't know the camp was there. But the other divisions did, and they were told ahead to go after. Anyway, when we got in and smashed the gate, that was at 6 o'clock on April 29, 1945. The next day, and I wasn't in the first ones that got in, but the next day, a few of us were selected to go see what was going on. Bodies had been brought. Well, originally, they were deportees from other places in Germany had been sent in by rail car, but they died of the way of hunger and one thing or another. They were shot if they dragged behind. Anyway, there were 37 rail cars full of bodies. They were all what the old French called in the First War, 40 and eights, or 40 men or eight horses, freight cars. They would have been jammed in several hundred to each one. It was a dreadful, dreadful sight. We counted the 37. They were sitting inside the camp along the siding. So we walked by there, just a few of us, and we went to where they were burning bodies, and the crematorium, all being handled by Polish prisoners. Our generals and everybody decided that they had to keep on doing this. They had to do something with all these bodies. So we saw that. There were 22 barracks, originally made for 200 men each, which had about 2,000 in each one. I forget the math exactly, but I know that they counted later. There were 35,000 prisoners in there. We saw those, and then we walked up to the other end where the officers were. There were people called Kampos. These were German criminals who were drafted to run the camp. They were really awful individuals, and they were told that if they weren't nasty and didn't kick people around, they themselves would get shot. So the enmity of the prisoners was on the Kampos, not on the German people or the German army per se. By the time we'd gotten there, most of them had been killed or run away. There was a lot of typhus there, and our officers right away said not to feed them too much. Their stomachs couldn't take it, although we were tempted to hand out food. They were also worried, our leaders, that we would pick up typhus. So basically all of the American troops, pretty much all, were moved out of the camp within 24 hours and headed down toward Munich. That's what happened to us. Before the liberation, sir, how much did you personally know about the existence of concentration camps or death camps? Almost nothing. Stars and Stripes had something about Auschwitz. Auschwitz was pretty much, it was in Poland, it was pretty much Jewish. The prisoners in Dachau were only about 16% Jewish. They went way back from German Protestants and various people that Hitler didn't like, thrown in as early as 1933 when the camp opened. Then they threw in gypsies, homosexuals, anybody they didn't like over the period. And then when the invasion of Russia took place, hundreds of Russians were captured. This was an awful thing. The Russian officers were sent to Dachau, and they were told if they would run down the field and get away, they would be freed. And they did, but they were all shot in the back. It was just a real murder scene. At the very end, the Germans wanted to hide what had happened in the other camps, and that's the reason that they sent all these poor victims down by train. They were alive when they put them on the train, to get them away so that presumably the Westerners wouldn't see what had happened. And the other crazy idea was that they would have a last-ditch action down in Bavaria, even guerrilla warfare to hold on. And Hitler, even though he'd been advised by some of his generals to give up, he refused to. So they were going to have a last-ditch fight there. And it was one bizarre incident at the end. First of all, these people on the train who were still living had to walk about four miles to the camp, and they were shot if they fell by the wayside. They had dogs chasing them and everything else. For those who were still mobile, they were supposed to go up into the mountains behind Munich. And there was a death march starting from Dachau up the hills. And one interesting thing was that these prisoners were required to push carts. It turned out that the carts were full of civilian clothes and the Germans were ready to shed their uniforms and jump into these clothes. When they got partway up the hill, just a Frenchman who was there told me about this, the French just realized what was happening. And they sent a mutiny. They shot the German soldiers who were there and they grabbed the clothes themselves and hid out until the Americans came about a day later. But there were a lot of different stories and some were unbelievable. They had a count every morning to see how many people were at each barracks of the prisoners. And they were very rigid. The SS, they would count the people and all the food, little food there was, depended on how many were there. And one of my friends said that he, after people died during the night, they would hold the bodies up just to get more rations because of the numbers. So there were a lot of different stories but perhaps that gives the picture.