April 29th, 1945.
A Sunday morning.
The sky was gray.
The air was cold.
The soldiers of the US 45th Infantry Division.
The Thunderbirds were pushing toward a large complex near Munich.
They thought they were attacking a supply depot or maybe a factory.
They had no idea they were walking into the nightmare of the century.
They reached a railroad track outside the complex.
There was a train sitting there.
39 cattle cars, silent, motionless.
The soldiers approached the train.
They smelled it before they saw it.
A lieutenant peaked inside one of the cars and he screamed.
[Music] Inside the train were bodies, thousands of them.
Men, women, children.
starved, beaten, stacked on top of each other like garbage.
They had been left there to die of thirst and exposure.
Some of the bodies had bite marks on them because the living had tried to eat the dead to survive.
The American soldiers were veterans.
They had fought in Italy.
They had fought in France.
They had seen friends blown apart.
But they had never seen this.
One soldier, a tough 19-year-old from Oklahoma, sat down in the snow and started crying uncontrollably.
Another soldier vomited.
But for most of them, the sadness quickly turned to something else.
Rage.
A cold, shaking, murderous rage.
They looked at the SS watchtowers in the distance.
They tightened their grip on their rifles.
And in that moment, the rules of war evaporated.
The Geneva Convention didn’t matter anymore.
The only thing that mattered was revenge.
This is the true story of the Docau liberation reprisals.
The day American soldiers snapped.
The day they lined up the SS guards against a wall.
And the day General Patton decided that sometimes murder is justice.
The men of the 45th Infantry Division were not murderers.
They were farm boys, factory workers, students.
They were the liberators.
Before April 29th, they had a reputation for being professional.
They took prisoners.
They treated the wounded.
But Dao changed them in an instant.
Lieutenant Colonel Felix Sparks was the commander on the ground.
He tried to keep control.
He shouted orders, “Keep moving.
Don’t look at the train.
” But you couldn’t not look.
There were 2300 bodies on that train.
The soldiers walked past them.
They saw the eyes of the dead staring at them.
They saw the skeletons.
Private John Lee later said, “We were mad.
We were so mad we wanted to kill every German in the world.
They reached the main gate of the camp.
The SS guards were still there.
The commonant Martin Weiss had fled, but he left behind a young lieutenant named Heinrich Wicker and about 500 SSmen.
Wicker knew the war was over.
He wanted to surrender.
He put on his best uniform.
He polished his boots.
He walked out with a white flag.
He expected to be treated like an officer.
He expected a salute.
He expected respect.
He walked up to the Americans and said, “I surrender this camp to the United States Army.
” An American officer looked at the clean, well-fed Nazi.
Then he looked at the pile of starving corpses behind him.
He spit in the Germans face.
The surrender did not go as planned.
The Americans entered the camp.
Chaos broke loose.
The prisoners saw the Americans.
30,000 skeletons rushed the fences.
They were screaming with joy.
They were crying, “Americans! Americans!” But while the prisoners cheered, the soldiers were hunting.
A group of SS guards tried to surrender near a coal yard.
They raised their hands.
They shouted, “Hitler kaput.
Hitler is finished.
” They thought this magic phrase would save them.
It didn’t.
An American lieutenant, we believe it was Lieutenant Jack Bushyhead, a Native American officer, was watching them.
He was shaking.
He had just seen the crematorium.
He had seen the oven still full of human ash.
He looked at the SS guard standing there, healthy, arrogant.
He looked at his men.
He didn’t give a verbal order.
He just gestured with his Thompson submachine gun.
Line them up.
The Germans were confused.
They lined up against a brick wall, about 50 of them.
They started to panic.
Nine.
Nine.
Geneva Convention,” one shouted.
An American machine gunner nicknamed Birdeye set up his 30 caliber machine gun on a tripod.
A sound of heavy metal clicking.
He looked at the lieutenant.
The lieutenant nodded, a massive sustained machine gun fire, screaming.
It lasted for about 10 seconds.
When the smoke cleared, the SS bars were on the ground.
Most were dead.
Some were twitching.
The snow was black with coal dust and red with blood.
Lieutenant Colonel Sparks heard the shooting.
He came running.
He saw his men firing into the pile of bodies.
He pulled out his pistol and fired into the air.
A sound of a pistol shot.
“Stop it!” he screamed.
“Stop it! What the hell are you doing?” he shouted.
The gunner looked at him.
His eyes were blank.
He wasn’t sorry.
He was crying.
Colonel, he cried.
They deserved it.
That wasn’t the only incident.
It was happening everywhere.
At tower B, the SS guards tried to surrender.
They climbed down the ladder with their hands up.
The American soldiers didn’t wait.
They shot them off the ladder.
Fire, fire, fire.
The bodies fell into the moat.
The Americans then walked up to the edge of the moat and emptied their magazines into the water just to be sure.
One GI later wrote home.
It wasn’t war.
It was an execution.
And I didn’t feel a thing.
After what I saw in those box cars, they weren’t human to me anymore.
But the Americans weren’t the only ones killing the prisoners.
The victims wanted their turn.
Somehow, the prisoners got out of the barracks.
They were weak.
They could barely walk, but they had adrenaline.
They found an SS guard hiding in a watchtowwer.
They dragged him down.
They didn’t have guns.
They had shovels.
They had sticks.
They had their bare hands.
The American soldiers stood by and watched.
They smoked cigarettes.
An officer asked, “Should we stop them?” A sergeant replied, “No, let them finish.
” The prisoners beat the guard to death.
They tore him apart.
It was primal.
It was savage.
It was justice.
In another part of the camp, the prisoners found a German capo, a prisoner who worked for the Nazis and beat other prisoners.
They drowned him in a latrine.
For one hour, Daau was a lawless zone.
The victims became the judges, the juries, and the executioners, and the US Army simply looked the other way.
Eventually, order was restored.
Lieutenant Colonel Sparks stopped the killing.
He locked up the surviving Germans to save them from his own men.
But the secret couldn’t be kept forever.
Photos had been taken.
Photos of American soldiers standing over piles of executed Germans.
Photos of the Coalard massacre.
A few days later, an investigative team arrived led by Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Whitaker.
They interviewed the soldiers.
They collected the photos.
They wrote a report.
investigation of alleged mistreatment of German guards at Daau.
The report was damning.
It concluded that American troops had violated international law.
It recommended court marshals.
It recommended that the heroes of Dhau be treated as criminals.
The report was sent up the chain of command.
It landed on the desk of General George S.
Patton.
Patton read the report.
He looked at the photos of the dead SS guards.
He looked at the photos of the death train.
Patton was a strict disciplinarian.
He usually punished soldiers for having unpolished boots.
But this this was different.
Patton knew what his men had seen.
He knew that the SS were monsters.
He called the SS the slime of the earth.
He summoned the investigating officer.
He held up the report.
What is this garbage? The officer said, “Sir, it is evidence of war crimes.
” Patton threw the report on his desk.
“War crimes? You walk into a place like that, you see 2,000 dead bodies on a train and you expect my boys to follow the rule book? Hell no.
” Patton reportedly said, “These men were over wrought.
They had nervous trigger fingers.
It happens in war.
” Then he did something legendary.
He didn’t sign the court marshal papers.
He took the report and he burned it.
Or according to some sources, he ordered it to be buried in the deepest top secret file in the archive, never to be opened.
He told his staff, “There will be no trial.
The SS got what they deserved.
” Dismissed.
Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander, agreed.
He saw the photos of the death train.
He realized that putting American heroes on trial for killing Nazi monsters would destroy morale.
So, the order came down.
Quash the investigation.
The charges were dropped.
Lieutenant Jack Bushyhead, who ordered the shooting, went home to Oklahoma.
He never spoke about it.
He died in 1977, a silent hero with a dark secret.
The Dao reprisals remain a controversial topic today.
Neon-Nazis use it to say, “Look, the Americans were bad, too.
” But historians see it differently.
It wasn’t a planned genocide.
It was a human reaction.
It was the snap of the human mind when confronted with pure evil.
When you see a child starved to death, when you see a room full of bodies, can you remain a professional soldier or do you become an avenger? The soldiers of the 45th division made their choice.
They chose vengeance and General Patton chose to protect them.
Today at Dao, there is a memorial.
It honors the 30,000 victims of the camp.
But there is no memorial for the 50 SS guards who died against the wall.
Their bodies were buried in unmarked graves, forgotten.
History has judged them.
They were the architects of hell.
And on April 29th, 1945, they met the devil.
As for the American soldiers, they carried the memory of the death train for the rest of their lives.
They tried to forget the shooting, but they never regretted it.
One veteran said years later, “I know killing prisoners is wrong, but that day at that place, it felt like the only right thing to do.
” This is the hardest question in war.
If you had seen the death train, would you have pulled the trigger? Be honest.
Let me know in the comments.
And if you want to see the story of the ghost army that fooled Hitler, click the video on the screen.
Thanks for watching.
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