80 years ago, the U.S. Army liberated Dachau
April 29, 2025
Karen Kirsten
On April 29, 1945, when U.S. Army officer Felix Sparks and his men approached Dachau concentration camp, a sweet odor reminiscent of the Chicago stockyards nauseated them. After encountering the grizzly spectacle of human carcasses piled high, they crept through gardens where roses bloomed outside abandoned SS officer’s homes.
Shots were fired. Silence. Then a spine-chilling roar — tens of thousands of prisoners yelling, “Long live America!”
Weeks earlier, my 34-year-old Jewish grandfather, Mietek Dortheimer, had contracted typhus. He knew the Americans were advancing, and hoped he might survive. “If we hadn’t that hope, we would kill ourselves,” he told Hollywood filmmakers days after the camp was liberated ...
My grandfather believed America and Britain would dispense justice for murdered friends and family. He was a lawyer in Poland before the war -- fluent in five languages — and at night in the camps, he’d urged prisoners to recite SS officer’s names and their insidious crimes. When the U.S. military established the Dachau Trials, they hired him as administrative director of the war crimes branch to help prosecute high ranking Nazis ...
https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2025/04/29/80-years-us-liberation-of-dachau-nazi-germany-holocaust-karen-kirsten
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