The American administrators gave the responsibility of internal government of the camp to the International Prisoners’ Committee. This body represented the national groups in Dachau, and in its first proclamation of 29 April 1945 it listed fourteen men, mostly political or military prisoners, as members. After liberation, the Committee continued to exist as an organ through which the Americans could communicate rules and guidelines to the mass of inmates, who could in turn use the Committee to make inquiries or state grievances.
Together, the American administrators and the Prisoners’ Committee formed the bureaucracy that governed the camp and oversaw the necessary improvements. The internal organization of the camp retained much of the same basic structure as the SS organization. The American commander became Camp Commandant, and the IPC President became Lagerführer, both titles borrowed from the terminology of the SS administration. Also retained were not only the positions of Lagerältester (camp elder) and Lagercapos, but in certain cases, usually when the inmate in question was known to have treated prisoners decently, the actual personnel as well.[1]
To relieve the overcrowding, it was necessary to build new barracks, clean and disinfect the existing ones, and renovate buildings in the SS compound for use as hospitals and housing. To do this, it was unavoidable that the Americans use inmate labor. Although the working conditions were certainly mild when compared with [END PAGE 37] those under the SS, the International Prisoners’ Committee found that it had to resort to coercion to assemble the requisite work details. Aside from reminding their fellow inmates of the hygienic benefits of creating new barracks space, the Committee also warned: “Those comrades reported for lack of order and discipline will be released last from the camp.”[2] The Committee thus displayed what was effectively its most useful instrument in motivating their fellows to cooperate with the American and camp authorities: the possibility of delayed liberation, meaning a longer stay in the former concentration camp.
Inmate labor was also necessary for the disposal of corpses in the camp. Because its members were experienced in the mechanics of cremation, the same Kommando undertook the task on behalf of the Americans. After increasing the Kommando’s workday from four hours to ten, after four days and 710 cremations, the American authorities decided that mass burials would be faster and more efficient.[3] For this, the townspeople of Dachau assisted by providing horse carts to transport the bodies to the nearby Leitenberg hill for burial.
Still, the apparent continuity between the years of SS rule and the new American administration, as experienced by the burial and crematory detail, is obvious. In fact, these inmates argued that conditions were actually slightly worse for them. Always granted certain privileges by the SS due to the nature of their work, the detail felt compelled to petition Lt. Smith, citing that their “position is worse than then as to food, drinks and tobacco.” The head of the detail noted that “it is a hard [END PAGE 38] job to wrap daily from 60 to 100 corpses … and to do the whole work that cannot be done by everybody,” and he asked for an increased allotment of food, tobacco, and alcohol, “not in order to be drunk, but to be even able to stand it out.”[4] Whether this particular request was actually met remains unclear. Smith notes only that, “[w]e surely did not want them to have poorer working conditions during our tenure than under our predecessors’, so we did what we could.”[5]
The quarantine also was an obvious seeming continuity with the camp’s SS past. Although the inmates were free of the SS, they were still not free to leave the camp.[6] It was, however, possible to obtain an excursionary pass (only with certification of typhus disinfection), generally for the purposes of visiting relatives or, more commonly, for bringing supplies into the camp. These passes were typically only issued to certain work details and not to the general camp population. Again it was up to the Prisoners’ Committee to explain to the inmates the necessity of the American decision. Numerous notices from the Committee urged patience and cooperation with the quarantine, and the Americans went so far as to announce that any inmate who left the camp confines without permission would be shot.[7] This threat did not prevent numerous escape attempts, however. In addition to those who obtained an excursionary pass and then simply disappeared were those who took more extreme measures to escape. More than one attempt was averted when guards [END PAGE 39] discovered inmates hiding in the cargo beds of outbound trucks hauling human waste and other filth.[8]
It is to the credit of the American presence in Dachau that several escapees actually returned soon after, citing the security of the camp and the scarcity of food and goods outside of it. Of course, the returning escapees were not punished, and no inmate was ever shot for leaving the camp without a pass.[9] As Army chaplain John Gaskill recalled, much of the impatience with regard to the quarantine came from the fact that the inmates who showed no symptoms of typhus “could not or would not take into consideration the fact that there is such a thing as an incubation period of from twelve to eighteen days.”[10]
Inmates also felt a certain animosity toward the Americans’ lengthy questionnaires, which were intended to serve as comprehensive identification documents for all inmates. Introduced on May 3, these forms asked each inmate for such information as name, birth date, nationality, religion, occupation, details of arrest and sentencing, positions held during confinement, and intended destination upon release.[11] This last question proved difficult to answer. Some Yugoslavs had during the course of the war become Italian citizens because of changing national borders. This also applied to certain Greeks and Albanians, as well as Poles, Lithuanians, Estonians, Latvians, and Ukrainians whose homes now belonged to the Soviet Union. There were also those, such as Spaniards who had opposed Franco, the [END PAGE 40] Yugoslavs who opposed Tito, and Polish Jews, who had no desire to return to their former homes.[12] Whatever the case, the Americans required each inmate to fill out the questionnaire, without which one could neither leave the camp nor return to his country of origin. Inmates directed complaints about this and other bureaucratic impositions toward both the Americans and the IPC. Only days removed from the bureaucracy of the SS and its emphasis on record-keeping, the former prisoners were wary of the questionnaires. A typical criticism was that the liberation, after the exhilaration of the Americans’ arrival had died down, had amounted to little more than “just a change in uniform for the guards.”[13]
Further frustrations, and perhaps the most immediately understandable, arose when the starving prisoners found that the Americans proposed only a slow and gradual increase in their daily rations. Having subsisted on as little as 500 calories per day in the last month of Nazi rule, the inmates naturally expected a vast increase in food. The desperate yearning to end the pains of hunger dominated the thoughts of the inmates. One Dachau survivor recalled that the prisoners “didn’t even have a wish of liberation. Their biggest wish was to have … enough food.”[14]
However, the American authorities knew that the rehabilitation of a patient suffering from severe malnourishment must be handled gradually; otherwise, heart failure and death might occur due to the prolonged weakening of the cardiac muscle.[15] Severe starvation causes the effective shutting down of the digestive [END PAGE 41] system, so that the sudden reappearance of food actually acts as a shock to the system.[16] The unfortunate results of this condition appear with some frequency in the literature of concentration camp survivors.[17]
Most tormenting is the fact that so many camp survivors had gotten sick, and some had actually died because of the generosity and good intentions of the American GIs who gave them food, usually including chocolate bars, at liberation.[18] Liberators who recall this terrible episode lament that they did not know at the time that the rich foods that they gave to the starving prisoners out of charity were for the most part incompatible with their fragile digestive systems.[19] However, at some point the soldiers were ordered to stop this practice when its unanticipated harmful effects were discovered.[20] This would allow the program devised and prescribed by Lt. Smith and the Displaced Persons Team to gradually introduce more quantity and variety to the inmates’ diet.
Despite warnings from the administrators to eat only the carefully prescribed diet, most inmates simply ate whatever they could procure. This was in keeping with the established practices of concentration camp life, which for years had meant the difference between life and death for prisoners, and which according to Primo Levi [END PAGE 42] mandated: “eat your own bread, and if you can, that of your neighbour.”[21] Even three weeks after the liberation, the hospitals persistently reported cases of illness related to overeating. [22] When the methodical and prescriptive approach of the administration clashed with the adapted mindset of the prisoners, who survived the camp by relying on instinct and self-preservation, instinct and self-preservation won. [END PAGE 43, PAGE 44 BLANK]
[1] Smith, 163; Benz, 40; Sack, 39.
[2] Benz, 46. n.29.
[3] Smith, 136.
[4] Smith, 140.
[5] Smith, 141.
[6] Benz, 32.
[7] Benz, 39-40.
[8] Gaskill.
[9] Smith, 136, 157.
[10] Gaskill.
[11] Distel and Jakusch, 56.
[12] Benz, 33.
[13] Smith, 163.
[14] Holocaust Testimony of Herbert Finder, Holocaust Oral History Archive of Gratz College.
[15] Rivers, 63; Smith, 104.
[16] Rivers, 78.
[17] Nerin E. Gun, The Day of the Americans (New York: Fleet Publishing, 1966), 209-210; Levi, 166-7; Sack, 14; Eli Wiesel, Night, trans. Stella Rodway (New York: Bantam Books, 1982), 109; Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, II: And Here My Troubles Began (New York: Pantheon, 1991), 111.
[18] No figures or good estimates of how many died are available. Sources instead use vague terms such as “some” or “many.”
[19] Snyder.
[20] Holocaust Testimony of William McCormick, Holocaust Oral History Archive of Gratz College.
[21] Levi, 160.
[22] Smith, 104, 207.