FINAL NOTES
Despite the long periods of waiting for release from the confines of the camp and the seeming continuities with the SS administration, camp conditions did improve gradually over the approximately six weeks of the American administration. Increasingly, inmates moved into new barracks and hospital wards in the former SS compound. On 15 May, the transfer of an eventual 10,000 former prisoners to German military barracks outside of Munich began. On 21 May, the daily death rate had dropped to sixty-four, down from nearly two hundred per day at the time of liberation, and by the end of the month it fell to below twenty.[1] When the IPC announced on the same day that (apart from the hospitals) infectious diseases had been eliminated, authorities allowed an early end to the quarantine. Furthermore, the Americans began dismantling their bureaucracy in mid-May, eliminating the questionnaires for all except Germans and Austrians, whose vital information would be needed for review during the denazification process. All that would be required of others for repatriation was the registration of one’s name on a list.[2] This represented a relaxation of the earlier order which had frustrated so many of the former prisoners.
On 12 May, 450 Belgians left for home. Ten days later, almost all of the nearly 6,000 French inmates had left. With the departure of most of the Russians, numbering almost 14,000, the camp now housed about 10,000, less than one-third of [END PAGE 45] its population at liberation, and by late June its only residents were less than 5,000 former prisoners who did not want to return to their (usually Eastern European and Russian) homelands for political reasons.[3] Aaron Stolzman would not return to Poland because “it was an alien country for me.” He remembers that “the Polish government came into our camp and tried to persuade us to go back to Poland. They came in with trucks … There was not one person, especially Jews. There was no way. Nobody went up.”[4]
Polish Jews as a group tended to show little interest in returning to Poland. Anticipating the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, some renounced their nationality, opting instead for the label “stateless” or “former Polish.”[5] Because of the fact that they now operated from a former concentration camp with approximately 2000 Jewish inmates, one wonders why not all American officials understood why a Jew would not want to return to Poland or Russia. In some cases, the inmates felt compelled to offer a quick lesson in European anti-Semitism and persecution.[6] The Polish government-in-exile did understand, however, and it sent a liaison to aid in the emigration of Poles into Western European countries, while the Lublin government provided for those who did want to return.[7]
It is imperative that this fundamental fact be kept in mind: despite the friction and miscommunication that the American administration of KZ Dachau sometimes [END PAGE 46] caused, its intent from the beginning was to save the lives of its charges. The success of its mission, even with the seemingly insurmountable difficulties the Americans were forced to overcome, may best be judged by placing the post-liberation statistics from Dachau alongside those from other former concentration camps liberated by the Western Allies. To take but one example, in the camp at Bergen-Belsen, approximately 14,000 inmates, nearly one quarter part of the 60,000 liberated on 15 April 1945, died in the following two months of British administration. Two months after the liberation of Dachau, however, just over 2,400 inmates (eight percent of the 32,000 liberated) had died in the camp.[8]
The aim of this study has been to show that the story of the liberation of Dachau did not end with the arrival of American troops. Neither did it conveniently end with the May Day Parade of Nations, although either of these events would serve to fulfill our apparent need for an identifiable “happy ending,” especially to a tale so full of tragedy and suffering. The story of the prisoners of the concentration camp at Dachau continues well into July of 1945, and the final phase of this story, though characterized by improvements in conditions, did not, and could not, represent a clean break with the years of Nazi oppression. Inmates remained in the camp. They continued to suffer from disease, malnutrition, and the lingering effects of the concentration camp system. They continued to cremate and bury the bodies of their fellows. They continued to die. For those who did not succumb to the concentration camp system, the tragedy of their experiences in it continued to affect them for years, even decades, afterward. [END PAGE 47]
Still, the history of the actual grounds of the camp at Dachau does not end even with the evacuation of all former prisoners by autumn 1945. Until 1948, the American Army used the installation as a stockade for some 30,000 German soldiers and Nazi officials accused of various crimes, as well as hosting the November 1945 “Dachau Trials” of personnel from Himmler’s concentration camp network. When the Americans transferred control of the camp to the Bavarian government, it became a housing complex for about 2000 Germans who had been expelled from Czechoslovakia under the terms of the Potsdam Agreement. Since 1964, the grounds of the former concentration camp have evolved into the Memorial Site that stands there today.[9] The story of Dachau continues.
This study illuminates what is probably the most neglected chapter of the history of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. Its greatest significance is the recognition that post-liberation Dachau resembled, at least externally, pre-liberation Dachau in quite striking ways. As late as 17 May, the Polish representative to the IPC stated that conditions were still no better than they had been at the time of liberation.[10]
Further attention to this phenomenon will change the way we envision the liberation of concentration camps, and an extension of this research would prove quite interesting. One might compare the policies and practices of the American administration at Dachau with those at Buchenwald or Mauthausen. These might even be compared with the camps controlled by the British, most notably Bergen- [END PAGE 48] Belsen, whose appalling post-liberation death statistics have already been sketched above. Perhaps one might still contrast the liberations and administrations of the Western Allies against those of the Soviets, who seem to have paid more attention to their pursuit of the Wehrmacht and the push to Berlin than to the survivors of the death camps that they encountered. Such research could then present a fuller, more accurate picture of the end of National Socialism and the human effects that lingered long after its demise – the disease, the starvation, and the physical and psychological damage inflicted on the prisoners – as well as of the experiences of concentration camp survivors.
To be sure, the effects of the National Socialist government did not disappear with the destruction of the regime. The complications facing the American administration at Dachau and the continued suffering of the camp’s former prisoners attest to this. Considering the logistical nightmare created by the need to accommodate, care for, and repatriate 32,000 people in the state in which the Americans found the prisoners, it is hardly surprising that prisoners continued to die. At times the American policies were unpopular with the inmates or not understandable to them, and conditions improved only slowly at first, but the American administration did the best job that it could reasonably be expected to do. Some 2,400 former prisoners died while under the care of the United States Army, but whatever problems arose from the procedures and methods of the Americans, their decisions and their actions undoubtedly saved the lives of countless more. [END PAGE 49]