During the Dachau liberation reprisals, German SS troops were killed by U.S. soldiers and concentration camp prisoners at the Dachau concentration camp on April 29, 1945, during World War II. It is unclear how many SS guards were killed in the incident, but most estimates place the number killed at around 35–50.
In the days before the camp's liberation, SS guards at the camp had forced 7,000 inmates on a death march that resulted in the death of many from exposure and shooting. When Allied soldiers liberated Dachau, they were variously shocked, horrified, disturbed, and angered at finding the massed corpses of prisoners, and by the combativeness of some of the remaining guards who allegedly fired on them.
Sparks account
Lt. Col. Sparks, a battalion commander of the 157th Infantry Regiment, 45th Infantry Division wrote about the incident. Sparks watched as about 50 German prisoners captured by the 157th Infantry Regiment were confined in an area that had been used for storing coal.
The area was partially enclosed by an L-shaped masonry wall about 8 ft (2.4 m) high and next to a hospital. The German POWs were watched over by a machine gun team from Company I.
He left those men behind to head towards the center of the camp where there were SS who had not yet surrendered; he had only gone a short distance when he heard a soldier yell, "They're trying to get away!" and then machine-gun fire coming from the area he had just left.
He ran back and kicked a 19-year-old soldier nicknamed "Birdeye" who was manning the machine gun and who had killed about 12 of the prisoners and wounded several more. The gunner, who was crying hysterically, said that the prisoners had tried to escape. Sparks said that he doubted the story; Sparks placed an NCO on the gun before resuming his journey towards the center of the camp. Sparks further stated:
"It was the foregoing incident which has given rise to wild claims in various publications that most or all of the German prisoners captured at Dachau were executed. Nothing could be further from the truth. The total number of German guards killed at Dachau during that day most certainly did not exceed fifty, with thirty probably being a more accurate figure. The regimental records for that date indicate that over a thousand German prisoners were brought to the regimental collecting point. Since my task force was leading the regimental attack, almost all the prisoners were taken by the task force, including several hundred from Dachau"
Killings by the inmates
Walenty Lenarczyk, a prisoner at Dachau, stated that following the camp's liberation "prisoners swarmed over the wire and grabbed the Americans and lifted them to their shoulders... other prisoners caught the SS men... The first SS man elbowed one or two prisoners out of his way, but the courage of the prisoners mounted, they knocked them down and nobody could see whether they were stomped or what, but they were killed." Elsewhere in the camp SS men, Kapos and informers were beaten badly with fists, sticks and shovels. There was at least one incident where US soldiers looked away as two prisoners beat a German guard to death with a shovel, and Lt. Bill Walsh witnessed one such beating. Another soldier witnessed an inmate stomping on an SS trooper's face until "there wasn't much left." When the soldier said to him, "You've got a lot of hate in your heart," he simply nodded.
An American chaplain was told by three young Jewish men, who had left the camp during liberation, that they had beaten to death one of the more sadistic SS guards when they discovered him hiding in a barn, dressed as a peasant.
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