The document summarizes the experiences of the 222nd Infantry Regiment as part of the 42nd Infantry Division in liberating the Dachau concentration camp in late April 1945. It describes the regiment fighting German resistance as they advanced towards Munich. Upon arriving at Dachau, soldiers were unprepared for the horrors they discovered, including thousands of dead bodies and emaciated prisoners. The liberation was an emotional scene as prisoners greeted their American liberators. The experiences had a profound impact on the soldiers who helped expose the Nazi atrocities.

2.  A 19-year-old musician
turned infantryman from
Brooklyn, N.Y.
 Army Specialized Training
Program Soldier until 1944
 Volunteer for the 222nd
Infantry Regiment
Intelligence/Reconnaissance
Platoon in the 42nd Division
 Among the first to enter
Munich

3. “There are an awful lot of people
that are trying to change history and
say it never happened. I had a
conversation with a guy that said the
concentration camps were a lie,
never happened, it’s all propaganda,
they filmed it. I said, “You’re out of
your mind, I was there and don’t try
to pull that stuff on me.””
-- Pfc. Richard Marowitz, 222nd Infantry Regiment,
US Holocaust Memorial Museum oral history, 1997

4.  Winter-Spring, 1945
 Rainbow Infantry
Regiments defeat the final
German Counter-
offensive in January,
Operation Nordwind, the
“Southern Battle of the
Bulge”
 Division reenters the line
on February 14th, 1945
 Across the Rhine and
capture of Wurzburg,
Schweinfurt & Nurnburg
 A race towards Munich

9. "Rheinhardt has died tonight. I
wanted to see him again, greet
him one last time, and so I went
looking for him, as he lay on
the road in front of the death
chamber - amongst the other
one hundred and fifty dead of
last night.
He was barely recognizable; his
face was swollen and contorted
in desperation. His death is not
only for us, his friends, a very
hard blow and painful loss, […]
And perhaps the worst thing in
the face of this death, the death
of all our friends, is: we do not
even have the time … to mourn
them"
-- Nico Rost: Goethe in Dachau

10. "Up until April 29, 1945, the majority of us in my
unit were not aware of the Nazi efforts to
exterminate the Jews - certainly not its scope,
nor its effect on the world; and certainly none of
us were aware of the Dachau Concentration
Camp,”
-- Lt. Jack Westbrook, 222nd Infantry Regiment

11. “Nothing could have prepared me for what was
to unfold in that small dorf north and west of
Munich in Bavarian Germany,"
-- Lt. Jack Westbrook, 222nd Infantry Regiment
• The 42nd, 45th
Infantry and 20th
Armored Divisions
head to Dachau
•“Three Dachaus,”
the city, an SS
barracks and the
Concentration Camp

13. “The I&R (Intelligence and Reconnaissance)
platoon was in front. I was platoon leader, 3rd
platoon, Company F, 2nd Battalion, and our
battalion commander, (Lt. Col.) Downard,
was leading the way. We ran into little pockets
of resistance, and the I&R gave them
machine-gun bursts and we drove right
through them. The Germans just looked at us.
They couldn’t understand it. Why didn’t we
want to stop and fight?”
-- Sgt. Olin Hawkins, 222nd Infantry Regiment, 1994 oral history
recording

18. “As we approached, there was a very distinctive
smell. We knew it fairly well, the stench of death.
But when you are in combat, you see dead animals
all the time. We just told ourselves, it was dead farm
animals. Animals.”
-- Pfc. Richard Marowitz, 222nd Infantry Regiment

20. Concentration Camp at Dachau
Jourhaus Gate
Crematorium
Concentration Camp
SS Compound

25. • Forty rail cars,
estimated with 5,000
Jewish inmates
• Left Buchenwald on
April 7
• More than 2,000
died enroute
• Arrived April 28
• 2,310 more left to die
on the cars

29. "Dachau, 1933-1945, will stand for all
time as one of history's most
gruesome symbols of inhumanity.
There our troops found sights,
sounds, and stenches horrible
beyond belief, cruelties so enormous
as to be incomprehensible to the
normal mind.
Dachau and death were synonymous."
-- Col. William W. Quinn, Intelligence Officer, 7th U.S.
Army official report, May 1945

32. “The first thing is the shock,”
Marowitz said. “And then you
cannot believe it, but you
can't help yourself going and
looking a little further,
because it's so hard to believe.
Not that you want to see – you
know – that kind of stuff. You
don't want to see that kind of
stuff, but you can't believe it.
-- Pfc. Richard Marowitz, 222nd Infantry
Regiment Headquarters

35. “As we approached the southwest corner,
three people came forward with a flag of
truce. They were a Swiss Red Cross
representative, Victor Maurer, and two
SS troopers who said they were the camp
commander [SS Lieutenant Heinrich
Wicker] and his assistant. They had
come here on the night of the 28th to
take over from the regular personnel, for
the purpose of surrendering the camp to
the advancing Americans.”
-- Brig. Gen. Henning Linden report to corps headquarters, May 2, 1945.

47.  By early 1945, lack of fuel for the crematorium put them out
of use. Bodies were piled nearby in the woodline

48. “There were over
4,000 bodies, men,
women and
children in a
warehouse in the
crematorium. There
were over 1,000
dead bodies in the
barracks within the
enclosure,”
-- Lt. Col. Walter Fellenz,
commander, 1st Battalion,
222nd Infantry

50. “When infantrymen of the
Rainbow fought their way into
Dachau, these hardened
soldiers expected to see
horrible sights. But no human
imagination fed with fantastic
tales that have leaked out from
this earliest and most
notorious of all Nazi
Concentration camps, could
have been preparation for
what they did see there...."
-- Tech. Sgt. James Creasman, division
public affairs NCO, 1 May 1945

52. “What the Soldiers discovered
next at Dachau left an
impression of a lifetime.
Nothing you can put in words
would adequately describe
what I saw there. The human
mind refuses to believe what
the eyes see. All the stories of
Nazi horrors are
underestimated rather than
exaggerated.”
-- Assistant Division Chaplain (Maj.) Eli Bohnen,
42nd Infantry Division Headquarters

56. "The day is over, this
April 29, 1945.
I will celebrate it for
the rest of my life as
my second birthday,
as the day that gifted
me life anew."
-- Edgar Kupfer-Koberwitz,
Dachau Prisoner, S.499

58. “Riflemen, accustomed to witnessing death, had
no stomach for rooms stacked almost ceiling
high with tangled human bodies adjoining the
cremation furnaces, looking like some maniac’s
woodpile,”
“Dachau is no longer a name of terror for hunted
men. 32,000 of them have been freed by the
42nd Rainbow Division,”
-- Tech. Sgt. James Creasman, division public affairs NCO, 42nd Infantry
Division World News, May 1, 1945

59. Chaplain (Capt.) David Max Eichhorn, XV Corps

61. “These tortured dead can only be avenged when our world is
aroused so much by what the 42nd uncovered at Dachau and by
what others have found at all the other Dachaus scattered
throughout Germany, that never again will any party, any
government, any people be allowed to mar the face of the Earth
with such inhumanity.”
-- Tech. Sgt. James Creasman, division public affairs NCO, 42nd Division

63. “The liberation
was a frenzied
scene: Inmates of
the camp hugged
and embraced the
American troops,
kissed the ground
before them and
carried them
shoulder high
around the place,”
-- Marguerite Higgins,
reporter, NY Herald
Tribune, May 1, 1945