On April 29, 1945, American troops of the 42nd Infantry Division marched into a German town called Dachau

 On April 29, 1945, American troops of the 42nd Infantry Division marched into a German town called Dachau. They were expecting it to be any ordinary town. It was not.

Just beyond, they noticed a huge camp with high fences and barbed wire. Behind the fence there were thousands of people who were so thin that they looked like skeletons. Striped uniforms were the attire of many of them. They had been starved, beaten, and brutally treated by the Nazis.

The odor was awful — of sickness and death. The soldiers witnessed train cars loaded with corpses. It was something that would never be forgotten by them.

It was just a few hours before the guards had left. Some of the prisoners were taken on a long walk, while most of them perished during the journey. The other individuals who were too weak to walk were left behind, and those were the ones that the soldiers were able to rescue.

Dachau was among the first camps the Nazis constructed. To visit it opened the eyes of the world to how awful the Nazis were and how horribly people were treated. No one who visited that day would ever forget it.


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