From: CODOH
Clergy Imprisoned in Dachau: A Critical Examination
Dachau was used partially as a detainment facility for Christian clergy in Europe. There were more than 1,000 clergymen in Dachau in 1940, which was about 4% of the inmates in Dachau that year. After 1940 all priests imprisoned by Germany were relocated to Dachau, with a total of 2,762 clergymen imprisoned in Dachau by the end of the war. Catholics made up 2,579 of this total, while the rest were mostly Protestant ministers.[i]
The largest national contingent was from Poland (1,780, or 64%), with the Germans (447, or 16%) and other nationalities following far behind. …
Medical Experimentation
Dachau was used as a center for medical experimentation on humans involving malaria, high altitudes, freezing, phlegmon, and other experiments. This has been corroborated by hundreds of documents and by witnesses in the Doctors’ Trial at Nuremberg, which opened on December 9, 1946, and ended on July 19, 1947.[iii]
The malaria experimentation at Dachau was performed by Dr. Klaus Karl Schilling, who was an internationally famous parasitologist. Dr. Schilling was ordered by Heinrich Himmler in 1936 to conduct medical research at Dachau for the purpose of specifically immunizing individuals against malaria. …
A total of 176 Polish priests, four Czechs and five German clergymen were subject to malaria experimentation at Dachau. Two priests died as a result….
Typhus
The first typhus epidemic at Dachau began in December 1942 [low vitamin D season – editor]. Quarantine measures were taken to prevent its spread. The end of this typhus epidemic was declared on March 14, 1943, with the disease killing between 100 and 250 inmates in the camp.[ix]
The second typhus epidemic struck Dachau in December 1944 and was much more widespread. …
Typhus was the primary reason for the huge piles of dead bodies at Dachau when U.S. troops entered the camp. Dr. Charles P. Larson, an American forensic pathologist, was at Dachau and conducted hundreds of autopsies at Dachau and some of its sub-camps. Dr. Larson stated in regard to these autopsies: “Many of them died from typhus. Dachau’s crematoriums couldn’t keep up with the burning of the bodies. They did not have enough oil to keep the incinerators going. I found that a number of the victims had also died from tuberculosis. All of them were malnourished. The medical facilities were most inadequate. There was no sanitation…”[xi]
Dr. John E. Gordon, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of preventive medicine and epidemiology at the Harvard University School of Public Health, was with U.S. forces at the end of World War II. Dr. Gordon determined that disease, and especially typhus, was the number one cause of death in the German camps. Dr. Gordon explained the causes for the outbreaks of disease and typhus:
Germany in the spring months of April and May [1945] was an astounding sight, a mixture of humanity traveling this way and that, homeless, often hungry and carrying typhus with them…
Germany was in chaos. The destruction of whole cities and the path left by advancing armies produced a disruption of living conditions contributing to the spread of disease. Sanitation was low grade, public utilities were seriously disrupted, food supply and food distribution was poor, housing was inadequate and order and discipline were everywhere lacking. Still more important, a shifting of population was occurring such as few times have experienced.[xii]
Famine
The food rations received by inmates in German concentration camps decreased in May 1942 due to shortages caused by the devastated-German-war effort. These shortages became a famine….
Dachau Clergy Mistreated After Liberation
The Americans who liberated Dachau were intent on exploiting Dachau for propaganda purposes. Photographers repeatedly visited Dachau to take pictures and film newsreel footage of the dead. Some clergymen petitioned American authorities to improve their lot. For example, Father Michel Riquet protested in a letter to Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, commander-in-chief of the Allied forces:
You will understand our impatience and even our astonishment at the fact that, more than 10 days after greeting our liberators, the 34,000 detainees of Dachau are still prisoners of the same barbed-wire fences, guarded by sentinels whose orders are still to fire on anyone who attempts to escape—which for every prisoner is a natural right, especially when he is told that he is free and victorious. In the barracks that are visited every day by the international press, some men continue to stagnate, stacked in these triple-decker beds that dysentery turns into a filthy cesspool, while the lanes between the blocks continue to be lined with cadavers—135 per day—just like in the darker times of the tyranny that you conquered.[xxvii]
The German clergymen who left Dachau also discovered that Germans were facing severe deprivations and starvation after the war. …
Conclusion
Historian Nikolaus Wachsmann writes regarding prisoner deaths in German concentration camps, “[T]he precise number of victims will never be known.”[xxxvii] While precise numbers can never be determined, some historians have made reasonable attempts to document the number of deaths in Dachau.
Harold Marcuse writes that the most reliable figures today set the total number of inmates in Dachau at 206,206, of whom at least 31,591 are documented to have died or been killed prior to liberation.[xxxviii] Paul Berben wrote that the total number of people who passed through Dachau during its existence is well in excess of 200,000.[xxxix] Berben concluded that while no one will ever know the exact number of deaths at Dachau, the number of deaths is probably several thousand more than the quoted number of 31,951.[xl]
Berben documented that approximately 66% of all deaths at Dachau occurred during the final seven months of the war. The increase in deaths at Dachau was caused primarily by a devastating typhus epidemic which, in spite of the efforts made by the medical staff, continued to spread throughout Dachau. The number of deaths at Dachau also includes 2,226 people who died in May 1945 after the Allies had liberated the camp, as well as the deaths of 223 prisoners in March 1944 from Allied bombings of Kommandos.[xli]
A VERSION OF THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE MAY/JUNE 2019 ISSUE OF THE BARNES REVIEW.
Notes
[i] Marcuse, Harold, Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, 1933-2001, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 43-44, 222.
[ii] Ibid., p. 44.
[iii] Berben, Paul, Dachau, 1933-1945: The Official History, London: The Norfolk Press, 1975, p. 123.
[iv] McCallum, John Dennis, Crime Doctor, Mercer Island, Wash.: The Writing Works, Inc., 1978, pp. 64-65.
[v] Zeller, Guillaume, The Priest Barracks: Dachau, 1938-1945, San Francisco, Cal.: Ignatius Press, 2017, pp. 152-154.
[vi] Pasternak, Alfred, Inhuman Research: Medical Experiments in German Concentration Camps, Budapest, Hungary: Akadémiai Kiadó, 2006, p. 149.
[vii] Zeller, Guillaume, The Priest Barracks: Dachau, 1938-1945, San Francisco, Cal.: Ignatius Press, 2017, pp. 157-158.
[viii] Ibid., p. 158.
[ix] Ibid., pp. 124-125.
[x] Ibid., pp. 126-132; Marcuse, Harold, Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, 1933-2001, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 232.
[xi] McCallum, John Dennis, Crime Doctor, Mercer Island, Wash.: The Writing Works, Inc., 1978, pp. 60-61.
[xii] Gordon, John E., “Louse-Borne Typhus Fever in the European Theater of Operations, U.S. Army, 1945,” in Moulton, Forest Ray, (ed.), Rickettsial Diseases of Man, Washington, D.C.: American Academy for the Advancement of Science, 1948, pp. 16-27. Quoted in Berg, Friedrich P., “Typhus and the Jews,” The Journal of Historical Review, Winter 1988-89, pp. 444-447, and in Butz, Arthur Robert, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, Newport Beach, Cal.: Institute for Historical Review, 1993, pp. 46-47.
[xiii] Zeller, Guillaume, The Priest Barracks: Dachau, 1938-1945, San Francisco, Cal.: Ignatius Press, 2017, p. 107.
[xiv] Berben, Paul, Dachau, 1933-1945: The Official History, London: The Norfolk Press, 1975, p. 150.
[xv] Ibid., p. 151.
[xvi] Cobden, John, Dachau: Reality and Myth in History, Costa Mesa, Cal.: Institute for Historical Review, 1991, pp. 21-23.
[xvii] Zeller, Guillaume, The Priest Barracks: Dachau, 1938-1945, San Francisco, Cal.: Ignatius Press, 2017, pp. 11, 27.
[xviii] Ibid., pp. 18, 258.
[xix] Neuhäusler, Johannes, What was it like in the Concentration Camp at Dachau?, Dachau: Trustees for the Monument of Atonement in the Concentration Camp at Dachau, 1973, pp. 3, 25-26.
[xx] Marcuse, Harold, Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, 1933-2001, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 221.
[xxi] Berben, Paul, Dachau, 1933-1945: The Official History, London: The Norfolk Press, 1975, p. 277.
[xxii] Ibid., p. 148.
[xxiii] Zeller, Guillaume, The Priest Barracks: Dachau, 1938-1945, San Francisco, Cal.: Ignatius Press, 2017, pp. 162-165.
[xxiv] Berben, Paul, Dachau, 1933-1945: The Official History, London: The Norfolk Press, 1975, pp. 148-149.
[xxv] For example, Neuhäusler, Johannes, What was it like in the Concentration Camp at Dachau?, Dachau: Trustees for the Monument of Atonement in the Concentration Camp at Dachau, 1973, pp. 15, 29.
[xxvi] Berben, Paul, Dachau, 1933-1945: The Official History, London: The Norfolk Press, 1975, p. 8.
[xxvii] Zeller, Guillaume, The Priest Barracks: Dachau, 1938-1945, San Francisco, Cal.: Ignatius Press, 2017, p. 212.
[xxviii] Hockenos, Matthew D., Then They Came For Me: Martin Niemöller, The Pastor Who Defied the Nazis, New York: Basic Books, 2018, p. 204.
[xxix] Ibid., p. 212.
[xxx] Ibid.
[xxxi] Ibid., p. 213.
[xxxii] Zeller, Guillaume, The Priest Barracks: Dachau, 1938-1945, San Francisco, Cal.: Ignatius Press, 2017, p. 217.
[xxxiii] Hockenos, Matthew D., Then They Came For Me: Martin Niemöller, The Pastor Who Defied the Nazis, New York: Basic Books, 2018, p. 203.
[xxxiv] Marcuse, Harold, Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, 1933-2001, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 229.
[xxxv] Zeller, Guillaume, The Priest Barracks: Dachau, 1938-1945, San Francisco, Cal.: Ignatius Press, 2017, pp. 222-223.
[xxxvi] Ibid., pp. 223-224.
[xxxvii] Wachsmann, Nikolaus, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015, p. 628.
[xxxviii] Marcuse, Harold, Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, 1933-2001, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 70.
[xxxix] Berben, Paul, Dachau, 1933-1945: The Official History, London: The Norfolk Press, 1975, p. 19.
[xl] Ibid., p. 202.
[xli] Ibid., pp. 95, 281.