Speer felt scorned. “No regards to my family, no wishes, no thanks, no farewell.” For a moment, Speer lost his composure and mumbled something about coming back. But Hitler dismissed his minister of war and weapons, and Speer left.
Six days after Speer’s final meeting with Hitler, the U.S. Army liberated Dachau, a concentration camp located twelve miles outside Munich. It was 7:30 in the morning on April 29 when fifty tanks from the Seventh Army, Third Battalion of the 157th Infantry Regiment, pulled up to what at first seemed like an ordinary military post, located adjacent to an SS training camp. The weather was cold and there was a dusting of snow. The post was surrounded by high brick walls, an electrified barbed-wire fence, and a deep ditch. Seven fortified guard towers loomed overhead. The large iron front gates were closed and locked. A few American soldiers scaled the fence, cut the locks, and opened the gates. The soldiers rushed inside. A brief exchange of rifle fire ensued. Turkish newspaper correspondent Nerin E. Gun, imprisoned in Dachau for his reports on the Warsaw Ghetto, bore witness as some of the SS guards in the watchtowers began shooting at prisoners. But the American soldiers, Gun said, put a quick end to that. “The SS guards promptly came down the ladders, their hands raised high in surrender.” Other accounts describe brutal acts of vengeance inflicted by prisoners against their former SS guards. More gunfire ensued as a second unit, the Forty-fifth Thunderbird Division, approached Dachau from the southwest. They discovered fifty open freight cars abandoned just outside the garrison. Each train car was filled with emaciated bodies. There were several thousand corpses in all.
Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp, had been established by Himmler on March 20, 1933. It was originally a place where Communists and other political enemies of National Socialism, the ideology of the Nazi Party, were sent. The name came from the fact that prisoners could be “concentrated” in a group and held under protective custody following Nazi law. Quickly, this changed. Himmler made concentration camps “legally independent administrative units outside the penal code and the ordinary law.” Dachau had served as a training center for SS concentration camp guards and became a model for how hundreds of other concentration camps were to be set up and run. It was also a model for Nazi medical research programs involving doctors who would later become part of Operation Paperclip.
A young U.S. Army lieutenant and physician, Dr. Marcus J. Smith, arrived at Dachau early on the morning of April 30, 1945, and in his journal Smith noted how cold and gloomy the thousand-year-old city was. Before noon it started to hail. Dr. Smith was the sole medical officer attached to a ten-man displaced persons team sent to the concentration camp the day after it was liberated. He and his fellow soldiers had instructions to do what they could to help the 32,000 starved, diseased, and dying camp survivors as they waited for Red Cross workers to arrive. The newly liberated suffered from dysentery, tuberculosis, typhus, pneumonia, scabies, and other infectious diseases in early, late, and terminal stages, Smith wrote. “Even my callous, death-hardened county-hospital exterior begins to crack.… One of my men weeps.”
During breaks, Dr. Smith walked around Dachau’s gas chamber to try to make sense of what had gone on there. “I cannot believe this is possible in this enlightened age,” he wrote. “In the rear of the crematorium is [a] sign, depicting a man riding a monstrous pig. ‘Wash your hands,’ says the caption. ‘It is your duty to remain clean.’ ”
In his spare time, Dr. Smith wandered through the camp. “On one of these walks I enter a one-story building that contains laboratory counters and storage shelves,” Smith wrote, “almost everything in it has been smashed: I step over broken benches and drawers, twisted instruments and shattered glassware. In the debris, I am surprised to find a few specimen jars and bottles intact, filled with preserved human and insect tissues.” Smith asked questions around the concentration camp to try to learn more. Prisoners told him that the laboratory had served Nazi doctors as an experimental medical ward, and that everyone was afraid of it because it was a place “where selected prisoners [were] used as experimental subjects without their consent.”
Although it was not yet known by American or British intelligence at the time, what Dr. Marcus Smith had come upon at Dachau was the place where a group of Luftwaffe doctors had been conducting medical research experiments on humans. This work took place in a freestanding barracks, isolated from the others, and was called Experimental Cell Block Five. Many of the Reich’s elite medical doctors passed through the laboratory here. The work that was performed in Experimental Cell Block Five was science without conscience: bad science for bad ends. That at least six Nazi medical doctors involved in this research at Dachau would be among the first scientists given contracts by the U.S. Army would become one of the darkest secrets of Operation Paperclip.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Captured and Their Interrogators