Dachau’s memorial marks 80 years since the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp

Rob Schmitz | April 29, 2025

A still from a documentary film shows a U.S. soldier reaching out to outstretched hands of prisoners of the liberated Nazi concentration camp at Dachau, in then West Germany, in April 1945, during World War II.

BERLIN — It is the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Nazi Germany’s Dachau concentration camp, and to commemorate, the Dachau memorial site north of Munich is dedicating a plaque in honor of the U.S. Army’s 45th Infantry Division that first encountered more than 30,000 prisoners alive at the camp on April 29, 1945.

The memorial site will host several days of official remembrance at the location of the former concentration camp, where at least 40,000 people were killed or died of hunger and illness between 1933 and 1945. That will include a commemoration for the victims and religious services for Jewish, Protestant, Catholic, Greek and Russian Orthodox communities on Sunday.

Clouds hang over the crematorium at the former Dachau concentration camp, where more than 40,000 people were murdered or died of illness and hunger, and more than 200,000 were imprisoned by the Nazis. (Matthias Schrader | AP)

Established on the grounds of an old gunpowder and ammunition factory in March 1933, Dachau was the longest operating concentration camp in the Holocaust. It was one of thousands of camps and other sites the Nazis used in the mass murder of more than 6 million Jews.

Don Greenbaum, a U.S. soldier interviewed by Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine in 2020, said he could not be prepared for the camp when a French minister showed him around.

A memorial stone pictured at the former Dachau concentration camp, where tens of thousands of people were murdered and more than 200,000 were imprisoned by the Nazis from 1933 to 1945, in Dachau, Germany. (Matthias Schrader | AP)

“He showed me the machine-gun positions of the SS soldiers, the gas chamber and the crematorium. There were suitcases all around, and you could see piles of clothes,” Greenbaum said.

“The war was over a week later. But I will never forget Dachau,” he said. “I still remember that horrible odor.”

After World War II, the Dachau camp was used by the Allied powers to hold former SS soldiers awaiting trial for war crimes. After 1948, it held ethnic Germans who had been expelled from Eastern Europe and were awaiting resettlement, and it was also used as a U.S. military base during the Allied occupation. It was finally closed in 1960.