Wednesday, 29th April 2020 marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Dachau Concentration Camp. The hippy reflects on his father’s firsthand account of that day.

Was my father a war criminal? I asked myself this recently, as I explored an idea I had for a feature story pegged to the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Dachau, which is on 29th April 2020.

My father was part of the US Army battalion that liberated Dachau, the very first Nazi concentration camp. It was the location of some of worst atrocities ever perpetrated by humans, against other humans. According to historic records, during the 12 years it was in operation, Dachau housed over 200,000 prisoners, and more than 40,000 of them were murdered there. These were horrendous war crimes, committed on an industrial scale.

My father didn’t like talking about the war. As a young boy, I found the idea of war fascinating. I would often pester him about his experiences, but he was almost always reluctant to talk about them.

When pushed, he would say the war changed him, that he didn’t feel able to come back home straight away when the war ended. He felt too savage. He said he had seen too many horrible things, and couldn’t return to his normal life straight away. He needed time to adjust, so he volunteered to stay on as part of the provisional government, tasked with the denazification of Germany. 

My father did have two go-to war stories, for when he was put on the spot, and I heard both more than once, over the years. One concerned a serious injury, when a mortar shell exploded near him, and the shrapnel sliced into his neck, barely missing an artery. He was stitched up and sent back to the frontline. It left a scar, you could still see. He received a Purple Heart medal for this incident, but he didn’t put in for it, for many decades, and only received it in his seventies.

The other story he would tell was even more dramatic. While on patrol in the Black Forest, a Nazi soldier jumped out from behind a tree, with his rifle trained on my father at close range. The Nazi pulled the trigger, but his rifle jammed, giving my father the opportunity to shoot and kill the Nazi instead. That jammed weapon spared my father’s life. My father called it fate, and said the incident left him shook. He knew he was very lucky to survive this brush with death.

You will notice I keep using the word Nazi, rather than German. I’m doing this, because my father always made this distinction. He liked the German people very much, and he said they were mostly very kind to him. But he hated, with a capital HATE, all Nazi soldiers, and especially, and specifically, the ones that tried to kill him. I never thought that was an unreasonable view for him to hold.

My father was my hero, when I was a kid. He was a man’s man, who could, and did, charm everyone he met. He could do everything. He rode horses, flew planes, and piloted boats. He could hunt, fish, he was a top marksman too. He could do woodwork, construction work, fix plumbing, fix cars, fix any engine, you name it. My best description of him is this: Picture Ernest Hemingway, but without the literary talent, or crippling alcoholism. He even looked a bit like Hemingway. That was my dad. He was hard working, capable, honest and decent, even if he was often emotionally distant. 

My father’s name was Henry, but everyone called him “Mac” and he passed away in 2004. During the war, he was a Master Sergeant in the US Army. He told me he was offered several field commissions, but he always turned them down. When I asked why, he chuckled and asked me why I thought they were being offered on the battlefield. I thought for a moment, and I realised it was because the officers he had been asked to replace had been killed in action. My father said he didn’t want to end up like them, so he remained a Master Sergeant for the duration of his deployment.

My father was born in New York City, in 1921, which means he would have been 100 years old, next year if he was still alive. He was orphaned as a baby. His mother died due to complications from childbirth, the day after he was born. And his father left him with a foster family, then disappeared himself, never to return. He didn’t have the best start in life, and in many ways, this defined him. He was as self-made as a man could be. 

My father married his first wife straight out of High School, at age 18, and they had their first child a year after that. I always thought he married so young to create the family he never had. A few years after that, America finally joined the war, my father voluntarily joined the military, and he was shipped out overseas. And by the age of 23, he was helping to liberate Dachau.

Contrast that with me at 23. I had just dropped out of university, again, and I was freelancing as a production assistant for MTV in New York. I wasn’t married, I had no children, and I hadn’t killed a single Nazi. Compared with my father at the same age, I was a loser, and a child, and not even a very successful child. 

My father spoke German, and because of that, I chose to study the German language in High School. Every two years, my school sponsored a trip to Germany, for ten days of culture and sightseeing, while immersed in the language. But that wasn’t the appeal of the trip. The appeal was beer. The drinking laws in Germany were different from the USA, and it meant I would be legal to drink beer there. The motivation to go was strong.

When I was 16, in 1979, I went on the school’s Germany trip, and my father came along as a chaperone. I was worried his presence would curtail my legal, yet underage beer consumption. I was in touch with my teenage priorities. Now, I couldn’t imagine the trip without him. 

Travelling in the olden days of the 1970’s was different than it is today. For starters, it was still relatively expensive, and overseas travel was rare. The flight to Germany would be only my second ever trip on a jet, and my very first abroad. And as it was a school trip, being organised as cheaply as possible, we didn’t even have direct flights. 

Our journey began with a coach ride from the Jersey shore, to JFK airport in New York. We first flew to Iceland, where we had a very brief layover at the airport. That was my first time on foreign soil, and we didn’t even leave the airport at Reykjavik. The second leg of the flight didn’t even land in Germany, but instead in neighbouring, tiny Luxembourg, which was the second foreign country I ever visited. I spent maybe an hour there, at baggage claim, and on yet another coach. And it was that second coach, which finally brought us to our destination, Germany, my third new country that day. The journey took over 16 hours and was exhausting.

Sitting here now, in April 2020, trying to recall details of my first foreign trip, and I find myself prodding the recesses of my memory. I remember many of the different places we visited, like Neuschwanstein Castle, and the site of the 1972 Olympics in Munich, but my most enduring memory of the trip, is our visit to Dachau. Seeing online photos of the camp now, and they have a certain familiarity to them. A digital restoration of my faded memories.

Growing up in the 1960s and 70s, you heard about “the war” a lot. Not Vietnam, which was the current war back then, but the big world war. It weighed heavily on the minds of my parents’ generation. Heroic WW2 films were broadcast on TV constantly. And “The Diary of Anne Frank” was required reading in my High School. We knew the Nazis were the bad guys, but actually seeing Dachau for myself, brought it all home.

Our group was led around Dachau by a tour guide. We saw the rows of foundations where the wooden barracks once stood. We saw the crematoria, and the gas chambers. There was also a small museum. We were all very solemn, the enormity of the atrocities still evident. 

At the end of the tour, my father took me aside and we found a spot outside to sit down. He seemed to be particularly subdued. He cleared his throat and told me he has been here before, in 1945, and this was his first time returning. Of course, I knew he had fought in Germany during the war, but at the time, I wasn’t aware of many details. He had never mentioned Dachau to me before. My father seemed surprised that he was having an emotional reaction to being back, like he wasn’t expecting it. 

He went on to tell me that he was amongst the first US soldiers to arrive at the camp. And he recalled his shock at the conditions, and the physical state of the prisoners. He described them as living skeletons, just all skin stretched tightly over bone. We’ve all seen the photos, they were on display at the small museum on-site, but my father’s description felt more visceral to me. I could see in his eyes, that he had witnessed unspeakable things that day.

And then he told me something that really stuck with me, and it was a detail that I never thought to look into, until recently.

My father told me that they captured all the remaining camp guards, those that hadn’t fled as his unit arrived. He said that rather than take the captured guards as prisoners, he and his colleagues, made a different choice. They gave guns to some of the liberated prisoners, and allowed these former prisoners to march the camp guards away from the camp, into a wooded area nearby. A short time later, the former prisoners returned, but the camp guards did not. 

I won’t lie, at 16 years old, I thought this was incredibly cool, like something out of a Hollywood film. Proper rough justice, a moral choice, an eye for an eye. Those Nazi guards ran a death camp. Whether they were following orders or not, they were still mistreating and murdering people on an industrial scale. They got what they deserved. End of. As a teenager, the world was still very black and white to me.

I was surprised my father opened up to me so much, that day. He was never very talkative, and he never spoke about his feelings, but I could see sharing this story with me wasn’t easy for him. I could also see that sharing this story was necessary for him, like he was unburdening himself. 

After a brief, awkward silence, we were bundled back on to the coach, and we left Dachau. We finished the trip, flew back to America, and got on with our lives. I tried to ask my father about this incident again, several times, but all he would say, is “I already told you all I remember”, as a way to cut me off. I never got any more details, but the story stuck with me.

Flash forward to a couple of months ago, and I noticed the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Dachau was approaching soon. Of course, my father’s story popped into my head, and I realised I’d never actually looked into it. 

I Googled three words, “Dachau guards killed” and this Wikipedia article was the first result: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dachau_liberation_reprisals

While it doesn’t confirm every detail my father gave me, it does confirm his overall story, that between 35 and 50 Nazis were killed in the post-liberation reprisals. I’d never doubted my father’s story, but it was still interesting to read other accounts of that day. 

And then the question that is the title of this piece, popped into my head. Was my father a war criminal? Could what he told me he did that day, be considered a war crime? It is a compelling title for a feature. You would click on it. You did click on it! But it still remained in my mind, as a valid question.

My plan, had I pitched this feature to a newspaper or magazine, and had it been commissioned, was to find an answer to this question. I would have interviewed a historian, and a war crimes prosecutor, to help me reach a conclusion.  But I didn’t. I can’t imagine anything non-Covid related getting commissioned now. Maybe I’m wrong, but I didn’t pursue this idea any further.

Instead, I am writing this piece for my website. I’m writing it as a tribute to my father. And I will answer the question, posed by the title of this piece, unequivocally. Chances are, you’ve already worked out my view. My father was never a war criminal. What happened at Dachau, what my father said he did there, was a moral and just response to grossly immoral crimes against humanity. Allowing the prisoners to mete out their own extreme punishments, was just a tiny step towards rebalancing the scales of justice. Two wrongs may not make things right, but sometimes you still need to take that eye in return. I don’t need scholars and experts to tell me what I already know.

When I ask myself, would I have done the same thing, under the same circumstances? Maybe. How can I know for sure? My father was a tough, confident, self reliant man at the age of 23. I wasn’t. I would never have considered joining the military, I grew up in the shadow of the very divisive Vietnam war. I’m a lover, not a fighter. I wish I was as tough and battle-tested as my dad, but I’m not. The horrors I’ve experienced over my 30 year career as a journalist, even as a non-combatant in war zones, are pale in comparison, relative to what my father went through during the war. 

My father has been gone for nearly 16 years, and a day doesn’t go by that I don’t think of him. Sometimes, the reminders are small, others are more significant. And I can think of nothing more significant than the Dachau liberation anniversary this week. It wasn’t just a major, historic event, it had a very personal significance for my father. And after our visit to Germany in 1979, for me too. I miss him a lot, and know I always will. When people talk of the greatest generation, I think of him. I’m not a tenth of the man he was, and never will be. No, my father wasn’t a war criminal. He was my hero. 

After a 30 year career as a journalist, working for some of the largest news organisations in the world, including Associated Press and Reuters, and 15 years as a duty news editor for BBC News, Doug – the northlondonhippy is now a full time writer, and hippy.

Doug is also the author of “Personal Use by the northlondonhippy.”  “Personal Use” chronicles Doug’s first 35 years of drug use, while calling for urgent drug law reform. It’s a cracking read, you will laugh, you will cry, and you can bet your ass that you will wish you were a hippy too!

You can also find Doug –  the northlondonhippy on Twitter: @nthlondonhippy