"People like us - and there are many, many others telling their stories around the country - my hope is that the people listening to these stories will long outlive the offspring of the deniers."
Hilbert "Hibby" Margol
The Kaufering network of 15 camps was located around the German village of Kaufering, about 25 miles southwest of Munich. The Kaufering camps, which were satellites of the Dachau concentration camp, were established between June and October 1944. Those prisoners brought to Kaufering were used as part of the Ministry of Armaments' plan to transfer Jews to Germany to build underground fighter plane factories that could not be harmed by Allied bombs. This plan was called the Jagerstab program.
The first prisoners at Kaufering were Lithuanian Jews who arrived in June 1944. In October large groups of Hungarian, Polish, Czechoslovak, and Romanian Jews arrived; most had been transferred to Kaufering from Auschwitz. The prisoners were housed in semi-underground huts, and were badly maltreated. They were given insufficient food rations, no medical care, and were made to do extraordinarily hard work for the armaments industry and construction companies. This resulted in a very high death rate.
The Germans began evacuating the Kaufering prisoners to Dachau in April 1945, a week before American troops arrived to liberate the camp complex. When the Americans arrived, they found the camps empty, but for a few prisoners who had hidden in the woods during the evacuation. It is unclear how many prisoners perished at Kaufering.
Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its allies established more than 44,000 camps and other incarceration sites (including ghettos). The perpetrators used these locations for a range of purposes, including forced labor, detention of people deemed to be "enemies of the state," and mass murder. Millions of people suffered and died or were killed. Among these sites was Kaufering.
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Kaufering was a subcamp of the Dachau concentration camp.
ContinueIn this sequence of a 1993 presentation at North Park University in Chicago, in which Viktor Frankl talked about his life, he shares personal recollections of his 3 days at Auschwitz and the months spent in the Nazi-concentrations camps of Kaufering, a sub camp of Dachau, and Turkheim, where in 1945 he almost died from typhoid fewer.
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On June 20, 1944, the first shipment of 1,000 Jewish concentration camp prisoners from Auschwitz arrived at Kaufering. They were scheduled to help build three gigantic subterraneous bunkers of a project that was named "Ringeltaube". In these three bunkers, inter alia the jet-propelled Messerschmitt airplane "Me 262" was to be produced. For this project, eleven concentration camps were built in the Landsberg area, numbered Kaufering I – XI.
ContinueOn April 27, 1945, the 12th Armored Division reached Kaufering IV. The 101st Airborne Division arrived the next day, with the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion and 36th Infantry Division arriving on April 30. The liberators found this Bavarian camp in one of the worst conditions of the Dachau subcamps.
WATCH ON YOUTUBEThe Dachau concentration camp was established in March 1933. It was the first regular concentration camp established by the National Socialist (Nazi) government. Heinrich Himmler, as police president of Munich, officially described the camp as "the first concentration camp for political prisoners."
It was located on the grounds of an abandoned munitions factory near the northeastern part of the town of Dachau, about 10 miles northwest of Munich in southern Germany. On March 22, 1933, the first prisoner transports arrived at the camp.
Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Nazi Germany on January 30, 1933, and in March of that year, Heinrich Himmler announced the first concentration camp, which opened in the town of Dachau, just outside Munich, a medieval city in southern Germany.
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Only a year after Hitler had taken office, thousands were already imprisoned, tortured, and murdered (Report from August 8, 1934)
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For the last several days of its existence, before soldiers of the United States Seventh Army arrived, Dachau was a small, self-enclosed universe of decay and death.
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Survivors of the Holocaust frequently attribute their ability to avoid death to one main variable: luck. For Benzion Peresecki, the 15 year-old son of a delicatessen owner from Radviliškis, Lithuania, surviving the Holocaust was indeed fortunate, but came at an immense cost.
ContinueOn April 29, 1945, the U.S. Seventh Army’s 45th Infantry Division liberates Dachau, the first concentration camp established by Germany’s Nazi regime. A major Dachau subcamp was liberated the same day by the 42nd Rainbow Division.
As they neared the camp, the Americans found more than 30 railroad cars filled with bodies in various states of decomposition. Inside the camp there were more bodies and 30,000 survivors, most severely emaciated. Some of the American troops who liberated Dachau were so appalled by conditions at the camp that they machine-gunned at least two groups of captured German guards. It is officially reported that 30 SS guards were killed in this fashion, but conspiracy theorists have alleged that more than 10 times that number were executed by the American liberators. The German citizens of the town of Dachau were later forced to bury the 9,000 dead inmates found at the camp.
Troops who rescued death march survivors honored on 75th anniversary of WWII order that forced Japanese-Americans into camps
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The footage shown here is from original footage shot by Allied cameramen as liberating troops entered Dachau or flew overhead.
ContinueHilbert "Hibby" Margol recalls being one of the first soldiers to discover the Dachau concentration camp.
"From Hawaii to the Holocaust" tells a story of the 522 Field Artillery Battalion during WWII. Composed of Americans of Japanese Ancestry, the 522 played a role in the liberation of Dachau while many of their parents remained in US internment camps at home. Written and directed by Ryan Sexton, produced by Judy Weightman, interviews directed by Judy Weightman and Wayne Weightman, Research Assistant Jamie Tolbert Franklin 1993.
WATCH ON YOUTUBEHilbert "Hibby" Margol describes what he saw when his unit liberated Dachau on April 29, 1945 (video by Atlanta History Center).
