The Day the Rules of War Died: How the Horror of the “Death Train” Drove American Soldiers to Massacre SS Guards at Dachau

DACHAU, GERMANY, 1945 – Sunday, April 29th, was a gray, bitterly cold day in Bavaria. The war in Europe was in its final, gasping breaths. For the men of the U.S. 45th Infantry Division—the “Thunderbirds”—the mission seemed routine: secure a large complex near Munich. Intelligence suggested it was a supply depot or perhaps a factory.

They had no idea they were walking toward the epicenter of hell.

As they approached the perimeter, the first thing that hit them wasn’t enemy fire. It was the smell. It was a stench so thick, so putrid, that it seemed to coat the back of their throats—the smell of death on an industrial scale.

Then they saw the train.

Sitting on a siding outside the complex were 39 railway cars. They were silent. Motionless. A lieutenant moved forward to inspect them, peering through the slats of a cattle car. He recoiled, screaming.

Inside were bodies. Thousands of them. Men, women, and children, stacked like cordwood, their limbs tangled in a gruesome mosaic of starvation and neglect. They had been left there to die of exposure and thirst. The soldiers, battle-hardened veterans who had fought through the bloody campaigns of Italy and France, broke down. A 19-year-old private from Oklahoma collapsed in the snow, sobbing uncontrollably. Another vomited.

But for many, the shock quickly calcified into something else: a cold, shaking, murderous rage.

The Breaking Point

The “Death Train,” as it would come to be known, held over 2,300 corpses. As the Americans moved past the cars, staring into the hollow eyes of the dead, the moral compass that had guided them through the war began to spin wildly.

“We were mad,” Private John Lee later recalled. “We were so mad we wanted to kill every German in the world.”

They reached the main gate of the camp. The Commandant, Martin Weiss, had fled, leaving behind a young SS Lieutenant named Heinrich Wicker and about 500 guards to surrender the camp. Wicker, seemingly oblivious to the reality of what he was guarding, had polished his boots and donned his dress uniform. He marched out to meet the Americans with a white flag, expecting the professional courtesies due an officer.

He saluted. “I surrender this camp to the United States Army,” he announced.

An American officer looked at the clean, well-fed Nazi. Then he looked back at the pile of emaciated corpses rotting in the open cars just yards away. He didn’t return the salute. He spit in the German’s face.

The surrender did not go as planned.

The Coal Yard Massacre

Chaos erupted as the Americans entered the camp. Inside the wire, 30,000 skeletal prisoners rushed the fences, screaming, weeping, and chanting “Americans! Americans!” It was a scene of delirious joy, but on the periphery, a darker drama was unfolding.

A group of SS guards, realizing the mood had shifted, tried to surrender near the camp’s coal yard. They raised their hands, shouting the only magic words they thought could save them: “Hitler kaput! Hitler is finished!”

It didn’t work.

Lieutenant Jack Bushyhead, a Native American officer from Oklahoma, was watching them. He had just come from the crematorium. He had seen the ovens, still warm, filled with human ash. He had seen the clothes of children piled high. The sight of these arrogant, healthy men standing amidst the genocide they had facilitated was too much.

Bushyhead didn’t shout. He didn’t read them their rights. He simply gestured with his Thompson submachine gun. Line them up.

Confused and terrified, the SS men were herded against a brick wall. There were about 50 of them. Panic set in. “Nein, nein! Geneva Convention!” one screamed.

A machine gunner known as “Birdeye” set up his .30 caliber weapon on a tripod. The metallic click-clack of the bolt echoed in the courtyard. Birdeye looked at Bushyhead. The Lieutenant nodded.

The air ripped apart. For ten seconds, a sustained burst of heavy fire cut through the line of grey uniforms. When the smoke cleared, the SS guards lay in a heap at the base of the wall. The snow was black with coal dust and red with blood. Some were still twitching.

Lieutenant Colonel Felix Sparks, the battalion commander, heard the firing and came running. “Stop it!” he screamed, firing his pistol into the air to break the trance. “What the hell are you doing?”

The machine gunner looked up, his eyes blank and tear-filled. “Colonel,” he sobbed, “they deserved it.”

Primal Justice

The “Coal Yard Massacre” wasn’t an isolated incident. Across the camp, the veneer of civilization was peeling away.

At Tower B, guards tried to climb down a ladder to surrender. Americans shot them off the rungs like carnival targets, their bodies splashing into the moat below. Soldiers then walked to the edge and emptied their magazines into the water to ensure no one survived.

“It wasn’t war,” one GI wrote home. “It was an execution. And I didn’t feel a thing. After what I saw in those boxcars, they weren’t human to me anymore.”

But the Americans weren’t the only ones seeking vengeance. The liberated prisoners, fueled by a final burst of adrenaline, sought their own justice.

They found an SS guard hiding in a watchtower and dragged him down. They didn’t have guns. They had shovels, sticks, and their bare hands. As they beat the man to death, tearing him apart in a frenzy of primal rage, American soldiers stood by and watched. They smoked cigarettes, silent witnesses to the carnage.

“Should we stop them?” a young officer asked.

“No,” a sergeant replied grimly. “Let them finish.”

In another corner of the camp, prisoners found a “Kapo”—a prisoner who had collaborated with the Nazis and brutalized his fellow inmates. They dragged him to a latrine and held him under the sewage until he stopped struggling. For one hour, Dachau was a lawless zone where the victims became the judges, juries, and executioners.

Patton’s Cover-Up

Eventually, order was restored. Lieutenant Colonel Sparks, regaining control, locked up the surviving Germans to protect them from his own men. But the secret was already out. Photos had been taken—black and white images of American soldiers standing casually over piles of executed Germans.

An investigation was launched immediately. Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Whitaker led the inquiry, interviewing soldiers and collecting the damning photos. The resulting report, “Investigation of Alleged Mistreatment of German Guards at Dachau,” was explosive. It concluded that American troops had violated international law and recommended court-martials for those involved, including Bushyhead.

The report traveled up the chain of command until it landed on the desk of General George S. Patton.

Patton was a legendarily strict disciplinarian. He was known to fine soldiers for having unpolished buttons. But as he read the report and looked at the photos of the “Death Train,” the “Old Blood and Guts” General made a different calculation.

He summoned the investigating officer. “What is this garbage?” Patton reportedly barked.

“Sir, it is evidence of war crimes,” the officer replied.

Patton threw the report down. “War crimes? You walk into a place like that, you see 2,000 dead bodies on a train, and you expect my boys to follow the rule book? Hell no.”

Patton understood what the investigators didn’t: the psychological snap that happens when humanity confronts pure evil. “These men were overwrought,” he said. “They had nervous trigger fingers. It happens in war.”

Then, he did something that cemented his legend among the rank and file. He didn’t sign the court-martial papers. He reportedly took the file and burned it (or, according to some accounts, ordered it buried in the deepest, most top-secret archive, never to be opened).

“There will be no trial,” he declared. “The SS got what they deserved.”

General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander, quietly agreed. To put American heroes on trial for killing the monsters of Dachau would have destroyed troop morale and public support. The investigation was quashed. The charges were dropped.

The Silent Legacy

Lieutenant Jack Bushyhead returned to Oklahoma after the war. He lived a quiet life and died in 1977. He never spoke publicly about the day he ordered the execution of 50 men. He remained a silent hero with a dark secret.

The Dachau reprisals remain a controversial chapter in WWII history. Neo-Nazis and revisionists have tried to use the event to claim a moral equivalence, to say, “Look, the Americans were bad too.”

But historians view it differently. It wasn’t a planned genocide. It wasn’t systemic industrial murder. It was a spontaneous, human reaction to the unbearable. It was the moment the human mind snapped.

Today, Dachau is a memorial site. It honors the 30,000 victims who perished behind its barbed wire. But there is no plaque for the 50 SS guards who died against the coal yard wall. They lie in unmarked graves, unmourned and largely forgotten.

History has judged them. They were the architects of hell, and on April 29, 1945, they met the devil.

As for the soldiers of the 45th, they carried the memory of the “Death Train” for the rest of their lives. They tried to forget the shooting, but few regretted it. As one veteran confessed years later, “I know killing prisoners is wrong. But that day, at that place, it felt like the only right thing to do.”