The liberation of Dachau concentration camp appears in Frank Sheeran’s account as a brief stop on the way to Munich that became an unforgettable encounter with mass death and retaliatory violence. His recollection joins the camp’s physical evidence of atrocity to the actions of soldiers and survivors, then returns to it years later as a memory that would not stay confined to the battlefield.

On the March to Munich

Sheeran recalls that his unit was heading south through Germany toward Munich, where Hitler had begun his political career in a beer hall. On the way, the soldiers stopped to liberate Dachau concentration camp. The account places the camp within the larger advance, but sharply changes the scale of what that journey meant: the men had heard rumors of atrocities, yet Sheeran says they were unprepared for what they encountered.

Evidence of Atrocity

A Combat Report described “some 1,000 bodies” inside the camp. It recorded gas chambers and crematoriums side by side, with clothing, shoes, and bodies stacked together in orderly piles. The report’s measured inventory contrasts with Sheeran’s description of the scene as something that remained printed on the mind. He recalled the stench as inseparable from the first sight of the camp, an impression that, in his telling, never went away.

The Guards and the Survivors

Sheeran says the camp commander and his officers were loaded into jeeps and driven away; gunfire could then be heard in the distance. He describes the roughly 500 German soldiers guarding Dachau as subsequently “taken care of by us,” without specifying the acts in detail. Some victims who had enough strength borrowed the soldiers’ guns and did what they had to do. Sheeran emphasizes that nobody objected when it was done, presenting the scene as a moment in which violence against the guards and action by the survivors passed without challenge from the soldiers around them.

Aftermath and Return in Memory

After the camp, the unit marched into Munich. Sheeran places the end of the war in Europe about two weeks later, with Germany’s unconditional surrender. The sequence gives the liberation a place in the advance’s closing movement, but not a clean emotional ending: years afterward, when he began stirring up memories of combat, he again dreamed about the war. In those dreams, he said, combat had become mixed with things he started doing for certain people after the war. The camp thus remains both a remembered wartime encounter and part of a later, unsettled landscape of violence.