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 Imagine endless rows of thin rotting corpses.  These were the bodies of all the innocent and helpless men, women, and children forced into camps where they were tortured and driven to death.  This was a vision that American troops encountered when they liberated Dachau, a concentration camp near Munich.  This was the terror that was… Dachau.
 

 Upon entering Dachau, prisoners were stripped of their possessions and forced to shave their heads.  The typical uniforms worn by all prisoners were pajama-like with matching hats.  Hundreds of women and children were crammed into small prisoner barracks.  There were at least four prisoners at one time sharing a bed.  Many prisoners were used as forced labor for Germany's industry.  In many pictures, these forced laborers looked well fed, some of them popping out of their uniforms so they could lift heavy machinery.  While the rest of the prisoners were fed hardly anything.  Others were used as guinea pigs in medical experiments to improve the military.  Some of these horrid acts include freezing prisoners and injecting thousands of people with Malaria just to see what would happen.  As prisoners started to get sick, the German guards killed them systematically.  Long walls were used as shooting ranges where mass executions were held.  To make sure that no one escaped, the SS (secret police) dug a large ditch and filled it with water while an electric fence surrounded it.  This was the day to day terror the prisoners at Dachau faced.
 

 Dachau was liberated at 5:28 PM on April 29, 1945.  American soldiers marched in form two sides and took over the camp.  Upon liberation, 520 German SS soldiers were killed, including Heinrich Skodzenski, the commander of the camp.  These young American soldiers were outraged at how clean the uniforms of the German soldiers were in such a filthy camp, so they executed them on the spot.  After the war, the 40 remaining soldiers were put on trial and 36 of them sentenced to death.  The prisoners joined in killing and beating the guards out of pure anger.  The prisoners were relieved and ecstatic to be released from this torture.  Many would live in the hospitals set up by American troops for months before returning home.  One American soldier said they began feeding the ex-prisoners real food, and all 1500 of them got diarrhea, some even died.  These deaths were called the canned-food victims.  The mental condition of these prisoners was in such poor shape that some believed their liberators were out to kill them.  One man was so afraid of an American soldier that he jumped out of a window, killing himself.
 Although many did survive the liberation of the camp, there were numerous prisoners near death, and thousands already dead when the camp was liberated.  The German soldiers had not had time to burn or bury the bodies.  The corpses were piled high on train beds, some were not dead, but could do nothing but twitch.
 The memorial of Dachau that commemorates the victims during the Holocaust is an everyday reminder that something like this should never happen again.