On April 29, 1945, US Army soldiers liberated the Nazi concentration camp of Dachau in southern Germany. The liberation was not preceded by battle – the camp commander and some SS personnel had fled, while the remaining guards raised a white flag and surrendered to the Americans with little resistance. The horror that confronted the fighters of the US Army's 42nd Infantry Division was unforgettable: thousands of corpses of camp prisoners, gas chambers, and crematoria, as well as tens of thousands of starved inmates, barely clinging to life.
In the hours that followed, Dachau's coal yard witnessed one of the most justified acts of retribution in 20th-century history: The Americans singled out the SS soldiers from among the surrendering Germans. These were lined up against a wall and then shot and killed, some by American soldiers and others by the camp's liberated prisoners. The exact number of SS members who paid for their actions at this moment is unknown, but it's estimated to be in the hundreds, including both sadistic guards and "ordinary" support personnel like cooks or quartermasters.
It doesn't take much imagination to understand what would happen if this case fell into the hands of those investigative and prosecutorial elements in Israel who are now trying to investigate and prosecute soldiers and civilians for killing Gazans who participated in the Oct. 7 massacre.
It's entirely clear that it would be the liberators of Dachau who would stand trial, but not before one of the investigators told them that "they are no better than the Nazis." Meanwhile, the captured Nazis would receive encouragement in the form of a letter instructing the military leadership to provide them with adequate detention facilities, nutritious and varied food, and television channels of their choice.
It's also likely that Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and other Allied leaders would be put in the dock on charges of incitement against Germans, as their statements about citizens of the Third Reich make even the harshest comment by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir about Gaza residents pale in comparison.
Fortunately for the United States of 1945, it was a healthy society with a healthy military, and above all, a correct moral compass. It distinguished clearly between good and evil, and put into practice the Jewish principle that "one who becomes compassionate to the cruel will ultimately become cruel to the compassionate." America knew that evil wore SS uniforms, and had no intention of showing mercy to the devil's minions, just as it had no intention of being cruel to those who risked their lives to liberate humanity from evil.
That's why General George S. Patton, the war hero and military governor of Bavaria, summarily decided to shelve and cancel any charges against American soldiers who liberated Dachau.
Do you think that America's legal advisors revolted against the general and sought to punish the soldiers who killed SS members? Quite the opposite. Even though their legal knowledge surpassed his, their moral compass was equally intact and did not cause them to confuse good and evil. Colonel Charles Decker, a senior legal expert in the US Army at the time, ruled that given what the soldiers had witnessed at Dachau, justice and fairness demanded they not be held personally responsible for their actions, regardless of whether those actions violated international law. Isn't it time we learned from the great United States?
