On April 29, 1945, Americans liberated the crowded Nazi death camp of Dachau. The U.S. soldiers were shocked and horrified beyond words at the atrocities that suddenly burst upon their consciousness, while the survivors they liberated felt as if the Americans were angels miraculously sent to free them.
Like thousands of other prisoners, Polish Jew and Dachau survivor Ben Lesser arrived at Dachau not long before liberation, shipped in on one of the many trains moving victims from other camps and locations as the Allies advanced. “We walked into the camp of Dachau and we see mountains full of dead bodies,” he remembered, as quoted by the National WWII Museum. “Apparently the Nazis ran out of coal to burn the bodies in the crematorium so they piled them up as high as they could. And they put me and my cousin in a barrack right next to the crematorium, next to these bodies.”
But Lesser did not suffer the fate of all those unfortunate victims whose corpses lay in heaps next to his barrack. “On the third day we hear ‘liberation,’ ‘Americans, Americans.’ I tell my cousin, ‘Let’s go out and see,’ and we’re holding each other going out and we see these inmates are crawling on their hands and knees and kissing the boots of the GIs. They looked like gods to us,” Lesser recalled.
Today in 1945, Dachau concentration camp was liberated by American forces. The first major concentration camp established by the Nazis, it held prisoners including Jews, Social Democrats and Communists. 200,000 prisoners passed through Dachau during its twelve-year history;… pic.twitter.com/Re5GUZjIDz
— H.E.T. (@HolocaustUK) April 29, 2026
Lesser not only survived Dachau thanks to the U.S. liberation, he went on to found the ZACHOR Holocaust Remembrance Foundation. Most of his family were not so lucky. His foundation states that Ben was one of five children born to Shari Segal and Lazar Leser. When he was 10 years old, the Holocaust broke his family apart. The Nazis killed the whole family except Ben and his older sister Lola.
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Ben Lesser survived multiple Jewish ghettoes and no fewer than four Nazi concentration camps, including the infamous Auschwitz. He also made it alive through a seven-week death march and two death trains, culminating in the train from Buchenwald to Dachau on which the Nazis loaded 6,000, of whom only 18 survived till American liberation. And Dachau was not the last time Americans would offer Ben Lesser freedom. He moved to the USA in 1947 and married and raised a family. He died in September 2025, having worked to educate others about the horrors of the Holocaust to the end.
April 29th, Dachau Liberation Day owes a special thank you to @NYNationalGuard/ NY's 42nd Infantry Division, who helped liberate Nazi Germany's longest-standing concentration camp.
— Rabbi Poupko (@RabbiPoupko) April 29, 2026
We all owe these brave warriors a huge thank you! pic.twitter.com/EfBhos2top
The Americans who liberated Dachau in April 1945 could never forget what they saw and heard and smelled. William McCormick of the 15th Reconnaissance Group in the U.S. Seventh Army said, “When I first went into the camp, the first thing I saw was people walking around and they looked like skeletons. And you could look like … you could almost … see through them. They were so thin, and they looked like zombies walking around. And you couldn’t believe a human being could be so thin and still be on its feet.”
I mentioned the death trains that Lesser survived. He was one of very few. McCormick remembered, “I’d say there was 25 boxcars full with bodies that were just laying there. And they threw lime on these people to keep the smell down. It didn’t help much … the odor was still terrible. … I’d say there was, I couldn’t estimate, but there was thousands of people dead there. It was terrible.”
It is incredibly important that Americans remember the atrocities of the Nazi Holocaust because we are seeing a resurgence in violent antisemitism in our own day, from New York to London to Amsterdam to Gaza. We cannot allow history to repeat itself. With the first Holocaust, Americans were the liberators. Which side are we on with the second Holocaust?
