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Testimony of: Brig. Gen. Henning Linden, Asst. Division Commander, 42nd Division.

Taken at: Kitzbuhel, Austria.

Date: 14 May 1945. By: Lt. Col. J. M. Whitaker, IGD,

Asst. Inspector General, Seventh Army.

The witness was sworn and advised of his rights under the 24th Article of War.

404 Q Please state your name, rank, serial number and organization.

A Henning Linden, 0-7009, Brigadier General, Asst. Division Commander, 42nd Division.

405 Q Did you enter the Dachau Concentration Camp on 29 April 1945?

A Yes.

406 Q Will you tell me briefly the general happenings from the time you approached it until contact was made with elements of the 45th Division?

A About 1530 hours on 29 April I was riding along the west edge of the Dachau Camp looking for Lt. Col. Downard, 2nd Bn., 222nd Infantry, who was reported by the regiment to be some three kilometers out of Dachau. With me were my two guard jeeps, my aid, Brig. Gen. Banfill, A-2 of the 8th Air Corps. When we were about 100 yards from the southwest corner of the camp three persons, one bearing a white flag, approached us from the gatehouse. We dismounted some 75 yards from the gatehouse and found that these three were Swiss Red Cross representatives, or rather one was and the other two were SS officers. The interpreter stated that he and the SS troopers and one or two others had been sent into the camp the night before to take over and surrender the camp to the American forces, and asked me if I was an American officer. I replied, "I am Asst. Division Commander of the 42nd Division." He said, "Take 40 or 50 guards to take over the camp." I immediately dispatched one of the guard vehicles with the message to Col. Buldoc, about a kilometer back in Dachau. At this time small arms fire broke out to the west of us in the camp area. I sent the aide to the enclosure to determine the cause of the shooting. He sent word back in a few minutes to come in and see the situation and I moved in with my guards into the enclosure, and I found the inmates having seen the American uniform of my guards there and those of the 45th Division approaching the main stockade from the east had stormed to the fence in riotous joy. This seething mass increased in intensity until the surge against the steel barbed wire fence was such that it broke in several places, and inmates poured out into the roadway between the fence and the moat. In this process several were electrocuted on the charged fence. About this time Col. Fellenz, of the 222nd, had come in with about 10 or 12 men in peeps and had found the electrician of the stockade and pulled the switch. This, of course, increased the problem of keeping the prisoners in the stockade in that they literally tore the fence