Brigadier General Henning Linden: The Man Who Accepted the Surrender of Dachau

Brigadier General Henning Linden

On April 29, 1945, Brigadier General Henning Linden walked to the gate of Dachau concentration camp and accepted its formal surrender from an SS officer. Like all of his soldiers that day, he would carry what he saw for the rest of his life.

Linden was fifty-two that day, a soldier for nearly thirty years, and nothing in those decades had prepared him for what waited inside the gates.

Minnesota to the Army

Carl Henning Linden was born on September 3, 1892, in Mound, Minnesota, the son of Swedish immigrant parents. He graduated from South High School in Minneapolis in 1912 and completed the Reserve Officers' Training Corps program at the University of Minnesota, graduating in 1917 with a degree in civil engineering. He received his commission as a second lieutenant of Infantry the same year.

During the First World War, Linden commanded a company of the 33rd Infantry Regiment in Panama. The interwar years brought a steady sequence of postings: assistant professor of military science at the University of Maryland in the early 1920s, adjutant at Fort Leavenworth in the early 1930s, graduation from the Command and General Staff College in 1936, and ROTC work at Boston University in the early 1940s.

When the United States entered the Second World War, Linden was commanding the 53rd Infantry Regiment in the Aleutian Islands, where American forces were working to reclaim territory from Japan. In 1943 he was promoted to brigadier general and assigned as assistant division commander of the 42nd Infantry Division under Major General Harry J. Collins.

Task Force Linden

In November 1944, the three infantry regiments of the 42nd Division, the 222nd, 232nd, and 242nd Infantry, were pulled from training and rushed to France ahead of the rest of the Division. They arrived at Marseille without their artillery, without their engineering and logistics support, without the infrastructure that makes a division a division. They were needed at once, the situation in Europe would not wait.

These three regiments became Task Force Linden.

Deployed to defend a thirty-mile front along the Rhine north and south of Strasbourg, Task Force Linden was already in an impossible position when Operation Nordwind launched on New Year's Eve 1944. Hitler's last offensive in the west drove German armor and elite infantry into the Alsatian plain. Linden's soldiers, most of them in their first days of combat, held the line in the January cold.

Two units of Task Force Linden, the 222nd Infantry Regiment and the 1st Battalion of the 242nd Infantry Regiment, were awarded Presidential Unit Citations for extraordinary heroism during those weeks.

At the end of January 1945, the remainder of the 42nd Division arrived in France and the full Division entered the line. Task Force Linden had served its purpose. What it had bought, at considerable cost, was time. The stand also played a real part in blunting the last German offensive in the west.

Through Germany

From February through April 1945, Linden served as Collins's assistant division commander while the Rainbow pushed into Germany. The division penetrated the Haardt Mountains, breached the Siegfried Line, bridged the Rhine, and drove through Würzburg, Schweinfurt, Fürth, and Donauwörth.

Linden was a working commander throughout. He directed infantry assaults, oversaw mobile operations, and managed the rapid mechanized advances that defined the Rainbow's final weeks. When the Division captured Würzburg on April 5 after sustained house-to-house fighting, Linden was part of the command structure that made it happen.

By the morning of April 29, the Rainbow was approaching Dachau.

The Gate

Linden led the 42nd Division detachment that reached the Dachau concentration camp on April 29, 1945. He was accompanied by his aide, First Lieutenant William Cowling, and correspondents Marguerite Higgins of The New York Herald Tribune, and Peter Furst of Stars and Stripes, whose reporting on the liberation would reach an international audience within days.

At the gate, SS Untersturmführer Heinrich Wicker surrendered the camp to Linden. Cowling stood at his shoulder with a tommy gun in his hands, half wishing the German would make a wrong move so he could use it. Wicker made none. "I am Assistant Division Commander of the 42nd Infantry Division," Linden said, "and will accept the surrender of the camp in the name of the Rainbow Division for the United States Army." The formal surrender of a concentration camp to an American general became one of the defining moments of the liberation of Dachau.

The living answered the moment with a sound Linden never forgot. The fence filled with prisoners, a "yelling, seething mass" in his own words, men pressing against the wire. Lieutenant Colonel Walter Fellenz wrote that the noise was beyond comprehension, and that the soldiers' hearts wept as they watched the tears of happiness fall down the faces of the emaciated prisoners.

Inside the camp Linden and his soldiers found more than thirty thousand prisoners. Just outside the fences were rail cars full of the dead. The living barely looked like the living.

Individual moments survive in the record. Fellenz, a twenty-eight-year-old battalion commander, thought at first the place looked like a wealthy girls' finishing school in the suburbs. Then he found the warehouse where the dead were thrown one on top of another like sacks of potatoes, and he vomited where he stood. Among the rail cars stood the Dachau death train, its cars carrying prisoners brought from Buchenwald, now dead. Lieutenant Colonel Donald E. Downard, commanding the 2nd Battalion of the Rainbow's advance, found one man still alive in the pile, and lifted him out with his own hands.

Private Lockered "Bud" Gahs of the 222nd Infantry, one of the regiments that had held the line as Task Force Linden that winter, was sent into the woods near the camp to hunt SS guards. He found an escaped prisoner instead. The man came to him and knelt and kissed his boot. "To this day," Gahs said, "one of the most moving moments of my life was when that prisoner came up to me and kissed my boot."

Elements of the 45th, including the 157th Infantry under Lieutenant Colonel Felix Sparks, entered the camp the same day. The U.S. Army recognizes the 42nd and 45th Infantry Divisions, along with the 20th Armored Division, as liberators of Dachau. Some of the SS guards were killed by liberators and prisoners in the hours after the surrender, and the captured staff who remained were prosecuted in the Dachau Trials.

After the War

Linden served in occupied Austria after the German surrender and later became Chief of the Army's Military Arts Department. He retired in 1952. His decorations included the Silver Star, two Bronze Stars, and two Legions of Merit.

Brigadier General Henning Linden died on March 15, 1984, at ninety-one, and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.