News, views and top stories in your inbox. Don't miss our must-read newsletter Sign up Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Invalid Email

Newly-found letters from an American Second World War doctor detail how German SS guards were massacred by Allied troops during the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp.

Captain David Wilsey was among the first to enter the death camp in Germany where tens of thousands of Jews and prisoners of war were tortured and executed by the Nazis.

Invading troops were so abhorred by the piles of bodies and prisoners' accounts that they rounded up the SS guards and tortured and executed them.

In the newly published letters to his wife Emily, Captain Wilsey wrote: "I saw captured SS tortured against a wall [by U.S. soldiers] and then shot in what you Americans would call 'cold blood'—but Emily!

"God forgive me if I say I saw it done without a single disturbed emotion because they so-had-it-coming after what I had just seen and what every minute more I have been seeing of the SS beasts' actions."

The executions have been described by historians as one of the most shameful incidents of American involvement in the war.

(Image: Getty)

The GIs tortured the guards by making them stand for hours in Heil Hitler salutes and pouring icy water over their naked backs before they were shot dead.

The charges against those involved were dismissed by General George Paton after the war, but history has not forgotten what happened as the camp was liberated in April 1945.

The letters are published in this month's New Republic magazine, which gives graphic and horrifying details of the final acts of war.

At the time he helped liberate Dachau, Captain Wilsey was a 30-year-old anaesthesiologist with the 116th Evacuation Hospital.

The medic describes days of heavy looting as the Allied troops grabbed everything they could from the German guards.

Capt Wilsey said he found "more supplies than downtown Chicago" and went on to list a series of presents he hoped to bring back to his wife.

He wrote: 'I'll only mention a few: a fine deer rifle, twin sweaters for you and I; silk smock for your house—"hasty" work; beautiful and expensive punching bag; I passed over most of the beautiful Dresden-ware; anesthesiology equipment; fine optical lens equipment (I missed the best); swords-tools-machinists apparatus; fountain pens; lotions; Swastika & SS banners to decorate our Rumpus Room, etc etc.'

(Image: Getty)

The letters were made public by Captains Wilsey's daughter Clarice, who lives in Eugene, Oregon, after she found them in her attic.

More than 500 letters spanning five wartime years were found and historians are considering the find invaluable.

Miss Wilsey said that before he died in 1996 her father would bristle when anyone tried to deny the Holocaust and would say: "I was there".

He was also very taken with the film Schindler's List but refused to talk in depth about what he had seen.

One letter to his wife said: "A captured escapist was tied by the SS naked to a post, and three of these huge Dobermans (after four days of being starved) were turned loose on him while thousands of internees witnessed it all standing at attention.

"Hans withstood the calves torn off, withstood the thighs torn off, withstood the guts (yes, guts) turned out.

"But he turned his head and vomited when the Dobermans had torn the lungs and heart out.

"The first thing the liberated internees did was to shoot the Dobermans and their horrid handler."

Captain Wilsey also went into more disturbing detail about the execution of the Nazi guards in a letter sent on May 22.

(Image: Getty)

He wrote: "Did I 'confess' how PASSIVELY my canteen cup was used to pour icy riverwater down SSers half-naked backs as they stood for hours with a two-arm-up-Heil Hitler before being shot in cold blood?

"A truly bloodthirsty (I'd never seen it before) combat engineer from California asked to borrow my cup in performing his 'preliminaries' to roaring his .45 automatic right into the face of 3 SSers.

"He was bloodthirsty and nothing else would have ever 'satisfied' that boy for his brother's death at the hands of the SS."

The New Republic says that Captain Wilsey's letters show another, darker side of the American GI which is rarely featured in Hollywood films.

The article notes that US soldiers have been "been canonized as an altruistic and honorable moral opposite of our unspeakably cruel and vicious enemy".

The article, by journalist Steve Friess, says: "Wilsey's letters complicate that sanitized picture of the GI, revealing him instead to be what he was in real life: undeniably heroic, courageous, dutiful, dedicated, brutal, vengeful, and ethically compromised."