The Dachau Massacre was a relatively small affair as numbers go and it might have remained little more than a footnote in World War II history but for one thing: Dachau was symbolic. The cold-blooded murders occurred after the war was won by the Allies and the peace, for all intents and purposes, should have been declared.
The evil turned loose that gray day at Dachau was a terrible harbinger of what was to come; it was a clear and unmistakable announcement to the world that the war and bloodshed would continue. Dachau was also grisly proof that what had been the world’s worst war would now transition into the world’s worst peace, or, as Henry Morgenthau demanded, a “peace of punishment.”