GOING AFTER HITLER

My interview with Felix Sparks, the American officer who led US troops into Hitler's first concentration camp, Dachau, 80 years ago today.

Apr 29, 2025

Sparks and his future wife of over 60 years, Mary. Summer 1941.

Eighty years ago today, on April 29, 1945, 26-year-old Lt. Colonel Felix Sparks, was leading a task force toward Berchtesgaden, tasked with hunting down Adolf Hitler. Then he received orders to divert his force toward a town called Dachau. He had already been at war for over five hundred days, landing in Sicily in July 1943, and playing his part in four amphibious invasions. He lost his rifle company at Anzio, and a battalion to the Waffen SS in the Vosges Mauntains. Over 2,500 men from the 157th Infantry Regiment of the 45th Division became casualties under his command. No American gave more, suffered more heartbreak, to liberate Europe.

Sparks on left before his 4th invasion, resting in Naples summer 1943.

Sparks stayed in the reserves after the war and eventually became commanding general of the Colorado National Guard before his death, aged 90, in 2006.

Sparks’ route to Dachau.

Here, on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Hitler’s first concentration camp, is an excerpt from my interview with Sparks.

DID YOU HATE THE GERMANS?

GENERAL FELIX SPARKS, "THE LIBERATOR", RESPONDS:

I have no hard feelings at all. Those poor bastards, the soldiers, were doing the same thing we were doing. What we were told to do. I never had any hard feelings for the Germans. They were just helpless once they got caught in Hitler's scheme. I couldn't hate them.

Sparks stops his men killing Germans at Dcahau today, 29 April 1945.

There was an incident where one of our soldiers was killed, one of the men in my company - the Germans deliberately shot him. He was a medic. He went out to try to help a German casualty, a German captain. Well we took a damn mountain, called "880" or something. We called every mountain by the elevation in meters, 880 or 480 or whatever it was.

The Germans counter-attacked. It was a stupid counterattack. There were only about fifty of them, and I had about a hundred and fifty men left at that time. We knocked them down. They just charged at us, and we mowed them down. But the lead guy was a captain and he fell right in front of us, maybe seventy-five feet away, something like that.

He kept groaning and groaning. This medic I had, a guy named Jack Turner from Lemar, Colorado, wanted to go out and bandage him and take care of him.

I said, "No, Jack, you can't go out there." Well, things quieted down, and I got aboutnever did much sleep, but we got a chance to take a nap. I was about half asleep, and somebody yelled at me, "Captain Turner's out there." I looked up, and Turn half asleep—we er was almost to that captain. He took his Red Cross armband off and was waving it in the air.

Somebody cut him, just about cut him in half with a machine gun. It killed him instantly. That night we went out and tied a piece of communication wire to his leg and that captain. Dragged them both with that communication wire.

Well I was pretty mad at the Germans for that time. But you know the day before we took that hill, two sergeants had been killed and the Germans had taken their bodies and they dug two nice graves for them. The Germans did! And that God damn ground was like solid rock almost. They had them buried only about six or eight inches deep and they put two wooden crosses with their dog tags hanging on them.

Sparks’ pistol.

We never bothered about burying any German soldiers - I'll tell you that. [Sparks laughs] So you never knew how to figure those guys. But they're just like anybody else. That guy that cut down Turner…he, I don't know, just got trigger happy I guess. So everybody was mad at the Germans in the Company at that time. But I could never really get excited about being angry at them.

My book, now a Netflix series.

What the hell, they were just soldiers doing what they were told to do. So I never had any hard feeling. The closest I came [to hating them] was in Dachau. The way they had the prisoners there and the dead. I did have some hard feelings for the SS. The SS ran all those prison camps. And the SS had murdered a bunch of American soldiers during the Battle of the Bulge [at Malmedy].

Word of Malmedy got around pretty fast. We didn't get much word during the war about the units on the right and left but we sure as hell heard about that Malmedy massacre in a hurry. Where they had all those GI's surrendered, lined up and shot. The whole Nazi system I hated with a passion. If I had a chance to kill Hitler, I would have slit his throat.