Dorney Germany is a four road town just to the south of Dortmund. The 75th Infantry Division continued it’s attack south throughout April 9th and 10th with the 2nd Battalion capturing Oespel and Dorney then proceeding south to the regimental objective which ultimately would be the Ruhr river.
It was raining all day so my only hope was to sketch from inside the rental car. It was a grey lifeless day. Someone threw recycled bottles in a bin and that glass clattered loudly.
Dortmund had a POW–Forced Labor Camp. When Ninth U.S. Army troops captured Dortmund, Germany, April 14, 1945, they liberated 4,070 prisoners and slave laborers of 13 nationalities–men, women and children. The Americans discovered prisoners-of-war and workers too weak from starvation, malnutrition and disease to move. Dozens were found lying in manure piles, ditches and cellars, dying from neglect and lack of medical treatment. Fifty bodies were found in the yard of the German guard barracks, now used as a hospital, unhurried and decomposing. These people were then cared for at the displaced persons center in Dortmund under command of Captain William T. Drake of Wilmington, Ohio. Two Russian doctors and Russian women assisted medical corpsmen of the 79th Infantry Division of the Ninth Army in caring for them.
In entering one room in the Dortmund Forced Labor Camp, soldiers found 4 dead babies lying on a table covered with sheets. On the floor were naked skeletal men and woman also covered in sheets. Babies were systematically taken from Forced Labor women and then starved to death to satisfy the the German ideal of the final solution. If the woman did not get right back to work, she would be murdered as well. If a woman tried to recover her child from German custody, she would be shot.
The Germans abducted about 12 million people from almost twenty European countries; about two thirds of whom came from Eastern Europe. Many workers died as a result of their living conditions, mistreatment or were civilian casualties of the war. They received little or no compensation during or after the war … At the peak of the war, one of every five workers in the economy of the Third Reich was a forced labourer. According to Fried, in January 1944 the Third Reich was relying on 10 million forced labourers. Of these, 6.5 million were civilians within German borders, 2.2 million were prisoners of war, and 1.3 million were located at forced labor camps outside Germany’s borders. Homze reported that civilian forced labourers from other countries working within the German borders rose steeply from 300,000 in 1939 to more than 5 million in 1944.
My father 1st Lieutenant Arthur Thorspecken was approaching Dortmund with his C-Company in the 75th Infantry Division. They were clearing the approaches to Dortmund which was being heavily defended. Casualties were high.
Despite the Allied bombing campaign which leveled 66% of Dortmund’s homes and 98% of the inner city. Workers kept rebuilding the factories. It therefore made perfect sense that Dortmund would not surrender easily. Even after a heavy bombing raid on March 6, 1945, it become clear that the soldiers in Dortmund was determined to fight to the bitter end. Dortmund and the surrounding towns suffered immense destruction from Allied bombing. Unexploded bomb ordnance, especially near sites like the stadium, remain to this day.