Seventy years ago, on April 29, 1945, the forward battalions of Rainbow Division, 42nd Infantry, were moving swiftly toward Munich. Confident and optimistic, they had survived four months of costly and bitter combat, and soon, it would all be over.

But then the road led to Dachau and the worst day of the war. In their collected memoirs, the Rainbow soldiers, almost half of whom were only eighteen, nineteen, or twenty years old, tell how they were confronted suddenly-without preparation, without warning-by horrors beyond human imagination.

This book is by and about the American liberators, who have since discovered that no one who was involved in any capacity can ever be truly free of the past that was Dachau. In the most complete eyewitness account ever available, editor Sam Dann, himself a Rainbow soldier, weaves their stories together with official reports, other documents, and the reminiscences of several survivors.