On April 5, 1945, units from the American Fourth Armored Division of the Third Army were

the first Americans to discover a camp with prisoners and corpses.

Ohrdruf was a Buchenwald sub-camp, and of the 10,000 male slave inmates, many had been
sent on death marches, shot in pits, or their corpses were stacked in the woods and burned. The
Americans found the camp by accident they did not set out to liberate camps, they happened
upon them and found starved, frail bodies of hundreds of prisoners who had managed to
survive, as well as the corpses. In Nordhausen, on the 11th, the American Timberwolf Division
found 3,000 corpses and 700 starving, ill, and war-wounded survivors who were slaves in
the V-2 rocket factories.
An Austrian-born Jewish U.S. soldier, Fred Bohm, helped liberate Nordhausen. He described
fellow GI's as having "no particular feeling for fighting the Germans. They also thought that
any stories they had read in the paper, or that I had told them out of first-hand experience, were
either not true or at least exaggerated. And it did not sink in, what this was all about, until we
got into Nordhausen."
When the American Combat Team 9 of the 9 th Armored Infantry Battalion, Sixth Armored
Division were led to Buchenwald by Russians, the camp contained 30,000 prisoners in a
pyramid of power, with German Communists at the top, in the main barracks, and Jews and
gypsies at the bottom, living in Little Camp, in an assortment of barns.
Buchenwald barrack prisoners were reasonably healthy looking. The Little Camp had 1,000 to
1,200 prisoners in a space meant for 450. Witnesses described prisoners as "emaciated beyond
all imagination or description. Their legs and arms were sticks with huge bulging joints, and
their loins were fouled by their own excrement. Their eyes were sunk so deep that they looked
blind. If they moved at all, it was with a crawling slowness that made them look like huge,
lethargic spiders. Many just lay in their bunks as if dead." After liberation, hundreds of
prisoners died daily.
Generals George Patton, Omar Bradley, and Dwight Eisenhower arrived in Ohrdruf on April
12, the day of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's death. They found 3,200 naked, emaciated
bodies in shallow graves.Eisenhower found a shed piled to the ceiling with bodies, various
torture devices, and a butcher's block for smashing gold fillings from the mouths of the dead.
Patton became physically ill. Eisenhower turned white at the scene inside the gates, but insisted
on seeing the entire camp. "We are told that the American soldier does not know what he was
fighting for," he said. "Now, at least he will know what he is fighting against."
After leaving Ohrdruf, Eisenhower wrote to Chief of Staff General George Marshall,
attempting to describe things that "beggar description." The evidence of starvation and

bestiality "were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick," Bradley later wrote about the day:
"The smell of death overwhelmed us." Patton, whose reputation for toughness was legendary,
was overcome. He refused to enter a room where the bodies of naked men who had starved to
death were piled, saying "he would get sick if he did so," Eisenhower reported. "I visited every
nook and cranny." It was his duty, he felt, "to be in a position from then on to testify about
these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief that the stories of Nazi brutality
were just propaganda." (Seemingly, he intuited then that these crimes might be denied.)
Eisenhower issued an order that American units in the area were to visit the camp. He also
issued a call to the press back home. A group of prominent journalists, led by the dean of
American publishers, Joseph Pulitzer, came to see the concentration camps. Pulitzer initially
had "a suspicious frame of mind," he wrote. He expected to find that many of "the terrible
reports" printed in the United States were "exaggerations and largely propaganda." But they
were understatements, he reported.
Within days, Congressional delegations came to visit the concentration camps, accompanied by
journalists and photographers. General Patton was so angry at what he found
at Buchenwald that he ordered the Military Police to go to Weimar, four miles away, and bring
back 1,000 civilians to see what their leaders had done, to witness what some human beings
could do to others. The MP's were so outraged they brought back 2,000. Some turned away.
Some fainted. Even veteran, battle-scarred correspondents were struck dumb. In a legendary
broadcast on April 15, Edward R. Murrow gave the American radio audience a stunning matterof-fact description of Buchenwald, of the piles of dead bodies so emaciated that those shot
through the head had barely bled, and of those children who still lived, tattooed with numbers,
whose ribs showed through their thin shirts. "I pray you to believe what I have said about
Buchenwald," Murrow asked listeners. "I have reported what I saw and heard, but only part of
it; for most of it I have no words." He added, "If I have offended you by this rather mild
account of Buchenwald, I am not in the least sorry."
It was these reports, the newsreel pictures that were shot and played in theaters, and the visits
of important delegations that proved to be influential in the public consciousness of the still
unnamed German atrocities and the perception that something awful had been done to the
Jews.
Then the American forces liberated Dachau, the first concentration camp built by the Germans
in 1933. There were 67,665 registered prisoners in Dachau and its subcamps; 43,350 were
political prisoners; 22,100 were Jews, and a percentage of "others." As Allied forces advanced,
the Germans moved prisoners from concentration camps near the front to prevent their
liberation. Transports arrived at Dachau continuously, resulting in severe deterioration of
conditions. Typhus epidemics, poor sanitary conditions, and the weakened state of the prisoners
worsened conditions further and spread disease even faster.

On April 26, 1945, as the Americans approached Dachau about 7,000 prisoners, most of them
Jews, were sent on a death march to Tegernsee. Three days later, American troops liberated the
main camp and found 28 wagons of decomposing bodies in addition to thousands of starving
and dying prisoners. Then in early May 1945, American forces liberated the prisoners who had
been sent on the death march.
After World War II, the Allies were faced with repatriating 7,000,000 displaced
persons in Germany andAustria, of whom 1,000,000 refused or were unable to return to their
homes. These included nationals from the Baltic countries, Poles, Ukrainians, and Yugoslavs
who were anti-communists and/or fascists afraid of prosecution for collaborating with the
Nazis and Jews. The Allies were forced to service citizens of 52 nationalities in 900 DP camps,
under the aegis of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA).
Lack of trained personnel, absence of a clear policy, and poor planning and management
prevented the agency from fulfilling its role properly. Private relief organizations were
gradually permitted to operate in the camps, but at best could provide only partial aid.
Consequently, the United States Army, with a shrinking budget and inexperienced personnel,
assumed major responsibility for the DPs. It was not a responsibility they anticipated or they
welcomed but they had no other choice.
Each national group and religious denomination demanded recognition of its own problems. In
order to avoid charges of discrimination, the American army adopted a policy of
evenhandedness toward all the DPs, a policy that adversely affected Jewish DPs housed in the
same camps with Poles, Baltic nationals, and Ukrainians. In those camps, the Jews who
survived the Holocaust remained exposed to antisemitic discrimination. They were living
among antisemites who had hostility toward them. Furthermore, only after liberation could
survivors begin to feel, to sense what had been lost. Others could return home, Jewish
survivors had no homes to which to return.
The American army was beleaguered. Trained for war, they had to juggle multiple assignments:
the occupation, the Cold War, and the problems of survivors who were naturally distrustful of
all authority and in need of medical and psychological attention.
Short-term problems, such as housing, medical treatment, food, and family reunification, were
acute. The army had no long-term strategy. The survivors had nowhere to go. Britain was
unwilling to permit Jewish immigration to Palestine and the United States was not ready to
receive refugees.
Homosexuals continued to suffer, even with the end of the war. Paragraph 175 of the German
legal code stated that male homosexuality, but not female lesbianism, was punishable by
imprisonment. After 1943, male homosexuals had been forced to wear a pink triangle and were

sent to the death camps. After the liberation, the Americans did not repeal Paragraph 175 and
sent homosexual inmates liberated from the camps to other prisons.
Preferential treatment to Jews was denied on the ground that this would be a confirmation of
the Nazi racial doctrine, which differentiated between Jews and others. The Jews were
therefore dealt with according to their country of origin; Jews from Germany, for example,
were classified as "enemy aliens," just like the Nazis.
American troops who liberated the concentration camps felt sympathy for the Jewish DPs, and
many JewishGIS and officers went out of their way to assist the survivors. But that sympathy
did not extend to men who arrived on following troop rotations. Unfamiliar with history and
facts, they had little or no sympathy for the Jews. It did not help that concentration camp
survivors mistrusted people, were hypersensitive, and had acquired habits that did not compare
favorably with the local German and Austrian population. Some objected to the fact that they
took care of their biological needs in hallways and outside; one officer provided a simple
solution of latrines and the problem ceased.
Americans' contacts with antisemitic Germans stirred up innate personal prejudices held by
troops. Some American commanders suspected that the DPs from Eastern Europe included
Soviet agents, and that Jews had a predisposition to communist beliefs. The Army also treated