Liberation came to different camps at different times, brought by different armies, and what it meant varied enormously depending on what the survivors had already endured. For many it came too late: tens of thousands of prisoners who had survived years of imprisonment died in the weeks after liberation from the effects of starvation and disease that no amount of Allied medical care could reverse. For others liberation was the beginning of years in displaced persons camps, waiting for somewhere to go in a world that had largely destroyed their communities and had not yet decided what to do with those who remained.
What the armies found
The first camp the Allies reached was Majdanek, taken by the Soviet Army on 23 July 1944. The Soviets preserved it deliberately as evidence and brought in journalists and photographers to document what they had found. Most of the world did not believe them. That changed in April 1945 when British and American forces entered Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, and the other western camps within days of each other, and the newsreel footage and press photographs reached audiences who could no longer dismiss what they were seeing. Richard Dimbleby’s BBC broadcast from Bergen-Belsen on 19 April 1945, in which he described what he walked through in language the corporation initially hesitated to transmit, became one of the defining documents of the twentieth century.
Eisenhower’s decision to summon journalists and members of Congress to witness the camps immediately after liberation was deliberate: he anticipated, correctly, that future generations would deny what had happened and wanted to create witnesses while the evidence was still visible. The forced visits he organised, marching local German civilians and officials through the camps, were part of the same intention. The photographs taken at liberation by Allied military and civilian photographers are among the most important documents of the Holocaust, and the story of how they were taken, what they show, and how they were used is told in full here.
What came after
The displaced persons crisis that followed liberation involved hundreds of thousands of Jewish survivors with no home to return to. Their pre-war communities had been destroyed; their property had been seized; in Poland, returning survivors faced further violence, culminating in the Kielce pogrom of July 1946 in which 42 Jewish survivors were murdered by their Polish neighbours. The story of what happened to the survivors after the camps opened is in some ways as harrowing as the story of the camps themselves, and it is told here in full: the DP camps, the Bricha movement, the Exodus, and the long road that eventually led most survivors either to Israel or to new lives in the West.
Sources
- Ben Shephard, After Daybreak: The Liberation of Bergen-Belsen, 1945, Jonathan Cape, 2005
- Abzug, Robert H., Inside the Vicious Heart: Americans and the Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps, Oxford University Press, 1985
- Yehuda Bauer, Out of the Ashes: The Impact of American Jews on Post-Holocaust European Jewry, Pergamon Press, 1989
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Liberation of Nazi Camps, encyclopedia.ushmm.org
- Richard Dimbleby, BBC broadcast from Bergen-Belsen, 19 April 1945