One of the most consistent Allied responses to the liberation of the camps was to require the local German civilian population to come and see them. The orders were given by senior commanders on the spot, often within hours of the camp being secured. The aim was to make sure that no German living near a camp could later claim not to have known what had happened in it.
The Eisenhower order
The pattern was set by Dwight Eisenhower at Ohrdruf on 12 April 1945. Having seen the camp himself, Eisenhower ordered that representative groups of every nearby town should be brought to view the bodies, accompanied by their elected officials and by photographers. The order was passed down through the American chain of command and was applied at every camp the Americans liberated in the following weeks.
At Buchenwald, the mayor of Weimar and around a thousand other Weimar residents were marched to the camp on 16 April 1945, five days after liberation. They were taken through the barracks, the medical experiments block and the crematorium. The mayor of Weimar and his wife killed themselves on returning home that evening.
At Dachau, residents of the town were marched through the camp grounds and made to walk past the railway wagons full of bodies that had arrived in the days before liberation. American troops also forced German civilians to dig graves and bury the bodies by hand, in many cases in their best clothes, as a deliberate act of public ritual.
The British forced visits
The British conducted similar exercises at Belsen. Civilians from the nearby town of Bergen and from the city of Celle were brought to the camp to view the bodies. SS guards still in custody were forced to load the bodies into mass graves while German civilians watched. The film of these scenes, which the British Army Film and Photographic Unit recorded systematically, became the basis of the documentary Memory of the Camps, eventually broadcast by PBS in 1985 after lying in the Imperial War Museum archive for forty years.
Why the visits were ordered
The visits had several purposes. They were intended to confront the local population with what had happened, on the basis that the war crimes trials would later prosecute only the immediate personnel and that the wider population needed an immediate, irrefutable encounter with the evidence. They were also intended to make recovery of the bodies and the medical response easier, by drafting in local labour. And they were intended to break the post-war defence that no one had known.
Whether the visits achieved any of these aims in the long term is contested. Some German memoirists have written that the visit changed their understanding of the war. Others have written that the visit was treated as another act of victors’ cruelty and produced resentment rather than recognition.
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
- Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards