The American and British soldiers who came across the camps in April and May 1945 had not been prepared for what they found. The Allied chain of command had received intelligence reports throughout the war about the persecution and killing of European Jews, but the reports had not been distributed to operational units, and most rank and file soldiers had no idea that camps of the kind they were about to encounter even existed. The shock of the encounter affected many of them for the rest of their lives.
The first response
Soldiers who entered the camps in the first days reported nausea, weeping and uncontrollable rage. The American and British medical units who were brought up to take charge had to deal with their own troops as well as with the prisoners. Several American soldiers at Dachau shot SS personnel without orders, in what became known as the Dachau reprisals. The matter was investigated by General Eisenhower and the question of prosecution was considered, but no charges were brought.
Chaplains who entered the camps were among the most affected. Many recorded in their personal journals that they had ceased to know what to say. Several rabbis attached to American units found themselves leading the first religious services in the liberated camps and conducting funerals for unknown people, in numbers that no rabbi had ever before been called on to handle.
The longer-term effects
Many of the soldiers who had entered the camps suffered what would later be called post-traumatic stress disorder for the rest of their lives. Veterans of the camp liberations have described nightmares, intrusive memories, an inability to eat certain foods, an inability to enter certain kinds of building. Some kept silent about what they had seen for decades. Others became active in Holocaust education and worked with survivors’ organisations.
The Liberators’ Project, an oral history programme run by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum from the 1990s, recorded testimony from many of the surviving liberators in the years before they died. The recordings are part of the museum’s permanent archive and are used in the museum’s teaching programmes.
The chaplains and the rabbis
The American Jewish chaplains who reached the camps in April and May 1945 played a particular role in the immediate postwar period. They organised the first religious services. They helped to compile lists of survivors and to begin the work of family tracing. Several of them, including Rabbi Abraham Klausner, would go on to play significant roles in the displaced persons camps in the years that followed and in the underground operations that moved survivors to Palestine.
See also
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