The Western Allied forces did not reach a major concentration camp until April 1945, fourteen months after the Soviet liberation of Majdanek. When they did, the camps they encountered were not extermination centres of the Auschwitz type but concentration camps in Germany itself, where the death marches had brought tens of thousands of prisoners in the closing weeks of the war. The conditions were different from those at the Polish camps but no less terrible. The Western liberations produced the photographs and film that came to dominate the Western public memory of the Holocaust.
Ohrdruf, 4 April 1945
The first camp reached by Western forces was Ohrdruf, a sub-camp of Buchenwald, on 4 April 1945. The American 4th Armored Division found the bodies of around a thousand prisoners in the camp grounds, recently shot or beaten to death. Generals Eisenhower, Bradley and Patton visited Ohrdruf together a few days later. Patton, who had a reputation for being unmoved by atrocity, vomited at the sight. Eisenhower ordered that every American unit in the area not currently fighting was to be brought to view the camp, so that they would understand what they were fighting against.
Buchenwald, 11 April 1945
The American 6th Armored Division reached Buchenwald on 11 April 1945. The camp had been partially evacuated in the preceding days, but around 21,000 prisoners remained. The communist underground inside the camp had organised an armed takeover of parts of the camp on the morning of liberation, and the prisoners had effectively liberated themselves before the Americans arrived. Among the survivors were the writer Elie Wiesel, the future Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, and the future French diplomat Stephane Hessel.
Dachau, 29 April 1945
Dachau, near Munich, was the first concentration camp opened by the regime in 1933 and the last to be liberated by the Western Allies. The American 7th Army reached it on 29 April 1945. They found around 32,000 surviving prisoners and around 30 freight wagons in a railway siding outside the camp, full of bodies of prisoners who had died on the journey from other camps in the previous weeks. American soldiers killed a number of SS guards in the immediate aftermath, in what became known as the Dachau reprisals; the matter was investigated but no prosecutions resulted.
Mauthausen, 5 May 1945
The American 11th Armored Division reached Mauthausen in Austria on 5 May 1945, three days before the German surrender. Around 40,000 prisoners were still alive in the camp, including the major Spanish Republican community of Mauthausen, who had been there since 1940. Many of the Spanish prisoners would not be able to return to Spain for decades because Franco’s government remained in power.
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