John realized then that he had landed into a Nazi concentration camp and had Jewish prisoners in front. When the Soviet Army's 322nd Rifle Division entered the concentration camp at Auschwitz on Jan. 27, 1945, they found a desolation. With only weeks left before the surrender, GIs were unexpectedly coming across the concentration camps. As Allied and Soviet troops moved across Europe against Nazi Germany in 1944 and 1945, they encountered concentration camps, mass graves, and other sites of Nazi crimes. During the war, a large number of young Americans were enrolled in various technical courses at colleges and universities around the country in the expectation the war would last long enough for these men to become future ground forces officers and aviators. I had about three-quarters of a year before I got drafted in April 1943. Earlier that day before the arrival of US troops, an underground prisoner resistance organization seized control of Buchenwald to prevent atrocities by the retreating camp guards. The deportation of millions of Jews to concentration camps such as Auschwitz in Poland was carried out mainly via rail. ... though the use of film of the concentration camps was emotionally the most powerful moment. When it was over I got orders to go to some other airfield in Texas. The death rate from principally, starvation was shocking. We went to classes all day long. Portland, OR: Areopagitica Press, 1990. They reacted very, very quickly. The forces of Hitler’s Third Reich––still actively resisting the advancing Allies–– simply had to be beaten. My family lived there until 1939. They gave us our choice. They put us in a converted Swedish luxury liner. In fact most of the details did not appear in the media until a couple of days after the liberation when the first medical team arrived. Find topics of interest and explore encyclopedia content related to those topics, Find articles, photos, maps, films, and more listed alphabetically, Recommended resources and topics if you have limited time to teach about the Holocaust, Explore the ID Cards to learn more about personal experiences during the Holocaust. The ship was always listing because guys were hanging out over the sides [seasick]. My mother was tubercular and was at the National Jewish Hospital [in Denver]. “If you have over 200, you’re in,” he said. I just couldn’t. We all thought we were going to the South Pacific. Soviet troops first arrived at Majdanek during the night of July 22–23 and captured Lublin on July 24. We landed at Le Havre and went to a depot called Camp Lucky Strike. As Allied and Soviet troops moved across Europe against Nazi Germany in 1944 and 1945, they encountered concentration camps, mass graves, and other sites of Nazi crimes. Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1995. Liberation 1945. As the first presence from the outside world, the Allied liberators presented a dual reality for detainees in concentration camps. In July 2015, at the age of 90 yet still spry and sharp (he had only retired from work the year before! They entered the, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC, Liberation of Nazi Camps - ID Card/Oral History. Later he would be present at Mauthausen in northern Austria. At the same time, American troops were learning why … With the advance of Allied forces against Germany in April 1945, the Germans transferred prisoners from concentration camps near the front to Dachau, leading to a … One day I went into Tyler, and there was a big sign there that said, “Join the Air Force.” So I think, “Okay, I’ll go in there.”. At the same time, American troops were learning why they had to fight this war firsthand. By then I already had six or eight hours of solo flying. Goodell, Stephen, and Susan D. Bachrach. Auschwitz was the largest Nazi killing center and concentration camp complex. We got our orders to go overseas. When they entered the camp, Soviet soldiers found over six thousand emaciated prisoners alive. When the hospital said she was able to leave, she couldn’t go back to the climate in Missouri. The small percentage of inmates who survived resembled skeletons because of the demands of forced labor and the lack of food, compounded by months and years of maltreatment. People were throwing rocks at us! To fill the depleted ranks of the infantry, many of these prospective future officers and pilots were withdrawn from their educational assignments and used to flesh out infantry divisions still forming in the United States. But then suddenly the orders are changed: “Sit where you are.” Roosevelt says we got too many pilots, navigators, and bombardiers so you’re going back to the infantry. Then the American forces liberated Dachau, the first concentration camp built by the Germans in 1933. That April, US troops also liberated Dachau, Dora-Mittelbau, and Flossenbürg. Six months later, on January 27, 1945, Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz. On January 10, 1945, the division embarked for Europe, arriving at Le Havre, France, on January 21. They said I had a pretty good chance. As the war progressed, the government began to revise its estimates of how long the war would last and also realized the Army was short of infantrymen. They were holding each other for stability. On March 9, they relieved the 26th Infantry Division in its bridgehead over the Saar River. He served as the radioman for the battalion’s executive officer in Headquarters Company, 3rd Battalion, 260th Infantry Regiment. Among these personal items were hundreds of thousands of men's suits, more than 800,000 women’s garments, and more than 14,000 pounds of human hair. Many were so weak that they could hardly move. We used to go there once a day to change operators. The Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps 1945: Eyewitness Accounts of the Liberators. So I sit down, do the whole thing, turn it in, and they told me, “Sit still, we’ll tell you where you’re at.” Ten, 15 minutes later he comes out and says, “How’s it feel to be in the air force? As a young radioman in the 65th Infantry Division, he was at the forefront of the division’s 55 days in combat, from early March 1945 until the war ended. ), Mr. Tulper sat down to tell of his own experiences. That was very interesting! Liberators confronted unspeakable conditions in the Nazi camps, where piles of corpses lay unburied. The sprawling Auschwitz-Birkenau complex in southern Poland, liberated by the Red Army on January 27, 1945, was gradually dismantled from mid-1944 and its more than 60,000 prisoners evacuated. Leon was caught up in this movement and was soon in the 65th Infantry Division. JEAN-MARIE CENTNER: "The reaction of the soldiers was awful. Jews from all parts of German-occupied territories were bundled on to these trains. Shortly after the Soviet capture of Majdanek in July 1944,  Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler  ordered that prisoners in all concentration camps and subcamps in the German-occupied east be forcibly evacuated into the interior of the Reich. He asked where I would like to go to school. When American forces arrived, they encountered more than 20,000 prisoners at Buchenwald. I was a radio operator, and we had a radio net in a little enclave right across the bridge there. The Allies knew about the concentration camps by that point. Bergen-Belsen was the only concentration camp taken by the British and the soldiers were unprepared for what they found there. How did Germany react to the Holocaust in the aftermath of World War Two? LT: I was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1925. Soviet officials invited journalists to inspect the camp and evidence of the horrors that had occurred there. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Never saw anything like that before. Chamberlin, Brewster S., and Marcia Feldman, editors. At Majdanek, the Soviet troops encountered a number of prisoners who had not been evacuated in the spring, mostly Soviet prisoners of war. Here is the story of how Allied forces liberated those camps and the terrible conditions they found there. BACKSTORY: The final months of World War II in the European Theater were a harrowing and desperate time for the soldiers who fought there. View the list of all donors. They were skin and bone. The camps had no food. The British prisoners told the liberating soldiers that they’d heard rumors of a different kind of camp, a concentration camp for Jews, just a few kilo… Or, if I get to Denver, I’d like to go to the University of Denver. Soviet forces liberated Auschwitz—the largest killing center and concentration camp complex—in January 1945. Disease remained an ever-present danger, and many of the camps had to be burned down to prevent the spread of epidemics. This unit was formed in Camp Shelby, Mississippi, in July 1943, and spent the next year and a half in training. We got orders to go into the Siegfried Line. We were all down in the hold, bunks five deep, and we got across in five days. CM: Tell me about your early life, where you’re from, how you grew up. It gave American soldiers clear reason as to why this war had to be taken to its full and dreadful conclusion. 2020 marked the 75th anniversary of the liberation of prisoners from Nazi concentration camps and the end of Nazi tyranny in Europe. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Library bibliography: Liberators, Teaching Materials on Americans and the Holocaust, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Library bibliography: Psychological Trauma and the Holocaust, Holocaust Survivors and Victims Resource Center. Dachau, near Munich, was the first concentration camp set up by the Nazis in 1933 ; More than 200,000 people are thought to have been imprisoned there Mass graves were dug to hold up to 5,000 corpses at a time. They had skeletal faces with deep set eyes. So now you think you’re going to be an aviator. I asked the guy in there, “How do you get into the air force?” He told me I had to take a test. Never had a loss there; we were lucky. Bridgman, Jon. Thus, as Allied troops launched offensives within Germany, they encountered tens of thousands of concentration camp prisoners. I said, “What the hell are we doing over here?” [See WWII Quarterly, “Bombing Our Friends,” Summer 2015.]. Footage shows a … Majdanek was captured virtually intact. No one wanted to die when the war was so close to its  end. There they stood. Soldiers of the Soviet Union’s Red Army were actually the first to begin the process of liberation when they came across the extermination camp at Lublin-Majdanek. As the Soviet troops approached Majdanek at the end of July, the remaining camp personnel hastily abandoned the Majdanek concentration camp without fully dismantling it. Now in France, the division spent a month preparing itself to enter combat. We lived there for three weeks in conditions that were not for a nice Jewish kid from the West Side––not for anybody, really! I only had about eight weeks left to go. When Sparks arrived, some 30,000 prisoners remained. You’re way over the top.” He told me I was going to preflight school, where I would learn to be a pilot, bombardier, or navigator. The resulting overcrowding in these camps hastened the spread of disease and caused many more deaths. In the days before the camp's liberation, SS guards at the camp … Some had come out of concentration camps and they were determined to … Key Point: Genocide is not new, but the scale of Nazi Germany's industrialized mass murder was a new level of evil. But in order to get to it, you had to start about two or three blocks back and put the pedal to the floor as fast as it would go because the Germans had it zeroed in. Shortly after the Soviet capture of Majdanek in July 1944, British forces liberated concentration camps in northern Germany, including Neuengamme and Bergen-Belsen. Can you tell us about your experiences once your unit entered combat? With only weeks left before the surrender, GIs were unexpectedly coming across the concentration camps. In the days before American forces reached Dachau, thousands of prisoners were forced out of the camp and on a death march by the Nazis. On 27 January 1945, Auschwitz concentration camp—a Nazi concentration camp where more than a million people were murdered—was liberated by the Red Army during the Vistula–Oder Offensive.Although most of the prisoners had been forced onto a death march, about 7,000 had been left behind.The Soviet soldiers attempted to help the survivors and were shocked at the … Further, they had to be made to understand they were beaten, lest there be another war for the next generation to fight. So here comes the 65th Division; they were just putting it together with a cadre from Guadalcanal and places like that. End of the Holocaust: The Liberation of the Camps. They also encountered substantial evidence of the mass murder committed at Majdanek by Nazi Germans. Their heads had been clean shaved. I went to North High School, graduated, and started attending Denver University. Washington, DC 20024-2126 As the war turned badly against Germany in the summer of 1944, Allied forces began liberating the concentration camps. Some 60,000 prisoners, most in critical condition because of a typhus epidemic, were found alive. In every camp, Allied soldiers encountered appalling scenes. © Copyright 2021 Center for the National Interest All Rights Reserved. The Allies believed that the best way to help the Jews was to win the war. We were marching toward the camp, and one of the guys says, “Take a look up there, it’s raining.” We look up and see the rain coming down but it stopped above our heads––it never got to the ground! This was due to both an initial underestimation of how many infantry troops the Army would need and the high casualties in that branch. More than 13,000 of them died from the effects of malnutrition or disease within a few weeks of liberation. In many cases, the camps had been abandoned by their guards and the inmates left to starve. It was a surprise but they let me finish the year. These centers of evil and depravity, scattered across Nazi-held territory for all the Allies to discover, explained the need for the war far better than mere words ever could. We’re on the train for four days and when they unlock the doors and say, “Come on out now,” it’s 104 degrees in Tyler, Texas! How did the Allied armies react when they liberated Nazi concentration camps? As at Majdanek, there was abundant evidence of mass murder in Auschwitz. The U.S. After a couple of weeks there we get dressed in nice winter uniforms and all the guys think we’re going to Alaska. Washington, DC: National Museum of American Jewish History, 1994. News of the women’s camp had also trickled out. Goodell, Stephen, and Kevin Mahoney. Main telephone: 202.488.0400 US Soldiers ' Reaction to Nazi Concentration Camps “When we walked through those gates…1 saw in front of me the walking dead. We would like to thank The Crown and Goodman Family and the Abe and Ida Cooper Foundation for supporting the ongoing In the weeks preceding the arrival of Soviet units, Auschwitz camp personnel had forced the majority of Auschwitz prisoners to march westward in what would become known as "death marches." 1945: The Year of Liberation. When the Allies carved up Germany after the war, the West Germans were instructed to view the Holocaust very differently to those who lived in the East. We get on a train, and they bolt the doors. The first was Ohrdruf, a sub-camp of Buchenwald, some 100 miles southwest of Berlin. So there I went; we did about five months there, but got credit for two years’ worth of college. They entered the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, near Celle, in mid-April 1945. Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1995. We waited a couple of weeks down at Keesler Army Air Field in Mississippi, which was pretty nice. The Americans were responsible for liberating Buchenwald and Dachau, while British forces entered Bergen-Belsen. Leon Tulper of Denver, Colorado, lived through these desperate days. These prisoners greeted the soldiers as their liberators. I was drafted and I go to Fort Logan in Denver. During the Dachau liberation reprisals, German prisoners of war were killed by U.S. soldiers and concentration camp internees at the Dachau concentration camp on April 29, 1945, during World War II.It is unclear how many SS members were killed in the incident but most estimates place the number killed at around 35–50. With only weeks left before the surrender, GIs were unexpectedly coming across the concentration camps. These centers of evil and depravity, scattered across Nazi-held territory for all the Allies to discover, explained the need for the war far better than mere words ever could. Abzug, Robert H. Inside the Vicious Heart: Americans and the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps. Many of those seeing the horror of the concentration camps for the first time were visibily shaken and many were moved to tears. I couldn’t understand this. They liberated Mauthausen in early May. From this position he witnessed not only combat operations but was also present at the liberation of two separate concentration camps. Nobody knew why. This process was often referred to … Three were acquitted; seven were handed prison sentences; and 12 were given the death sentence. How did that go? NARRATOR: The concentration camp Buchenwald, April 1945 - only few prisoners in Hitler's death camps live to see the day of liberation. It was liberated in the summer of 1944 as Soviet forces advanced westward. This gave Leon an exceptional perspective on the war. In the event, the Nazi leadership gave the Allies no choice but to prove that point. We crossed the Saar River; we had an outpost on the far side. The Allied soldiers are horrified as they open the gates. The German heroes who helped Allies against Hitler. British forces liberated concentration camps in northern Germany, including Neuengamme and Bergen-Belsen. The phrase ‘concentration camps’ is obsolete, as out of date as economic sanctions or non-recognition. British forces liberated concentration camps in northern Germany, including Neuengamme and Bergen-Belsen. American forces liberated concentration camps including Buchenwald, Dora-Mittelbau, Flossenbürg, Dachau, and Mauthausen. Since I was from Kansas City, I told them I’d like to go to Rockhurst College there; they have a good reputation. You had 249 on your test. As part of the Allied policy of postwar denazification, meant to purge Germany of the remnants of Nazi rule and rebuild its civil society, infrastructure, and … In the event, the Nazi leadership gave the Allies no choice but to prove that point. Liberation of Nazi Camps. The previous spring, the SS had evacuated most of the Majdanek prisoners and camp personnel. We get into Camp Fannin [near Tyler, Texas], took 13 weeks of basic there, and then took three weeks of jungle training. We said we were, and the reaction of the whole mass was immediate: simultaneously on their faces were relaxation, ease, joy, and they all began chattering to us in a babble of tongues that we couldn’t answer–but we could, and did, point the muzzles of our weapons at the ground, making it obvious these weapons were not “at the ready”. The unspeakable conditions the liberators confronted shed light on the full scope of Nazi horrors. Moskin, who served in the Army with the 66th infantry, 71st Division, recalls that his side of the experience started when a group of U.S. Army combat soldiers stumbled upon a prisoner-of-war camp, holding mostly Royal Air Force members, near Lambach, Austria. US forces liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, Germany, on April 11, 1945. Newly-found letters from an American Second World War doctor detail how German SS guards were massacred by Allied troops during the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp. It was a tough kind of deal, but in certain areas it wasn’t so bad. Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Council, 1987. This called for caution in the minds of many, yet the fighting was not over. When the Allies prevented a typhus epidemic by burning down the Belsen concentration camp, they also destroyed a monument to man's inhumanity to man. Upon liberating the camps, many Allied units were so shocked by what they saw that they meted out spontaneous punishment to some of the remaining SS personnel. During this time, Leon’s 260th Regiment was sent to capture Saarlauten. I asked him when I could take it, and he told me to sit down. 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, SW But in those warehouses that remained, Soviet soldiers found personal belongings of the victims. Survivors of the camps faced a long and difficult road to recovery. We started training with other units like the 442nd [Regimental Combat Team made up of Japanese American soldiers], which meant fights every weekend. I gained some bad feelings toward the French when we drove over to the French town of Rouen and we heard pinging on our steel helmets. Most of these prisoners were suffering from starvation and disease. The first major Nazi camp to be liberated was Majdanek, located in Lublin, Poland. The evacuated prisoners were sent to concentration camps further west, such as Gross-Rosen, Auschwitz, and Mauthausen. When the American GIs entered the concentration camp, they found piles of naked corpses, their skin stretched tight across impossibly malnourished bodies. So my dad packed up the whole family and we moved; I was in Denver in 1939. You had guys from Guadalcanal and Japanese American guys with something to prove; they were Americans, after all. work to create content and resources for the Holocaust Encyclopedia. How did leaders, diplomats, and citizens around the world respond to the events of the Holocaust? The unspeakable conditions the liberators confronted shed light on the full scope of Nazi horrors. Shortly before Germany's surrender in May 1945, Soviet forces liberated the Stutthof, Sachsenhausen, and Ravensbrück concentration camps. Soldiers Who Liberated Nazi Concentration Camps Could Never Forget What They Saw. Jorges … With profound shock and anger. Only after the liberation of these camps was the full scope of Nazi horrors exposed to the world. Abzug, Robert H. GIs Remember: Liberating the Concentration Camps. Then one day I got my orders, Mississippi State! In other cases, the prisoners were forced to go on long and grueling marches to stay ahead of the advancing Allied forces. Survivors who were moved from camps close to the front were sent to Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Terezín (Theresienstadt) and Ravensbrück, or one of their many sub-camps. On March 4, 1945, the bulk of the division arrived in Borsch, Germany. The retreating Germans had destroyed most of the warehouses in the camp. In the following months, Soviet units liberated additional camps in the Baltic states and Poland. TTY: 202.488.0406, The first major Nazi camp to be liberated was, Six months later, on January 27, 1945, Soviet troops liberated. The formal handover of the camp was done by SS officer Lt Heinrich Skodzensky who walked up to the Americans and offers his surrender with a … It is now possible only to speak of extermination camps. Although the Germans had attempted to empty the camps of surviving prisoners and hide all evidence of their crimes, the Allied soldiers came upon thousands of dead bodies "stacked up like cordwood," according to one American soldier. Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army in January, 1945.
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