Eisenhower’s Foresight: Protecting the Truth of the Holocaust
During a tour of the newly liberated Ohrdruf concentration camp in Germany, an Austrian Jewish survivor describes to General Dwight D. Eisenhower and his entourage the use of the gallows in the camp. National Archives
While Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower had studied his World War II enemy, he was unprepared for the Nazi brutality he witnessed at Ohrdruf concentration camp in April 1945. Bodies were piled like wood and living skeletons struggled to survive. Even as the Allied Forces continued their fight, General Dwight D. Eisenhower foresaw a day when the horrors of the Holocaust might be denied. He invited the media to document the scene. He compelled Germans living in the surrounding towns and any soldier not fighting at the front to witness the atrocities for themselves.
General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, visited the camp on April 12, 1945, with General George S. Patton and General Omar Bradley. After his visit, Eisenhower cabled General George C. Marshall, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, describing his trip to Ohrdruf:
. . .the most interesting—although horrible—sight that I encountered during the trip was a visit to a German internment camp near Gotha. The things I saw beggar description. While I was touring the camp I encountered three men who had been inmates and by one ruse or another had made their escape. I interviewed them through an interpreter. The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where they were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said that he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to “propaganda.”
Seeing the Nazi crimes committed at Ohrdruf made a powerful impact on Eisenhower, and he wanted the world to know what happened in the concentration camps. On April 19, 1945, he again cabled Marshall with a request to bring members of Congress and journalists to the newly liberated camps so that they could bring the horrible truth about Nazi atrocities to the American public. He wrote:
We continue to uncover German concentration camps for political prisoners in which conditions of indescribable horror prevail. I have visited one of these myself and I assure you that whatever has been printed on them to date has been understatement. If you could see any advantage in asking about a dozen leaders of Congress and a dozen prominent editors to make a short visit to this theater in a couple of C-54's, I will arrange to have them conducted to one of these places where the evidence of bestiality and cruelty is so overpowering as to leave no doubt in their minds about the normal practices of the Germans in these camps. I am hopeful that some British individuals in similar categories will visit the northern area to witness similar evidence of atrocity.
That same day, Marshall received permission from the Secretary of War, Henry Lewis Stimson, and President Harry S. Truman for these delegations to visit the liberated camps.
Ohrdruf made a powerful impression on General George S. Patton as well. He described it as “one of the most appalling sights that I have ever seen.” He recounted in his diary that
In a shed . . . was a pile of about 40 completely naked human bodies in the last stages of emaciation. These bodies were lightly sprinkled with lime, not for the purposes of destroying them, but for the purpose of removing the stench.
When the shed was full—I presume its capacity to be about 200, the bodies were taken to a pit a mile from the camp where they were buried. The inmates claimed that 3,000 men, who had been either shot in the head or who had died of starvation, had been so buried since the 1st of January.
When we began to approach with our troops, the Germans thought it expedient to remove the evidence of their crime. Therefore, they had some of the slaves exhume the bodies and place them on a mammoth griddle composed of 60-centimeter railway tracks laid on brick foundations. They poured pitch on the bodies and then built a fire of pinewood and coal under them. They were not very successful in their operations because there was a pile of human bones, skulls, charred torsos on or under the griddle which must have accounted for many hundreds.
The discovery of the Ohrdruf camp opened the eyes of many US soldiers to the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis during the
Holocaust.
See:
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/ohrdruf
On the night of July 22-23, 1944, soldiers of the Red Army came upon Majdanek, the first of the Nazi extermination camps to be liberated. They freed just under 500 prisoners and occupied the nearby city of Lublin on July 24. What Soviet and Polish researchers uncovered and documented behind the camp’s electrified barbed wire, soon reinforced by the investigative work conducted by others outside of the USSR, definitively shaped our understanding of the Nazi genocide. While still largely unfamiliar to most Americans, the liberation of Majdanek was one of the most significant moments in the history of World War II and the Holocaust.
Soviet soldiers inspect the crematory ovens at Majdanek, July 1944. Courtesy of Deutsche Fotothek.
In 1942-43, Majdanek was transformed from a labor camp to an extermination camp (Vernichtungslager). As the Nazi mass annihilation of European Jews escalated, the SS installed gas chambers and crematoria there. Polish, Czech, Slovakian, and Hungarian Jews were deported directly or diverted to Majdanek because of backed up trains and overcrowding at other killing centers. The Nazis also transported Jews from Germany, France, and the Low Countries to the camp. In 1943, SS personnel at Majdanek murdered thousands from the Warsaw and Bialystok Ghettos in Poland after Himmler called for their liquidation. The camp’s “efficiency” increased as its usefulness to the “Final Solution” expanded.
A combination of the rapid Soviet advance following Operation Bagration, launched on June 22, 1944, and SS incompetence meant that most of Majdanek’s infrastructure of murder remained intact when Soviet units seized the camp a month later. Posterity will be forever grateful for both the Red Army’s speed and the Nazis’ incompetence.
The Polish People’s Army’s Film Crew, under the direction of Aleksander Ford, created a powerful documentary about the camp. Released in 1944 and called
Majdanek—The Cemetery of Europe, the film spares the reader little of the horror of the killing. The crew took shots of the excavations of mass graves and showed Majdanek’s piles of shoes, shoes that once belonged to real, flesh-and-blood human beings. Viewers can also lay eyes on the gas chambers and ovens and hear the testimony of liberated inmates removed from all over the European continent and sent to this hell. While the film says little about the special targeting of Jews—a major problem with much of the early Soviet and Communist coverage of the genocide, it is a landmark work in the history of Holocaust cinema and leaves deep imprints on viewers to this day.
Soviet journalist, Konstantin Simonov, struck a similar note when he authored a pamphlet,
The Lublin Extermination Camp, in the summer of 1944. The pamphlet was quickly translated into many languages, including English. Reading Simonov exposes one to the fragility of human comprehension—how to find an adequate language and set of categories that can grasp the inhumanity and terror of a place like Majdanek. He introduces the text with a warning that there was so much more to learn about the camp and its operations, so many more witnesses to interview, and so many more of the dead to identify. “But having only this,” Simonov declares, “I cannot remain silent, I cannot wait. I want to speak at once, today, about the first traces of this crime that have been revealed, about what I have heard during the past few days, and what I have seen with my own eyes.” To edge his audience toward some limited understanding of what he saw, he lists the names of many of the murdered, names he extracted from a mountain of documents collected by the SS. “This frightful heap of documents was the grave mound of Europe, squeezed into one room.” Simonov notes how Jews and Soviet and Polish prisoners were among the earliest victims. He also records stories from witnesses about the horrors of November 3, 1943. The pamphlet then escorts the reader on a nightmarish journey through Majdanek, accompanied by photographs of the barbed wire and barracks, and, unforgettably, the crematoria surrounded by the charred remains of innumerable victims. If Simonov errs in the pamphlet in estimating the numbers of deaths in the camp at several hundred thousand (contemporary estimates range from 95,000 to 200,000), this is forgivable.
The works of Ford and Simonov were truly momentous. They grappled, visually and through the written word, with a genocide, before “genocide,” as a word and concept (it was only coined by Rafael Lemkin in 1944), really existed. For that matter “Holocaust,” the not uncontroversial term which has become the central designator for the annihilation of European Jews, had not yet emerged as an organizing concept either. Thus, the Red Army’s liberation of Majdanek and the vital research which followed soon thereafter should find a deeper place in our historical awareness of the Third Reich’s crimes. The camp’s discovery yielded irrefutable evidence of the Nazi extermination system and gave even greater impetus to the quest for justice for the victims comprising this “cemetery of Europe.”
See:
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/liberation-of-nazi-camp-majdanek-1944
The prescience of General Dwight Eisenhower, Alexsander Ford and Konstantin Simonov provided documentary and photographic evidence of the first concentration camps to be liberated. Majdanek was the first, though initially unheralded, extermination camp to be liberated.
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