Hitler Concentration Camp

Throughout the history of mankind, there have been many meaningless wars fought by power-hungry tyrants seeking world domination. The ambition of these unruly rulers have brought bloodshed to many innocent people, and the one standing chief among these is Adolf Hitler. As the absolute dictator of an impoverished Germany after World War I, he used Jewish people as a scapegoat. Hitler, believing that his race was superior to all others, sent Jews, the elderly, and his political opponents, to the horrifying death/concentration camps. In these camps, Hitler exterminated approximately 11 million people, 6 million of them Jews. Those who can attest to the evils of these camps are the U.S. soldiers. After the invasion of Europe on D-Day, they discovered

and liberated many camps, including Buchenwald and Dachau. The United States army in World War II helped and liberated thousands of prisoners, and the soldiers’ testimonies to these death camps have shown the true and evil nature of Nazi Germany.
The brutality and horror that these soldiers witnessed at the Nazi concentration camps in World War II will never be forgotten because of their first-hand accounts.

When the U.S. soldiers of Cannon Company found the first concentration camp on April 11, 1945, they were unprepared for what they were about to see. Those that had survived the torture looked like skeletons from starvation, were disease ridden, and could hardly even move. And now, although safe from the Nazi’s, they had to face years of recovery and physical therapy. An even more unforgettable sight was the amount of dead bodies laying about. Since death was so common place in the camps, there were corpses stacked up, one after the other, of people who had died of starvation or

disease.
Although horrified by the sight of the camps, the soldiers did their duty to the world community and told the unforgettable descriptions of what these camps looked and smelled like. This was very important, since if we are to prevent this from ever happening again, people must know about it. The Nazi death camp Buchenwald was the first camp to be liberated by the Americans. It was a miracle in itself that the American’s arrived at the camp Buchenwald when they had, since the remaining survivors of the camp would have been executed if they had come a few hours later. Ventura De La Torre, a soldier in Cannon Company, had never even heard of the mass murder of people in Germany until he entered Buchenwald. He stated, as many of his fellow comrades repeated, that the prisoners who had died were “stacked up like wood” inside the camps. De La Torre also said “Their knees were nothing but skin and bone. Their ribs… a terrible sight to see them”(Hirsh 81). Even though he was only in the camp for about three hours, it created an image in his mind to last a lifetime. Another soldier, Robert Duoos, of the 80th Infantry Division’s reconnaissance troop, arrived at Buchenwald on April 17, and stated some of the things of which he saw. “In the hospital, I saw lampshades that were made from human skin, with tattoos, and they had every part of the human body displayed in alcohol jars”(Hirsh 113). This is just a few of the evils that he saw within the camp, and it really attests to how horrible these camps truly were.
Even the great General George Patton was extremely affected by what he saw at the sub-camp Ohrdruf. He described it as “one of the most appalling sights that I have ever seen” In his diary account about his time at Ohrdruf, he says, “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”(USHMM). Patton was so disturbed by the sight of the bodies that he refused to even enter a room where about thirty men were piled up, since he said we would get sick if he did so. As a man who had over thirty years of military experience, this is saying a lot.
The stories that these soldiers tell are unforgettable and horrendous.

One soldier tells the story of a little girl that died in his arms. “there was a little girl in a fetal position. And I grabbed her by the ankle, pulled her out and wrapped her in my jacket, and I started running toward the aid station, because I sensed that there was life there. I heard a kind of a whimper. And I got about halfway to the aid station, and then felt the little body collapse. She died in my arms” (Hirsh 121). The soldier goes on to tell that this represented how so many young people were the innocent victims of the crimes of madmen. This is very agreeable and tells how horrible the holocaust really was, by showing they killed children by means of starvation, disease, and

torture.
Edward R. Murrow broadcasted a report on Buchenwald about the camps. Murrow tells his account of what he saw at these camps, and it is hard to listen to. He states “most of the patients cannot move” in the hospital, and that “in another part of the camp, they showed me the children, hundreds of them” This speech on the radio goes on for 7 minutes telling stories of the people in the camps and explaining how many people died the day before, The doctor of the hospital in the camp said that 200 people had perished the day before he arrived. Moreover, the causes of death in the hospital, Murrow stated, was tuberculosis, starvation, and a general unwill to live. The lack of sanitation in the camps caused disease to spread like wildfire, causing some to drop dead right where they stood. Murrow also exclaimed how the children were treated like animals. These innocent kids were subject to doctor experimentation, but usually, death. Most of the time kids were killed immediately on arrival to the death camps, or were forced into labor.
On April 26, 1945, the Nazi’s evacuated aproximatly 7,000 prisoners from the Dachau concentration camp and forced them to march to Tegernsee. Only three days later the American troops liberated Dachau, freeing about 33,000 people. On railroads near the camp, the American GI’s found 50 freight cars filled with the bodies of 1,500 men. The doors to Dachau had flowers, well trimmed lawns, and was quite inviting. One soldier said “This must be what Hell looks like”(Marilyn Culpepper 125). During the span of this camp's existence, over 200,000 prisoners were sent here and over 35,000 people died in total. About 400 people died per day in this camp. Some of the Liberators were so disgusted at the sight of the camp that they executed more than 30 German guards and forced German citizens to bury 9,000 dead bodies in the camp. However, American soldier’s tell how grateful and unbelievably happy these people were to see them. One survivor of the liberated camps said “I shall remember the day 11th of April 1945 as the day of my rebirth, On that day I became a free man again”(Hirsh 122). Peter DeMarzo, a rifleman in Company L, describes how an inmate was so happy that he kissed him. “Oh, my God. This poor guy came over and kissed me. He must’ve weighed seventy pounds” Also, many other prisoners hugged the Liberators when they saw them for the first time. They were free at last from the Nazi enslavery.
Though the soldiers were already fighting Hitler, they were now fighting for something much greater, the freedom for thousands of innocent people. “If there were any possible doubt in a GI’s mind about why he was fighting, all uncertainty was quickly dispelled as the troops moved into Germany and witnessed firsthand the appalling concentration camps”(Marilyn Culpepper 123). Though the war was coming to an end, they pushed even harder through Germany to liberate the concentration camps as quickly as possible. In Dachau, as people recounted their horrific stories about their time in the camps, it really struck home to how important it was to be fighting this war. “Dachau made it painfully clear for every soldier ‘why we were fighting this war’”(Never Will We Forget, 125).
As the American forces delved deeper into Europe, they found and liberated more of these death camps, such as Dora-Mittelbau, Flossenburg, and Mauthausen. In Dora-Mittelbau, Nazi’s had killed practically everyone in the camp, but the GI’s had been about to save the remaining survivors in this camp. In Flossenburg, American forces liberated the remaining 1,500 people left in the camps.
Though the task of winning World War II was a big one, they faced an even bigger task: transporting everyone from these camps back home. This was a major problem, since there were about 6 million people who were now homeless from the holocaust. In 1945, U.S. President Harriett Truman pushed for a displaced persons act that would allow victims of the holocaust to enter the United States. This allowed for over 16,000 Jewish DP’s to come to the U.S. Truman had also made the displaced person’s camps in Europe much more livable and well managed by separating the Jews from the non-Jews. In 1948, the U.S. Congress allowed for 400,000 visas to be handed out to displaced people, of which 80,000 were Jewish. The U.S. admitting all of these people helped them get back onto their feet after such a huge tragedy and suffering so much. This act had provided a home for hundreds of thousands of people who were in dire need of one.