US Policy During World War II: US Army and the Holocaust

On April 5, 1945, units from the American Fourth Armored Division of the Third
Army were the first Americans to discover a camp with prisoners and corpses.
Ohrdruf was a Buchenwald sub-camp, and of the 10,000 male slave inmates,
many had been sent on death marches, shot in pits, or their corpses were stacked
in the woods and burned. The Americans found the camp by accident they did
not set out to liberate camps, they happened upon them and found starved, frail
bodies of hundreds of prisoners who had managed to survive, as well as the
corpses. In Nordhausen, on the 11th, the American Timberwolf Division found
3,000 corpses and 700 starving, ill, and war-wounded survivors who were slaves
in the V-2 rocket factories.
An Austrian-born Jewish U.S. soldier, Fred Bohm, helped liberate Nordhausen.
He described fellow GI's as having "no particular feeling for fighting the
Germans. They also thought that any stories they had read in the paper, or that I
had told them out of first-hand experience, were either not true or at least
exaggerated. And it did not sink in, what this was all about, until we got
into Nordhausen."
When the American Combat Team 9 of the 9th Armored Infantry Battalion, Sixth
Armored Division were led to Buchenwald by Russians, the camp contained
30,000 prisoners in a pyramid of power, with German Communists at the top, in
the main barracks, and Jews and gypsies at the bottom, living in Little Camp, in
an assortment of barns.
Buchenwald barrack prisoners were reasonably healthy looking. The Little
Camp had 1,000 to 1,200 prisoners in a space meant for 450. Witnesses described
prisoners as "emaciated beyond all imagination or description. Their legs and
arms were sticks with huge bulging joints, and their loins were fouled by their
own excrement. Their eyes were sunk so deep that they looked blind. If they
moved at all, it was with a crawling slowness that made them look like huge,
lethargic spiders. Many just lay in their bunks as if dead." After liberation,
hundreds of prisoners died daily.

Generals George Patton, Omar Bradley, and Dwight Eisenhower arrived

in Ohrdruf on April 12, the day of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's death. They
found 3,200 naked, emaciated bodies in shallow graves. Eisenhower found a shed
piled to the ceiling with bodies, various torture devices, and a butcher's block for
smashing gold fillings from the mouths of the dead. Patton became physically ill.
Eisenhower turned white at the scene inside the gates, but insisted on seeing the
entire camp. "We are told that the American soldier does not know what he was
fighting for," he said. "Now, at least he will know what he is fighting against."
After leaving Ohrdruf, Eisenhower wrote to Chief of Staff General George
Marshall, attempting to describe things that "beggar description." The evidence
of starvation and bestiality "were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick,"
Bradley later wrote about the day: "The smell of death overwhelmed us." Patton,
whose reputation for toughness was legendary, was overcome. He refused to
enter a room where the bodies of naked men who had starved to death were piled,
saying "he would get sick if he did so," Eisenhower reported. "I visited every
nook and cranny." It was his duty, he felt, "to be in a position from then on to
testify about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief that the
stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda." (Seemingly, he intuited then that
these crimes might be denied.)
Eisenhower issued an order that American units in the area were to visit the
camp. He also issued a call to the press back home. A group of prominent
journalists, led by the dean of American publishers, Joseph Pulitzer, came to see
the concentration camps. Pulitzer initially had "a suspicious frame of mind," he
wrote. He expected to find that many of "the terrible reports" printed in the
United States were "exaggerations and largely propaganda." But they were
understatements, he reported.
Within days, Congressional delegations came to visit the concentration camps,
accompanied by journalists and photographers. General Patton was so angry at
what he found at Buchenwald that he ordered the Military Police to go to
Weimar, four miles away, and bring back 1,000 civilians to see what their leaders
had done, to witness what some human beings could do to others. The MP's were
so outraged they brought back 2,000. Some turned away. Some fainted. Even

veteran, battle-scarred correspondents were struck dumb. In a legendary

broadcast on April 15, Edward R. Murrow gave the American radio audience a
stunning matter-of-fact description of Buchenwald, of the piles of dead bodies so
emaciated that those shot through the head had barely bled, and of those children
who still lived, tattooed with numbers, whose ribs showed through their thin
shirts. "I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald," Murrow asked
listeners. "I have reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it; for most of it
I have no words." He added, "If I have offended you by this rather mild account
of Buchenwald, I am not in the least sorry."
It was these reports, the newsreel pictures that were shot and played in theaters,
and the visits of important delegations that proved to be influential in the public
consciousness of the still unnamed German atrocities and the perception that
something awful had been done to the Jews.
Then the American forces liberated Dachau, the first concentration camp built by
the Germans in 1933. There were 67,665 registered prisoners in Dachau and its
subcamps; 43,350 were political prisoners; 22,100 were Jews, and a percentage
of "others." As Allied forces advanced, the Germans moved prisoners from
concentration camps near the front to prevent their liberation. Transports arrived
at Dachau continuously, resulting in severe deterioration of conditions. Typhus
epidemics, poor sanitary conditions, and the weakened state of the prisoners
worsened conditions further and spread disease even faster.
On April 26, 1945, as the Americans approached Dachau about 7,000 prisoners,
most of them Jews, were sent on a death march to Tegernsee. Three days later,
American troops liberated the main camp and found 28 wagons of decomposing
bodies in addition to thousands of starving and dying prisoners. Then in early
May 1945, American forces liberated the prisoners who had been sent on the
death march.
After World War II, the Allies were faced with repatriating 7,000,000 displaced
persons in Germany and Austria, of whom 1,000,000 refused or were unable to
return to their homes. These included nationals from the Baltic countries, Poles,
Ukrainians, and Yugoslavs who were anti-communists and/or fascists afraid of
prosecution for collaborating with the Nazis and Jews.

In those camps, the Jews who survived the Holocaust remained exposed to
antisemitic discrimination. They were living among antisemites who had hostility
toward them. Furthermore, only after liberation could survivors begin to feel, to
sense what had been lost. Others could return home, Jewish survivors had no
homes to which to return.