U.S.

Policy During WWII:

U.S. Army & the Holocaust
U.S. Policy: Table of Contents | Auschwitz Bombing Controversy | "We Will Never Die"

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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 9 th 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 andAustria,
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. The Allies were

forced to service citizens of 52 nationalities in 900 DP camps, under the

aegis of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration
(UNRRA). Lack of trained personnel, absence of a clear policy, and
poor planning and management prevented the agency from fulfilling its
role properly. Private relief organizations were gradually permitted to
operate in the camps, but at best could provide only partial aid.
Consequently, the United States Army, with a shrinking budget and
inexperienced personnel, assumed major responsibility for the DPs. It
was not a responsibility they anticipated or they welcomed but they had
no other choice.
Each national group and religious denomination demanded recognition
of its own problems. In order to avoid charges of discrimination, the
American army adopted a policy of evenhandedness toward all the DPs,
a policy that adversely affected Jewish DPs housed in the same camps
with Poles, Baltic nationals, and Ukrainians. 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.
The American army was beleaguered. Trained for war, they had to
juggle multiple assignments: the occupation, the Cold War, and the
problems of survivors who were naturally distrustful of all authority
and in need of medical and psychological attention.
Short-term problems, such as housing, medical treatment, food, and
family reunification, were acute. The army had no long-term strategy.
The survivors had nowhere to go. Britain was unwilling to
permit Jewish immigration to Palestine and the United States was not
ready to receive refugees.
Homosexuals continued to suffer, even with the end of the war.
Paragraph 175 of the German legal code stated that male
homosexuality, but not female lesbianism, was punishable by
imprisonment. After 1943, male homosexuals had been forced to wear a
pink triangle and were sent to the death camps. After the liberation, the
Americans did not repeal Paragraph 175 and sent homosexual inmates
liberated from the camps to other prisons.
Preferential treatment to Jews was denied on the ground that this would
be a confirmation of the Nazi racial doctrine, which differentiated

between Jews and others. The Jews were therefore dealt with according
to their country of origin; Jews from Germany, for example, were
classified as "enemy aliens," just like the Nazis.
American troops who liberated the concentration camps felt sympathy
for the Jewish DPs, and many Jewish GIS and officers went out of their
way to assist the survivors. But that sympathy did not extend to men
who arrived on following troop rotations. Unfamiliar with history and
facts, they had little or no sympathy for the Jews. It did not help that
concentration camp survivors mistrusted people, were hypersensitive,
and had acquired habits that did not compare favorably with the local
German and Austrian population. Some objected to the fact that they
took care of their biological needs in hallways and outside; one officer
provided a simple solution of latrines and the problem ceased.
Americans' contacts with antisemitic Germans stirred up innate
personal prejudices held by troops. Some American commanders
suspected that the DPs from Eastern Europe included Soviet agents, and
that Jews had a predisposition to communist beliefs. The Army also
treated the DPs as if they stood in the way of the pre-Cold-War rush to
rehabilitate Germany. By June 1945, conflicts were heated enough for
President Truman to send Earl G. Harrison to the American Zone on a
fact-finding mission. His visit was complete with political overtones
and his report was a bombshell.
His conclusions were harsh, even overstated:
We appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated
them except that we do not exterminate them. They are in
concentration camps in large numbers under our military
guard instead of SS troops. One is led to wonder whether
the German people seeing this are not supposing that we
are following or at least condoning Nazi policy.
His recommendations were equally dramatic:
Jews must be recognized as Jews. They should be
evacuated from Germany quickly. One hundred thousand
Jews should be admitted to Palestine. President Truman
endorsed the Report, rebuked the army, and intensified
pressure on Britain. He opened up the United States for
limited immigration.

After the pogrom by Polish fascists that killed 6070 Jews in *Kielce ,
Poland, on July 4, 1946, more than 100,000 Jews fled to the American
Zone aided by *Berih ah , overcrowding the camps and straining the
Army's budget, but when the administration tried to close the borders,
the American Jews pressured them to reopen them. Twice the American
government kept the borders open.
From April 1945 to the summer of 1947, the Jewish DP population in
the American Zone exploded from 30,000 to 250,000 as the Jews fled
the Soviet Bloc. The Jews had no place else to go, since no one would
take them in. As their needs grew, and U.S. Army charged with caring
for them was being restricted by budget cuts, the U.S. tried to transfer
control of the Jews to the local German governments, which the Jews
refused to accept under any circumstances.
On April 19, 1947, General Lucius Clay, commander of the American
forces in Germany closed the borders to the American Zone and
denied UN aid to newcomers, but 12,000 Jews from Romania and
Hungary managed to enter. The American Army usually closed their
eyes to illegal immigration, especially when the immigrants were Jews.
But as time went by, and troops were replaced, the communication,
tolerance, and relationships deteriorated between the Americans and the
Jews, especially in matters concerning the black market, which led to
raids and even violence.
When Israel was established in May 1948 and Congress passed the
Wiley-Revercomb Displaced Persons bill allowing 100,000 DPs to
come to America, the situation changed again. The camps were
essentially empty and changed the Army's attitude to those who
remained behind.
At the end of the day, the Army has been praised by some historians
and scholars, and reviled by others. Typical are Abraham Hyman who
calls the postwar period and the Army's treatment of the Jewish DPs the
Army's finest hours. Leonard Dinnerstein, a historian, criticized the
Army for being insensitive and unduly harsh.