Never Again is the phrase that came out of the Nazi persecution of Jews, and others in Nazi Germany. The other night i watched a documentary on the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. Wolf Biltzer was the commentator, and he interviewed his father and mother who were survivors of the camps. It’s been 79 years since Allied troops first started liberating the concentration camp prisoners. 79 years ago and we are still in situations where people are killing off others to make them supreme.
In late 1944 and early 1945, as Allied troops defeated the German army and moved across Europe into Germany, they encountered tens of thousands of concentration camp prisoners.
Soviet forces were the first to approach a major Nazi camp, reaching Majdanek near Lublin, Poland, in July 1944. Later, the Soviets liberated Auschwitz, the largest killing center and concentration camp, in January 1945. In the following months, the Soviets liberated additional camps in the Baltic states, Poland, and eventually in Germany itself. In April and May 1945, the British liberated Nazi camps in northern Germany, including Bergen-Belsen and Neuengamme.
The first Nazi camp liberated by US forces was Ohrdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald (the main camp would be liberated one week later). The 4th Armored Division and the 89th Infantry of the Third US Army entered Ohrdruf on April 4, 1945. When soldiers of the 4th Armored Division entered the camp, they discovered piles of bodies, some covered with lime, and others partially incinerated on pyres. The ghastly nature of their discovery led General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, to visit the camp on April 12, with Generals George S. Patton and 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 things I saw beggar description. … The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick ... . 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.” This description of General Eisenhower’s visit to Ohrdruf came be seen in the Holocaust Museum among other things. (Shoes, lots of shoes, which is the only surviving thing , the actual bunkers of some of the camps). It is horrific.
For the dead and the living, we must be witness to this genocide. We must continue to education, and communicate future generations, that this did occur, that this continues and we must put a stop to this killing.
