On 4 May 1945, the German Admiral Von Friedeburg at Lüneburg surrendered to British Field Marshal Montgomery on behalf of the German troops in Northwest Germany, the Netherlands, Schleswig-Holstein and Denmark. On 5 May, Canadian General Charles Foulkes summoned the German Supreme Commander Johannes Blaskowitz to Hotel De Wereld in Wageningen to discuss the effect of the capitulation of the German troops in the Netherlands in the presence of Prince Bernhard (Commander of the Interior Forces).
The photo, most likely taken on 5 May 1945, below was the book burning of an NSB shop in The Hague in 1945. The public looted and set fire to a shop of the NSB (Dutch Nazis). Much like 12 years before the Nazis did in Germany.
During the negotiations on 5 May 1945, the street along Hotel De Wereld in Wageningen, during the capitulation negotiations.
A photo of Canadian soldiers entering Leiden, Tuesday, 8 May 1945. A Canadian soldier with a wife in traditional Zeeland costume and six children. In the background of the photo: (…)dsreportage (…)NK en Beeld’ (… gel 5. tel 395 Leiden, and text on the back, “I took this photo on the sound car and the Zeeuwin with her blouse (?) children, who lived in Leiden as long as she was evacuated and whom I knew because she came to the dental institute as a patient of SS.”
After five years of oppression, the day of the complete liberation of the Netherlands came on 5 May 1945. Germany accepts the unconditional capitulation.
The Netherlands is free: While the Germans still armed along the roads to the assembly points, the Canadian Army N-W Netherlands advances into the Netherlands, enthusiastically received by the population. Before leaving for N.W. Netherlands, Gen. Maj. Kruls, Chief of Staff M.G., had a meeting with military authorities at the temporary staff quarters, Hotel Bloeminck. ‘t Loo. Gene. Maj. Curl in the middle of the section heads.
The hate of the Nazis for all who were not Aryan was so great that even in the last months of the war, they still set up a new concentration camp.
The camp, near the city of Ludwigslust, was a subcamp of the Neuengamme concentration camp. The SS had established Wöbbelin in early February 1945 to house concentration camp prisoners whom the SS had evacuated from other camps to prevent their liberation by the Allies. At its height, Wöbbelin held some 5,000 inmates, many of whom were suffering from starvation and disease.
On 2 May 1945, the camp was liberated by US troops, These are some of the testimonies.
Living conditions in the camp, when the U.S. 8th Infantry and the 82nd Airborne arrived were deplorable. There was little food or water and some prisoners had resorted to cannibalism. When the units arrived, they found about 1,000 inmates dead in the camp. In the aftermath, the U.S. Army ordered the townspeople in Ludwigslust to visit the camp and bury the dead
James Megellas, was among the first soldiers to enter the Wöbbelin camp. He was 28 at the time and wrote about his experiences in his book ‘All the Way to Berlin: A Paratrooper at War in Europe.’
“I was not prepared mentally to deal with the horror of the camp,” Inside, he said he found “two hundred twisted, nude bodies of skin and bone piled four to five feet high.” In the corner of the room was a pile of clothes taken off the bodies for reuse. Individual forms were almost indistinguishable. There could not have been a body more than sixty pounds,”
In another building, Megellas found living prisoners.
“Most were lying on the dirt floor or propped against the sides of the building too weak to get up. With sunken eyes and skin taut, they looked like skeletons.”
On May 7, 1945, the 82nd Airborne Division conducted a funeral service in Ludwigslust for 200 inmates. Engineers dug the graves, and citizens of Ludwigslust buried each one in parachute silk, Megellas said.
A chaplain from the 82nd delivered the following eulogy:
“The crimes here committed in the name of the German people and by their acquiescence were minor compared to those to be found in concentration camps elsewhere in Germany. Here there were no gas chambers, no crematoria; these men of Holland, Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia and France were simply allowed to starve to death. Within four miles of your comfortable homes, 4,000 men were forced to live like animals, deprived even of the food you would give to your dogs.”
Megellas said he will never forget what he saw at Wöbbelin. The incident reinforced why he and his men fought the war.
“We stood there and we realized that it was to destroy the monstrosity that the Nazis had created.”
In accordance with a policy mandated by General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, the U.S. Army in Ludwigslust ordered “all atrocity victims to be buried in a public place” with crosses placed at the graves of Christians and Stars of David on the Jewish graves, along with a stone monument to commemorate the dead.
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In a few weeks, I will be going to Munich for a few days. When I am there, I will also go to Dachau. In a way, I am looking forward to it, but I am also dreading it.
Dachau was the first concentration camp built by the Nazis. It opened on 22 March 1933. Twelve years, one month and one week later, the US Forces liberated the camp.
The troops were horrified by what they saw. Below are just some testimonies.
A letter by Sgt. Horace Evers
Dearest Mom and Lou,
Just received your 19th April letter and was glad to hear you all are well and the tractor business is still intact.
So you went to N. Y. and had a big time. I’d give most everything to be able to see Lou with his pants rolled up and a baby cap on. Gawdamighty. Did Mom get a jog on and smoke weeds? Have you even learned to smoke, Mom?
A year ago today I was sweating out shells on Anzio Beachhead, today I am sitting in Hitler’s luxuriously furnished apartment in Munich writing a few lines home. What a contrast. A still greater contrast is that between his quarters here and the living hell of Dachau concentration camp only 10 miles from here.
I had the misfortune of seeing the camp yesterday and I still find it hard to believe what my eyes told me.
A railroad runs alongside the camp and as we walked toward the box cars on the track I thought of some of the stories I previously had read about Dachau and was glad of the chance to see for myself just to prove once and for all that what I had heard was propaganda. But no it wasn’t propaganda at all. If anything some of the truth had been held back. In two years of combat, you can imagine I have seen a lot of death, furious death mostly. But nothing has ever stirred me as much as this. I can’t shrug off the feeling of utter hate I now hold for these people. I’ve shot at Germans with intent to kill before but only because I had to or else it was me, now I hold no hesitancy whatsoever.
The first box car I came to had about 30 of what were once humans in it.
All were just bones with a layer of skin over them. Most of the eyes were open and had an indescribable look about them. They had that beaten “What did I do to deserve this?” look. They had that beaten, “what did I do to deserve this?” look. Twenty or thirty other box cars were the same. Bodies on top of each other no telling how many.
No identification as far as I could see. And then into the camp itself. Filthy barracks were suitable for about 200 persons and held 1500. 160,000 persons were originally in the camp and 32,000 were alive (or almost alive) when we arrived. There is a gas chamber and furnace room in one barracks. Two rooms were full of bodies waiting to be cremated. In one room they were all nude, in the other they had prison clothes on, as filthy as dirt itself. How can people do things like that? I never believed they could until now. The only good thing I noticed about the whole camp was the scores of SS guards freshly killed.
Some of the prisoners newly freed could not control themselves and went from German to German and bashed their heads in with sticks and rocks. No one tried to stop them for we all realized how long they had suffered. I guess the papers have told you about the 7th Army taking Nuremberg and Munich by now. Our division took the greater part of each place and captured many thousands of prisoners. We also liberated Russian, Polish and British and American prisoners by the thousands, what a happy day for the people.
Well enough for now Miss you all very much Your Son, Horace”
Hilbert Margol Early the morning of 29 April 1945, two months after our 21st birthday, my twin brother, Howard, & I, after seeing a trainload of boxcars, containing many dead bodies, entered the nearby Dachau Concentration Camp. We witnessed some unforgettable sights while not understanding what caused the same.
A personal account by Felix L. Sparks Brigadier General At 0730 on the morning of April 29th, the task force resumed the attack with Companies L and K and the tank battalion as the assault force. The attack zone assigned to Company L was through the city of Dachau but did not include the concentration camp, a short distance outside of the city.
Company L was designated as the reserve unit, with the mission of mopping up any resistance bypassed by the assault forces.
Shortly after the attack began, I received a radio message from the Regimental Commander ordering me to proceed immediately to take the Dachau concentration camp. The order also stated: “Upon capture, post an airtight guard and allow no one to enter or leave.”
As the main gate to the camp was closed and locked, we scaled the brick wall surrounding the camp. As I climbed over the wall following the advancing soldiers, I heard rifle fire to my right front.
The lead elements of the Company had reached the confinement area and were disposing of the SS troops manning the guard towers, along with a number of vicious guard dogs. By the time I neared the confinement area, the brief battle was almost over.
After I entered the camp over the wall, I was not able to see the confinement area and had no idea where it was. My vision was obscured by the many buildings and barracks which were outside the confinement area.
The confinement area itself occupied only a small portion of the total camp area. As I went further into the camp, I saw some men from Company L collecting German prisoners. Next to the camp hospital, there was a L-shaped masonry wall, about eight feet high, which had been used as a coal bin.
The ground was covered with coal dust, and a narrow gauge railroad track, laid on top of the ground, lead into the area. The prisoners were being collected in the semi-enclosed area.
As I watched, about fifty German troops were brought in from various directions. A machine gun squad from Company L was guarding the prisoners. After watching for a few minutes, I started for the confinement area.
After I had walked away for a short distance, I hear the machine gun guarding the prisoners open fire. I immediately ran back to the gun and kicked the gunner off the gun with my boot.
I then grabbed him by the collar and said, “What the hell are you doing?” He was a young private about 19 years old and was crying hysterically. His reply to me was, “Colonel, they were trying to get away.”
I doubt that they were, but in any event, he killed about twelve of the prisoners and wounded several more. I placed a non-com on the gun and headed toward the confinement area.
It was the forgoing incident which has given rise to wild claims in various publications that most or all of the German prisoners captured at Dachau were executed. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The total number of German guards killed at Dachau during that day most certainly did not exceed fifty, with thirty probably being a more accurate figure.
The regimental records for that date indicate that over a thousand German prisoners were brought to the regimental collecting point. Since my task force was leading the regimental attack, almost all the prisoners were taken by the task force, including several hundred from Dachau.
During the early period of our entry into the camp, a number of Company men all battle-hardened veterans, became extremely distraught.
Some cried while others raged. Some thirty minutes passed before I could restore order and discipline. During that time, the over thirty thousand camp prisoners still alive began to grasp the significance of the events taking place.
They streamed from their crowded barracks by the hundreds and were soon pressing at the confining barbed wire fence. They began to shout in unison, which soon became a chilling roar.
At the same time, several bodies were being tossed about and torn apart by hundreds of hands. I was told later that those being killed at the time were ‘informers.’
After about ten minutes of screaming and shouting, the prisoners quieted down. At that point, a man came forward at the gate and identified himself as an American soldier.
We immediately let him out. He turned out to be Major Rene Guiraud of our OSS. He informed me that he had been captured earlier while on an intelligence mission and sentenced to death, but the sentence was never carried out.
Within about an hour of our entry, events were under control. Guard posts were set up, and communications were established with the inmates.
We informed them that we could not release them immediately but that food and medical assistance would arrive soon.
The dead, numbering about nine thousand, were later buried with the forced assistance of the good citizens of the city of Dachau.
On the morning of April 30, our first battalion resumed the attack towards Munich.
At this point, I should point out that Seventh Army Headquarters took over the actual camp administration on the day following the liberation.
The camp occupation by combat troops after that time was solely for security purposes. On the morning of April 30, several trucks arrived from Seventh Army carrying food and medical supplies.
The following day, the 116th and 127th Evacuation Hospitals arrived and took over the care and feeding of the prisoners.
I am passionate about my site and I know you all like reading my blogs. I have been doing this at no cost and will continue to do so. All I ask is for a voluntary donation of $2, however if you are not in a position to do so I can fully understand, maybe next time then. Thank you.
To donate click on the credit/debit card icon of the card you will use. If you want to donate more then $2 just add a higher number in the box left from the PayPal link. Many thanks.
Edward R. Murrow was born on 25 April 1908. Although he is in uniform in the picture above, he was a journalist and broadcaster. I am not going to do a piece on his life as such. I will only go into one report.
He was one of the first reporters to go into Buchenwald as it was liberated in April 1945, Before I post the manuscript of his report I want to pick out one line because it is so relevant today.
“I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald. I have reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it, I have no words…. If I’ve offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I’m not in the least sorry.”
Some people nowadays get so easily offended by the truth.
The manuscript of the report:
“Permit me to tell you what you would have seen and heard had you been with me on Thursday. It will not be pleasant listening. If you are at lunch, or if you have no appetite to hear what Germans have done, now is a good time to switch off the radio for I propose to tell you of Buchenwald. It is on a small hill about four miles outside Weimar, and it was one of the largest concentration camps in Germany, and it was built to last.
As we approached it, we saw about a hundred men in civilian clothes with rifles advancing in open order across the field. There were a few shots. We stopped to inquire. We’re told that some of the prisoners have a couple of SS men cornered in there. We drove on, reached the main gate. The prisoners crowd up behind the wire. We entered. And now, let me tell this in the first person, for I was the least important person there, as you can hear.
There surged around me an evil-smelling stink. Men and boys reached out to touch me. They were in rags and the remnants of uniforms. Death had already marked many of them, but they were smiling with their eyes. I looked out over that mass of men to the green fields beyond, where well-fed Germans were ploughing. A German, Fritz Kersheimer, came up and said, ‘May I show you around the camp? I’ve been here for ten years.’
An Englishman stood to attention saying, ‘May I introduce myself? Delighted to see you. And can you tell me when some of our folks will be along?’
I told him, ‘Soon,’ and asked to see one of the barracks. It happened to be occupied by Czechoslovakians. When I entered, men crowded around tried to lift me to their shoulders. They were too weak. Many of them could not get out of bed. I was told that this building had once stabled 80 horses. There were 1200 men in it, five to a bunk. The stink was beyond all description. When I reached the centre of the barracks, a man came up and said, ‘You remember me, I am Petr Zenkl, one-time mayor of Prague.’ I remembered him but did not recognize him. He asked about Benes and Jan Masaryk. I asked how many men had died in that building during the last month. They called the doctor; we inspected his records. There were only names in the little black book, nothing more—nothing of who had been where what they had done or hoped. Behind the names of those who had died, there was a cross. I counted them. They totaled 242, two hundred and forty-two out of 1200 in one month.
As I walked down to the end of the barracks, there was applause from the men too weak to get out of bed. It sounded like the hand-clapping of babies, they were so weak. The doctor’s name was Paul Heller. He had been there since ’38. As we walked out into the courtyard, a man fell dead. Two others–they must have been over 60–were crawling toward the latrine. I saw it, but will not describe it.
In another part of the camp, they showed me the children, hundreds of them. Some were only six. One rolled up his sleeve, showed me his number. It was tattooed on his arm. B-6030, it was. The others showed me their numbers. They will carry them till they die. An elderly man standing beside me said, ‘The children–enemies of the state!’ I could see their ribs through their thin shirts. The old man said, ‘I am Professor Charles Richer of the Sorbonne.’ The children clung to my hands and stared. We crossed to the courtyard. Men kept coming up to me to speak to me and touch me, professors from Poland, doctors from Vienna, men from all of Europe. Men from the countries that made America.
We went to the hospital; it was full. The doctor told me that two hundred had died the day before. I asked the cause of death. He shrugged and said: ‘Tuberculosis, starvation, fatigue, and there are many who have no desire to live. It is very difficult.’ Dr Heller pulled back the blanket from a man’s feet to show me how swollen they were. The man was dead. Most of the patients could not move.
As we left the hospital, I drew out a leather billfold, hoping that I had some money which would help those who lived to get home. Professor Richer from the Sorbonne said, ‘I should be careful of my wallet if I were you. You know there are criminals in this camp, too.’ A small man tottered up, saying, ‘May I feel the leather, please? You see, I used to make good things of leather in Vienna.’
Another man said, ‘My name is Walter Roeder. For many years I lived in Joliet. Came back to Germany for a visit and Hitler grabbed me.’
I asked to see the kitchen; it was clean. The German in charge had been a Communist, had been at Buchenwald for nine years, had a picture of his daughter in Hamburg. He hadn’t seen her in twelve years, and if I got to Hamburg, would I look her up? He showed me the daily ration: one piece of brown bread about as thick as your thumb, on top of it a piece of margarine as big as three sticks of chewing gum. That, and a little stew, was what they received every twenty-four hours. He had a chart on the wall; very complicated it was. There were little red tabs scattered through it. He said that was to indicate each ten men who died. He had to account for the rations, and he added, ‘We’re very efficient here.’
We went again into the courtyard, and as we walked, we talked. The two doctors, the Frenchman and the Czech agreed that about six thousand had died during March. Kershenheimer, the German, added that back in the winter of 1939 when the Poles began to arrive without winter clothing, they died at the rate of approximately 900 a day. Five different men asserted that Buchenwald was the best concentration camp in Germany; they had had some experience of the others.
Dr Heller, the Czech, asked if I would care to see the crematorium. He said it wouldn’t be very interesting because the Germans had run out of coke some days ago, and had taken to dumping the bodies into a great hole nearby. Professor Richer said perhaps I would care to see the small courtyard. I said yes. He turned and told the children to stay behind. As we walked across the square, I noticed that the professor had a hole in his left shoe and a toe sticking out of the right one. He followed my eyes and said, ‘I regret that I am so little presentable, but what can one do?’ At that point, another Frenchman came up to announce that three of his fellow countrymen outside had killed three SS men and taken one prisoner.
We proceeded to the small courtyard. The wall was about eight feet high. It adjoined what had been a stable or garage. We entered. It was floored with concrete. There were two rows of bodies stacked up like cordwood. They were thin and very white. Some of the bodies were terribly bruised, though there seemed to be little flesh to bruise. Some had been shot through the head, but they bled but little. All except two were naked. I tried to count them as best I could, and arrived at the conclusion that all that was mortal of more than five hundred men and boys lay there in two neat piles.
There was a German trailer, which must have contained another fifty, but it wasn’t possible to count them. The clothing was piled in a heap against the wall. It appeared that most of the men and boys had died of starvation; they had not been executed. But the manner of death seemed unimportant. Murder had been done at Buchenwald. God alone knows how many men and boys have died there during the last twelve years. Thursday, I was told that there were more than twenty thousand in the camp. There had been as many as sixty thousand. Where are they now? As I left the camp, a Frenchman who used to work for Havas in Paris came up to me and said, ‘You will write something about this, perhaps?’ And he added, ‘To write about this, you must have been here at least two years, and after that–you don’t want to write any more.”
Liberation for Bergen-Belsen arrived on 15 April 1945. Major Dick Williams, one of the first British soldiers to enter and liberate the camp said, “It was an evil, filthy place; a hell on Earth.”
The British comedian Michael Bentine, who took part in the liberation of the camp, wrote this on his encounter with Bergen-Belsen: “Millions of words have been written about these horror camps, many of them by inmates of those unbelievable places. I’ve tried, without success, to describe it from my own point of view, but the words won’t come. To me, Belsen was the ultimate blasphemy.”
The camp was rife with deadly diseases, such as typhus, dysentery, and tuberculosis, caused by poor hygiene and malnutrition. As the thousands of dead bodies were contagious, they had to be buried in a hurry. At first, the British forced the arrested SS officers and other guards to dig the graves; later, they also used bulldozers. The mayors of the towns near the camp were forced to stand at the edge of the graves and watch.
It surprises me that they look shocked, they were mayors. So they would have been part of the Nazi regime that was responsible for the genocide on their doorsteps.
What the British troops encountered was described by the BBC’s Richard Dimbleby, who accompanied them:
“…Here over an acre of ground lay dead and dying people. You could not see which was which… The living lay with their heads against the corpses and around them moved the awful, ghostly procession of emaciated, aimless people, with nothing to do and with no hope of life, unable to move out of your way, unable to look at the terrible sights around them … Babies had been born here, tiny wizened things that could not live … A mother, driven mad, screamed at a British sentry to give her milk for her child, and thrust the tiny mite into his arms, then ran off, crying terribly. He opened the bundle and found the baby had been dead for days. This day at Belsen was the most horrible of my life.”
Military photographers and cameramen of the No. 5 Army Film and Photographic Unit documented the conditions of the camp and the measures of the British Army to ameliorate them. Many of the photos they took and the films they made from 15 April–9 June 1945, were published and/or shown abroad. Today, the originals are in the Imperial War Museum.
Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp was then burned to the ground by flame-throwing Bren Gun Carriers and Churchill Crocodile Tanks because of the typhus epidemic and louse infestation. As the concentration camp ceased to exist at this point, the name Belsen after this time refers to events at the Bergen-Belsen DP camp.
Finishing with a quote from the camp’s most famous victim, Anne Frank, “What is done cannot be undone, but one can prevent it happening again.”
In general, I try to avoid using graphic images as much as possible. Not because I think they are not important, but because they are. and solely because I find it difficult to erase them from my memories.
However, it is important every now and then to be reminded of the unfathomable horrors.
Buchenwald was liberated on 11 April 1945. This was really only a physical liberation because, for most of the survivors, the horrors remained with them in their memories and sometimes in their dreams. Also, those who liberated the camp were never freed from the horrors they encountered.
Below is the testimony of Edward R. Murrow, a journalist and one of the men who was there for the liberation.
This is Buchenwald, 11 April 1945 Permit me to tell you what you would have seen and heard if you were with me on Thursday. It will not be pleasant listening. If you’re at lunch, or if you have no appetite to hear what Germans have done, now is a good time to switch off the radio for I propose to tell you about Buchenwald. It is on a small hill about four miles outside Weimar and it was one of the largest concentration camps in Germany. And it was built to last. As we approached it we saw about a hundred men in civilian clothes with rifles, but dancing in open order across the fields. There were a few shots. We stopped to enquire. We were told that some of the prisoners had a couple of SS men cornered in there. We drove on, reached the main gate. The prisoners crowded up behind the wire. We entered. And now let me tell this in the first person for I was the least important person there as you shall hear.
There surged around me an evil smelling of horrors. Men and boys reached out to touch me. They were in rags and the remnants of uniforms. Death had already marked many of them, but they were smiling with their eyes. I looked out over that mass of men to the green fields beyond where well-fed Germans were plowing. A German, Fritz Gersheimer, came up and said, “May I show you around the camp? I’ve been here ten years.”
An Englishman stood to attention saying, “May I introduce myself?
Delighted to see you.
And can you tell me when some of our blokes will be along?”
I told him, “Soon,” and asked to see one of the barracks. It happened to be occupied by Czechoslovakians. When I entered men crowded around, tried to lift me to their shoulders. They were too weak. Many of them could not get out of bed. I was told that this building had once stabled eighty horses. There were twelve hundred men in it, five to a bunk.
The stink was beyond all description. When I reached the center of the barracks a man came up and said, “You remember me. I’m Pieter Zinko, onetime mayor of Prague.” I remembered him, but did not recognize him. He asked about Benish and Jan Mastericht.
I asked, “How many men had died in that building during the last month?” They called the doctor. We inspected his records. There were only names in a little black book, nothing more. Nothing about where, what they had done or hoped. Behind the names of those who had died there was a cross. I counted them. They totaled two hundred and forty-two. Two hundred and forty-two out of twelve hundred in one month. As I walked down to the end of the barracks there was applause from the men too weak to get out of bed. It sounded like the hand-clapping of babies—they were so weak.
The doctor’s name was Paul Heller. He had been there since ’38. As we walked out into the courtyard a man fell dead. Two others—they must have been over sixty—were crawling towards the latrine. I saw it, but will not describe it. In another part of the camp they showed me the children, hundreds of them. Some were only six. One rolled up his sleeve, showed me his number. It was tattooed on his arm—B6030 it was. The others showed me their numbers. They will carry them till they die. An elderly man standing beside me said, “The children—enemies of the state.” I could see their ribs through their thin shirts.
The old man said: “I am Professor Charles Richa of the Sorbonne.” The children clung to my hands and stared.
We crossed to the courtyard. Men kept coming up to speak to me and to touch me. Professors from Poland, doctors from Vienna, men from all Europe. Men from the countries that made America. We went to the hospital—it was full. The doctor told me that two hundred had died the day before. I asked the cause of death. He shrugged and said, “Tuberculosis, starvation, fatigue, and there are many who have no desire to live. It is very difficult.” Dr. Heller pulled back the blankets from a man’s feet to show me how swollen they were. The man was dead. Most of the patients could not move.
As we left the hospital I drew out a leather billfold hoping that I had some money which would help those who lived to get home. Professor Richa from the Sorbonne said, “I should be careful of my wallet if I were you. You know, there are criminals in this camp, too.”
A small man tottered up saying, “May I feel the leather please? You see, I used to make good things of leather in Vienna.”
Another man said, “My name is Walter Reuder. For many years I lived in Joliette. Came back to Germany for a visit and Hitler grabbed me.”
I asked to see the kitchen. It was clean. The German in charge had been a Communist, had been at Buchenwald for nine years. Had a picture of his daughter in Hamburg, hadn’t seen her for almost twelve years, and if I got to Hamburg would I look her up. He showed me the daily ration—one piece of brown bread about as thick as your thumb. On top of it a piece of margarine as big as three sticks of chewing gum. That, and a little stew was what they received every twenty-four hours. He had a chart on the wall, very complicated it was. There were little red tabs scattered through it. He said that was to indicate each ten men who died. He had to account for the rations and he added, “We’re very efficient here.”
We went again into the courtyard and as we walked, we talked. The two doctors, the Frenchman and the Czech, agreed that about six thousand had died during March. Kirshenheimer, the German, added that back in the winter of ’39 when the Poles began to arrive without winter clothing, they died at the rate of approximately nine hundred a day. Five different men asserted that Buchenwald was the best concentration camp in Germany. They had had some experience of the others.
Dr. Heller, the Czech, asked if I would care to see the crematorium. He said it wouldn’t be very interesting because the Germans had run out of coal some days ago and had taken to dumping the bodies into a great hole nearby.
Professor Richa said, “Perhaps I would care to see the small courtyard.
I said, “Yes.” He turned and told the children to stay behind. As we walked across the square I noticed that the professor had a hole in his left shoe and a toe sticking out of the right one.
He followed my eyes and said, “I regret that I am so little presentable, but what can one do?” At that point another Frenchman came up to announce that three of his fellow countrymen outside had killed three SS men and taken one prisoner.
We proceeded to the small courtyard. The wall was about eight feet high. It adjoined what had been a stable or garage. We entered. It was floored with concrete. There were two rows of bodies stacked up like cordwood. They were thin and very white. Some of the bodies were terribly bruised though there seemed to be little flesh to bruise. Some had been shot through the head, but they bled but little. All except two were naked. I tried to count them as best I could and arrived at the conclusion that all that was mortal of more than five hundred men and boys lay there in two neat piles. There was a German trailer, which must have contained another fifty, but it wasn’t possible to count them. The clothing was piled in a heap against the wall. It appeared that most of the men and boys had died of starvation. They had not been executed, but the manner of death seemed unimportant. Murder had been done at Buchenwald.
G-d alone knows how many men and boys have died there during the last twelve years. Thursday I was told that there were more than twenty thousand in the camp. There had been as many as sixty thousand. Where are they now?
As I left that camp, a Frenchman who used to work for Havas in Paris came up to me and said, “You will write something about this perhaps?” And he added: “To write about this you must have been here at least two years and after that—you don’t want to write anymore.”
I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald. I have reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it I have no words. Dead men are plentiful in war, but the living dead, more than twenty thousand of them in one camp, and the country round about was pleasing to the eye. And the Germans were well fed and well dressed. American trucks were rolling towards the rear filled with prisoners. Soon they would be eating American rations, as much for a meal as the men at Buchenwald received in four days.
If I have offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I am not in the least sorry. I was there on Thursday and many men in many tongues blessed the name of Roosevelt. For long years his name had meant the full measure of their hope. These men who had kept close company with death for many years did not know that Mr. Roosevelt would within hours join their comrades who had laid their lives on the scales of freedom. Back in ’41 Mr. Churchill said to me, with tears in his eyes, “One day the world and history will recognize and acknowledge what it owes to your president.”
I saw and heard the first installment of that at Buchenwald on Thursday. It came from men from all over Europe. Their faces, with more flesh on them, might have been found anywhere at home. To them the name Roosevelt was a symbol, the code word for a lot of guys named Joe who were somewhere out in the blue with the armor heading East. At Buchenwald they spoke of the president just before he died. If there be a better epitaph, history does not record it.
On 27 January 1945, the Soviet Army liberated Auschwitz. Although those who survived were physically liberated, for many the mental torture never left them. Their experiences were relived in their nightmares and there was constant anxiety.
The United Nations has designated 27 January as Holocaust Memorial Day. I believe every day should be a Holocaust Memorial Day, especially nowadays when so many want to forget or revise history.
Never Again. Never Forget. I cannot say Never Forgive because that is not my call—that’s the prerogative of those who survived and their families.
On 27 January 1945, the Soviet Army liberated Auschwitz. Ivan Martynushkin was one of the liberators of Auschwitz. Below are some excerpts about what he witnessed.
“We beat back the Germans in one village, passed through, and came out onto some kind of enormous field almost completely surrounded by electrified barbed-wire fences and watchtowers, we saw buildings beyond the barbed wire. And as we got closer, we began to see there were people.”
“We saw emaciated, tortured, impoverished people. Those were the people I first encountered…We could tell from their eyes that they were happy to be saved from this hell. Happy that now they weren’t threatened by death in a crematorium. Happy to be freed. And we had the feeling of doing a good deed—liberating these people from this hell.”
“It was hard to watch them. I remember their faces, especially their eyes which betrayed their ordeal. But what did I feel when I saw these people in the camp? I felt compassion and pity understanding how these people’s fate unfolded. Because I could have ended up in the same situation. I fought in the Soviet army. I could have been taken prisoner and they could have also thrown me into the camp.”
“At first there was wariness, on both our part and theirs. But then they apparently figured out who we were and began to welcome us, to signal that they knew who we were and that we shouldn’t be afraid of them, that there were no guards or Germans behind the barbed wire. Only prisoners.”
Maastricht is one of the oldest cities in the Netherlands and one of the first settlements. It was also the first city to be liberated in World War 2.
On 13 and 14 September 1944 it was the first Dutch city to be liberated by Allied forces of the US Old Hickory Division..
These are just some impressions of the liberation of Maastricht. Picture above: Wijck and Maastricht are liberated on 13 and 14 September. German prisoners of war are taken away by American soldiers of the Old Hickory division. This American infantry division played a leading role in the liberation of South Limburg.
American soldiers of the 113th Cavalry Group transport prisoners of war in East Maarland.
‘Maastricht 14 September 1944. The house of the NSB member Spoor is stormed.’
Wycker Brugstraat, direction Sint Servaasbrug in Maastricht. The building on the right in the background is on the west bank, corner Maastrichter Brugstraat/Kesselskade. Photo taken to the west, after September 14, 1944.
An American soldier in the photo with a woman in Maastricht.
Location: Vrijthof, north side. Photo taken to the east, towards Grote Straat. The boy is probably a member of the scouting company.
On the 2nd of May a unit from the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion, US Army, encountered Jewish inmates who were put on a death march from Dachau and were approaching Waakirchen. The US soldiers were almost entirely of second-generation American soldiers of Japanese ancestry (Nisei)
During these marches, also called the “death marches”, at least one thousand prisoners died. They died of disease, undernourishment, and exhaustion. If a prisoner collapsed or, fully exhausted, simply could not continue, they were beaten or shot to death by SS guards. The route of the marches passed through numerous villages and small towns. Scores of residents witnessed the brutal marches.
Women prisoners from the Dachau concentration camp on an “death march” in Percha, Lake Starnberg, April 28 1945 (Municipal archives Landsberg am Lech)
By the second of May 1945, only some of the 6,000 prisoners sent on the death march were still alive; thosewhose heatlth failed them or were unable to continue had been shot as they fell. On that day, as the eastwards-marching prisoners had passed through Bad Tölz and were nearing Waakirchen, nearly sixty kilometers (37 miles) south of Dachau, several hundred of the dead and dying were lying on open ground, nearly all covered in freshly fallen snow.
They were spotted by advance scouts of the U.S. Army’s 522nd Field Artillery Battalion, the only segregated Japanese American-manned military unit in Germany at the time. Only days earlier, they had liberated the Kaufering IV Hurlach satellite slave labor camp of the Dachau main camp’s “system”.
Finishing up with the words of one of the survivors.
Willemijn Petroff-van Gurp Due to my resistance activities, I was imprisoned in Scheveningen, Vught, Ravensbrück and Dachau. We were liberated by the Americans.
I owe my life to my friends, who dragged me along with them when I passed out and kept me warm when I was in bad shape in the camp.
Because of the war, it became clear to me what freedom of expression, the danger of dictatorship and declaring human beings to be inferior mean. This is why I contributed to a report of my experiences of the war, because I think it is important that the youth also realize this.
My oldest son Robert had prepared himself to go to the commemoration in Dachau in my name. Unfortunately I can not go there myself anymore due to my health, as I am now 101 years old.
Willemijn Petroff-van Gurp wrote this message 2 years ago
History of Sorts 
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