The man came up to us and said there's a factory about a mile down the road and you will find a lot of Jewish women in there that were dropped there and the SS is guarding them. We opened this shed we went in there. Though fighting still raged in the Pacific theater, World War II in Europe officially ended with Germany's unconditional surrender on May 8th.
1945. Allied armed forces advanced across Europe in the war's final stages, relentlessly pursuing the retreating German army. As they did, they stumbled onto camps, often accidentally, that had been established and run by the Nazis and their local collaborators. The Soviet army, advancing from the east, liberated Nazi camps in Poland, including Majdanek and Auschwitz.
The British and Canadians, advancing from the west, liberated Bergen-Belsen and camps in northern Germany. The Americans, our focus here, liberated Dachau, Buchenwald and other camps. As their armies advanced across Europe, the Allies found thousands of people in prison and camps.
They encountered piles of corpses and thousands of skeletal prisoners on the verge of death from malnutrition and disease. This was their first encounter with the horror of what would come to be known as the Holocaust. They began to understand that the Nazis had committed atrocities against civilians, the vast majority of them Jews, on an unimaginable scale.. And that these atrocities were very different from the deaths caused by conventional warfare. A new category of crime had to be recognized to describe the intentional attempt to destroy a people.
This crime came to be known as genocide. The soldiers were the very first outside witnesses of the Holocaust, an unprecedented case of genocide. The testimonies of the first soldiers who entered the camps, known as the Liberators, are important eyewitness accounts of the mass atrocities committed against the Jews of Europe by the Nazis and their collaborators. Hardened combat veterans, the American GIs were used to death. Many had been fighting for years, but they had never seen killings of civilians on the massive scale they discovered.
Their first encounters with Holocaust survivors at this unique moment in time, give us an essential and intensely human perspective on the difference between military war and genocide. Leon Bass was 20 years old and was among the first U.S. soldiers to arrive at Buchenwald. I can never forget that day, because when I walked through that gate, I saw in front of me what I call the walking dead. I saw human beings, human beings that had been beaten, had been starved, had been tortured. They had been denied everything.
They had skeletal faces with deep-set eyes. Their heads had been clean-shaved and they were standing there and they were holding on to one another just to keep from falling. I saw the clothing of little children, the little children that didn't survive. Up against the wall there were mounds of clothing. I saw the caps, sweaters, the stockings, the shoes, but I never saw a child.
Harry Mogan was a Jewish refugee from Nazi persecution. He reached the United States and became a soldier and a liberator. And you saw women on the floor, on wooden pallets. When I say women, you saw skeletons, rags hanging on them, no shoes, bones instead of faces, and the stench was so horrible, it's hard to describe. What the American soldiers found at Ordruf, a sub-camp of Buchenwald, was so grisly that General Dwight D. Eisenhower, then the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe, together with Generals Patton and Bradley, arrived to inspect the camp for themselves.
After his visit, Eisenhower cabled. 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 firsthand evidence of these things, if ever, in the future.
There develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to propaganda. These words are now engraved on the wall of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Eisenhower's eyewitness testimony reveals that what he saw at Ordruf left a powerful impression. Eisenhower foresaw the problem of disbelief that could fuel the denial of atrocities committed by the Nazis and their collaborators. He emphasized that he purposely witnessed these horrors so that no one would later be able to deny what he saw with his own eyes. Eisenhower was convinced that the world needed to know.
He made sure that members of Congress and journalists were brought to see the camp. He had all nearby soldiers whose units were not on the front lines visit as well, writing, We are told the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for. Now at least he will know what he is fighting against.
U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Horace Evers was among the first Allied soldiers to enter Adolf Hitler's abandoned Munich quarters. He discovered Hitler's personal stationery. He crossed out Adolf Hitler, inserted his own name, and wrote a letter home about the camp he had seen just outside of Munich.
Dearest Mom and Lou, A railroad runs alongside the camp and as we walked toward the boxcars 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 deaths mostly, but nothing has ever stirred me as much as this.
The first boxcar I came to had about 30 what were once humans in it. Bodies on top of each other. No telling how many. And then into the camp itself.
Filthy barracks. How can people do things like that? I never believed they could.
Until now. As American troops approached Dachau, they saw ghastly evidence of recent mass prisoner executions. Anger led some to shoot SS guards still at the camp, but Dachau not only fueled their rage, it also aroused their compassion.
Paul Parks was a 22-year-old American soldier from Indianapolis who witnessed Dachau after liberation. These people came out of these barracks-like buildings, they're striped uniforms on, and just in devastated shape. One of the fellas came out who spoke English, and he said, Are you Americans?
And I said, Yes. He said, Thank God. And he hit the ground and started to pray.
Who were the people that these soldiers found? They were the victims of Nazi ideology and hatred. The Jews among them had managed to survive the Holocaust, whose goal was total annihilation.
Other prisoners, including Roma, homosexuals, and communists, had managed to survive persecution and murder. For many, liberation came too late. Hundreds continued to die every day of starvation, exhaustion. and disease. But for others, the soldiers were larger than life.
They represented the moment of salvation that many survivors had despaired they might not live to see. Helen Greenbaum survived imprisonment in the Warsaw Ghetto, forced labor at a number of camps, including Majdanek and Ravensburg, and a death march to Dachau, where she was finally liberated. They opened all the...
The gates and we started some of on all four because they let us know that the soldiers are coming and we went out to greet the American soldiers and we dropped to their feet we kissed their boots. There's some of them that couldn't walk they were just crawling they picked up and carried the men into the camps. Some of the soldiers broke down and cried at the sight of the survivors.
Many made the conscious decision to put their military objectives temporarily on hold in order to care for the broken and dying prisoners that they found. In most cases, the liberators treated them with sympathy and kindness. After the Germans had mercilessly stripped them of their dignity, the liberators were the first to restore their humanity.
Anton Mason was about 18 when he was liberated by American soldiers at Buchenwald. He had survived Auschwitz, where most of his family was murdered. I found out my father was dead, and I was truly at the end of my rope. I said, I don't know if I can go on.
But there is something that is just impossible to explain. I just decided that... I'm not going to give up.
I'm going to try. And then, out of no place, on April 11, the Americans arrived. I couldn't believe it.
I couldn't believe it. I said, how is this possible? I walked over to a GI and... Young guy, and I asked him if he could give me some food. I was very hungry.
So he took out, he gave me a Nestle bar, and he gave me a little gold envelope. It said Nestle Cafe. I didn't know what it was. So he gave me a little food. You know how much that food was worth?
He could have gotten anything for it in Weimar. But he gave it to me. Sully Ganor lay half-dead in the snow after a death march from Dachau. He remembers the unshaven, tired soldier who knelt down, gently touched him on the shoulder and said, You're free, boy.
You're free now. Sully was surprised by the soldier's Japanese features. His liberator, Clarence Matsumura, was a member of a segregated regiment of Nisei soldiers, American children of Japanese immigrants.
Clarence smiled at Sully. a smile that stayed with him ever since. Sully has called Clarence his angel. Ironically, African American GIs like Paul Parks and Leon Bass, and Japanese Americans like Clarence Matsumura, served in segregated units in the U.S.
Army. They fought for freedom and democracy, despite facing discrimination at home and within the Army. Nisei soldiers celebrated the survivors'freedom Even though racial tension and fear during the war had caused many of their own families to be interned in camps in the U.S.
For countless survivors of the Holocaust, that first contact with the liberators was the moment they began to feel safe after years of fear, loss, and rupture. But for many, liberation was the saddest moment of their lives. It was the moment they realized they were completely alone in the world. For many liberators, their first contact with the survivors was a powerful moment of insight.
Trained to wage war, many chose to suspend their military missions for the humanitarian mission of giving care and respect to the survivors. The experiences of the survivors and the liberators moved many to become a moral voice, sharing their stories. I've been trying to give testimony for a long time by just going around and speaking to people. I think it's important that I speak about what I saw and that others speak about what they saw.
Are we looking for credit? No. No one's looking for credit.
No one wants a pat on the back. All we want to do is say, will this be prevented from happening again? That's the most basic thing.