When Allied soldiers began liberating the concentration camps set up across Germany, they encountered scenes that would haunt them for the rest of their lives. Thousands upon thousands of corpses lay exposed, clouds of flies hovering over them, and the nauseating smell of rotting bodies filled the air. Survivors who looked like living skeletons stood among the dead.
The months or even years of cruelty inflicted on prisoners left marks that could never be erased. It is not surprising that some Allied soldiers could not contain their emotions when witnessing such brutality. The camps of captivity were bathed in the blood of their prisoners.
By mid-1944, it was clear that Germany was on the ropes. The Soviet Union's Red Army, after great and bloody victories on its own territory, was rapidly heading toward Berlin. In the west, the Allies had succeeded in carrying out the landing in Normandy and were advancing at a good pace toward the heart of the Reich.
Fearing what might happen after the end of the conflict, Heinrich Himmler, in charge of the organization of the concentration camps, ordered his men to eliminate all traces of the Final Solution, the systematic plan to exterminate approximately six million Jews. Adolf Hitler's enemies already knew how sadistic and gruesome his men were. They had already found evidence of German massacres of civilians, but when they began to liberate territory previously occupied by the Germans, they witnessed their darkest crimes firsthand.
The first concentration camp to be liberated was Majdanek, located in Poland, on July 22, 1944, by Soviet soldiers. It was established near the Lublin ghetto, where much of the area's Jewish population had been forced to live. When the Nazis needed labor for forced labor, they began bringing these people to the detention center, but the place was quickly turned into an extermination camp. Using seven gas chambers, the Germans killed approximately 880,000 men, women, and children there.
Due to the rapid advance of the Soviets, the Germans were unable to destroy the evidence of their crimes before fleeing, so Majdanek was captured almost intact. This was the first time the Allies were confronted with the full extent of Nazi cruelty. 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 committed atrocities against civilians, the vast majority of them Jews, on an unimaginable scale. Majdanek was only the first of hundreds of liberated concentration camps. In all of them, the evidence of the brutality to which the prisoners were subjected was overwhelming.
Auschwitz, perhaps the most notorious of these terrible places, began to be evacuated by the Nazis on January 17, 1945. Tens of thousands of Jews and other prisoners were forced into the Reich to continue their captivity. Thousands more remained until Soviet soldiers began to arrive on January 27.
The Germans found it impossible to erase the evidence of what they had done there. In some sheds, there were hundreds of thousands of suits and dresses, all belonging to murdered people. In addition, more than 7,000 kilos of human hair were found, due to the custom of shaving the heads of captives as soon as they arrived.
Many Soviet soldiers, veterans of a terrible war and witnesses of all kinds of cruelty, broke down in tears when they saw the evidence of Nazi crimes. Some seemed to feel ashamed or even guilty that human brutality could reach such extremes. Only a few prisoners celebrated their release. The vast majority were so weak that they were unable to move or even understand what was happening. Many believed it was a cruel trick by their captors to make them think their captivity was over. It was only when they were taken to hospitals and offered nutritious food for the first time in months or years that they understood they had regained their freedom.
Of the 1.3 million people who arrived at Auschwitz, only 7,000 remained in the camp when the Soviets arrived. Although the Red Army soldiers shared their findings with the Western Allies, the latter would soon experience them for themselves.
By April 1945, American and British fighters were deep inside German territory. The Nazis were constantly being forced back further and further toward Berlin, but as they moved toward their capital, they were also forced to abandon the concentration camps on German soil. On April 11, American soldiers liberated Buchenwald. A resistance organization had taken control of the detention center earlier that day to prevent the last Nazi guards from committing atrocities against their prisoners before fleeing. However, for many it was already too late. By the time the Allies arrived, most of the captives could barely stand.
The Allied generals had read the Soviet reports, but most of the lower-ranking soldiers had not expected the brutal images found in the camps. The American and British soldiers, many of them under the age of 20, could barely comprehend what they were seeing. The rumors they might have heard were nothing compared to what they were now witnessing.
By the end of the war, there were so many corpses in these places that the guards had not even attempted to dispose of them, so they were left completely out in the open. These thousands of bodies bore the marks of the torture and hardship they were subjected to throughout their captivity. According to the testimonies of the liberators, the smell was the first thing perceived, even before seeing the prisoners. The years of overcrowding with almost no hygiene produced a stench that made many of the soldiers vomit upon entering the camps.
The few survivors looked like skeletons due to lack of food, and thousands died after being released from the diseases they had contracted there. Typhus was one of the most common, which caused rashes all over the body, high fevers, and even delirium. Many of the infected, having such low defenses due to the inhumane conditions to which they were subjected, were never able to recover. Several of the camps had to be completely incinerated to prevent the spread of this and other diseases.
Medical battalions worked two days and nights binding wounds and giving medications, but for advanced cases of starvation and tuberculosis there were often no cures. The survivors were evacuated for treatment in Allied hospitals. In some cases, soldiers could not contain their emotions provoked by the macabre scenes they witnessed.
On April 29, American troops advanced on Dachau, another of the concentration camps on German territory. The SS men in charge of security at the camp, upon learning that their enemies were nearby, began to destroy evidence of their crimes, but they were not fast enough. When they surrendered, there were still many signs of their sadistic behavior.
Upon entering, the Americans found 39 wagons full of naked corpses so thin that the bones could be seen beneath the skin. There were about 2,000 bodies there, some of them with signs that they had been recently murdered. For a group of Allied soldiers, this was too much. They needed revenge.
Even today it is not known exactly what happened. According to some of the witnesses, 50 German SS men after their surrender were gathered in front of one of the walls of the camp. A squad of Americans, some of whom carried machine guns, were tasked with keeping a close watch on them. This is where accounts differ. Some sources stated that the prisoners tried to escape, so the soldiers opened fire. Dozens were killed almost instantly, while many others were seriously wounded. Following other accounts, however, we find a mass summary execution in retaliation for the atrocities committed at Dachau. Whatever the truth, between 35 and 50 Germans died after their surrender within the walls of the center of the camp. Many of those wounded by bullets never received medical attention and bled slowly to death in the snow.
One soldier later reflected that he did not really feel good about what happened there, but also admitted he felt there was a certain amount of revenge. In a way, he felt that even though these may not have been the men who perpetrated this sort of thing, at least they paid back a little bit for what happened to the prisoners.
What happened at Dachau is perhaps the best-known case of a camp whose liberation turned bloody against its oppressors, but it was far from the only one. Mauthausen in Austria was one of the last detention centers to be reached by the Allies. It was liberated between May 3 and 6, days after Adolf Hitler, seeing that the war was lost, decided to take his own life.
This camp was one of the most brutal in all of Nazi Germany. The inhuman conditions to which its prisoners were subjected caused the death of more than 90,000 people, approximately half of those who set foot there. As in many other such prisons, the cause of the deaths were not only the German guards but also the so-called kapos. These were captives who collaborated with their captors in exchange for better living conditions, which meant supervising the rest of the prisoners and often also torturing them. Sometimes they were even crueler than the Nazis.
By the time American soldiers arrived at Mauthausen, most of the guards had evacuated the camp, but dozens of them were still there. After the Allies disarmed these men, chaos broke out. The prisoners took the opportunity to take revenge on the people who had tormented them for years. Many were decapitated with their own knives, and in several cases their heads were reportedly placed on stakes in a macabre display of rage.
The kapos were not spared from the wave of retribution. Those who had not fled were hunted down and killed with guns or even beaten to death. In many cases, American soldiers, sickened by the brutal images they encountered each time they arrived at a camp, did not intervene to help the Nazis. To them, it was exactly what they deserved.
On the first night after the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp, all the prisoners who had collaborated with the administration, the so-called kapos, were also executed by the prisoners. They were strangled, torn apart, some had their heads crushed, and some were simply hanged. Altogether about 300 prisoners became victims of the first night after the liberation.
On May 8, 1945, Germany signed its unconditional surrender. World War II in Europe came to an end. By then only a few concentration camps remained to be liberated. In these, the guards peacefully laid down their weapons and let their prisoners go.
But even though the days of captivity were over, the deaths continued to occur. The malnutrition, exhaustion, and disease to which these people were subjected for years was too much for many of them. Tens of thousands lost their lives months after the end of hostilities due to these factors. A large number of them decided to take their own lives, unable to comprehend the cruelty they had experienced.
Even some Allied soldiers could not cope with what they saw in the camps and made the same tragic decision. The war continued to claim victims even after it had ended. One witness recalled a fellow soldier saying he would never make it through the night with the smell, because he had been smelling the bodies all day long. No one ate that night, and it seemed there was not a man who slept or who did not cry openly.
Some German guards, filled with guilt for what they had done, also took their own lives. Many others were put on trial after the war and sentenced to prison, but only the camp commanders were sentenced to death. Among them was Rudolf Höss, the leader of Auschwitz, and Martin Weiss of Dachau. For the lower-ranking Germans, however, even though they were responsible for unimaginable cruelties, the maximum penalty they faced was a few years of imprisonment. Many of them were never even brought to court and managed to spend the rest of their lives in freedom, though not in peace.
Their anguish, however, would never be comparable to that of the few survivors of the Holocaust who witnessed firsthand one of the most barbaric acts in human history.