Week Three— Concentration Camp Liberations: Collecting the Evidence.
By Raymond Millen, PKSOI
In July 1944, the Soviets discovered and liberated the death camp of Majdanek, The Soviet rapid
advance after the destruction of the Wehrmacht’s Army Group Center caught German authorities
by surprise, so they were unable to erase the evidence of the gas chambers and crematorium.
During the rest of the summer, the
Soviets overran the Sobibor,
Belzec, and Treblinka death camps,
but the Germans had dismantled
these in 1943 after killing the
Jewish inmates, thus leaving little
apparent evidence. In January
1945, the Soviets liberated
Auschwitz, discovering tens of
thousands of personal effects from
Jewish victims, including hair, in
the abandoned warehouses. Except
for a few thousand emaciated
prisoners, the magnitude of the
mass incarceration and extermination of the Jews was not immediately evident because the
Germans had evacuated the vast majority of Jews through death marches to the West.
In the spring of 1945, the Western Allies were shocked by the discovery of labor camps and
survivors of death marches in western Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Austria. Due to the
collapsing military front, German guards and authorities abandoned the camps, leaving behind
tens of thousands emaciated,
diseased, and dying prisoners and
bodies in the open and in mass
graves. Upon hearing accounts of
camp liberations, senior allied
generals, including General Dwight
D. Eisenhower, visited the camps.
Eisenhower ordered a formal and
meticulous documentation of
evidence, to include film footage
and pictures, stating later, “The
things I saw beggar description . . .
The visual evidence and the verbal
testimony of starvation, cruelty and
bestiality were so overpowering . . .
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 to propaganda.” The film footage of the Flossenburg, Dachau, Mauthausen,