A box of wedding bands, once worn by Holocaust victims, was found in a Nazi concentration camp by American soldiers in May 1945.
David Cohen and the 4th Armored Division entered the Ohrdruf labor camp in early April 1945. It was the first Nazi camp at which American forces found live inmates. David remembers that “there was a memorandum from General Eisenhower, that he wanted all available troops to see the concentration camp, to see why we were fighting.” General Eisenhower also insisted that the camps be documented with as many pictures as possible. As David explains, “there were six million Jews killed [in] the camp[s], but there were five-and-a-half million non-Jews in the camp[s]. [Adolf Hitler] killed Gypsies, Jehovah Witnesses, Catholics, Protestants, that, you know, were dissidents, political prisoners, Polish, Russians. He killed…people that he didn’t like….Children, anywhere from young infants to eighteen. A million and half children out of the six million Jews.” Toward the end of the war, American soldiers had increasing contact with victims of Nazi concentration camps. Jewish American soldier Kurt Klein met a young girl, Gerda Weissman, who had been sent to both a Nazi labor camp and a concentration camp. She was one of 120 Jewish women who, near death, were found abandoned in an old factory in Czechoslovakia. He later visited her in the army hospital. At the end of their conversation, the young girl handed Kurt Klein these written thoughts:
Freedom–I welcome it in the rays of the golden sun, and I salute you, brave American soldiers. You ask what we have suffered, what we have lived through. Your sympathy is great, but we cannot speak the unspeakable, and you might not understand our language…
General George S. Patton and General Omar Bradley confer at the Ohrdruf labor camp, April 12, 1945.
U.S. generals and soldiers responded in varied ways to what they witnessed at Ohrdruf and other Nazi labor and concentration camps. At Ohrdruf, Eisenhower vomited and lamented the loss in human potential suffered by the world because of the lives that had been taken there. General Patton also vomited, and was ready to choose revenge over the Geneva Conventions. As David Cohen remembers, “he got up on his jeep,…he starts screaming at the top of his voice. Now mind you, Generals Eisenhower and General Bradley were standing there. And he gets up and he says, see what these son-of-a-bitches did? See what these bastards did? He says, I don’t want you to take a f’n prisoner, he yells to us.” One of the Army doctors, Dr. Scotty, as Cohen recalls, “stood in the middle of the street and he starts screaming. He says, now I know how the Germans found the cure for malaria and typhus. He says, they killed them…they burned them.” David reflects upon how easy it is, as soldiers, to “lose some of your humanity.” It happened to those who decided to kill SS soldiers rather than take them prisoner, and it happened to David, himself, when he enjoyed watching SS soldiers be brutally beaten by Czech civilians.
Two local German women are forced to confront the reality of the German Holocaust. Buchenwald concentration camp, April 1945.
In the spring of 1945, American officers repeatedly insisted that German citizens confront the atrocities that had been committed by the German military in their own hometowns. While the mayor of Ohrdruf claimed that he was unaware of the things that were occurring at the Ohrdruf labor camp, David Cohen recalls that one of his superior officers, Colonial Sears, was unconvinced: “The smell alone will tell you what was go[ing on].” The smell “was awful,” David remembers, “I can’t describe the smell. It was so penetrating, horrible.”
Note: The views or opinions expressed in this exhibit Web feature and the context in which the images are used, do not necessarily reflect the views or policy of, nor imply approval or endorsement by, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.