- Headline
-
Ill Prisoners Slaughtered in German Camp
- Sub-Headline
- STACKED LIKE PIGS
- Publication Date
- Saturday, April 7, 1945
- Historical Event
-
Eisenhower Asks Congress and Press to Witness Nazi Horrors
This database includes 1,688 articles about this event - Article Type
- Newspaper
- Page Section and Number
- 1
- Author/Byline
- Robert Cromie
- Article Text
- OHRDRUF, Germany — Thirty-one partly clothed bodies lie huddled grotesquely together where SS (elite guard) guards killed them because they were too ill to be moved.
In a little wood shed nearly 20 or so naked things that once were men were stacked like slaughtered pigs. The whole unbelievable pile is sprinkled with lime.
* * *
THIS IS NOT hearsay or rumor. These are things I saw in company with other newsmen and American officers at a concentration camp.
Russians, Czechs, Poles, Frenchmen, German Jews and German political prisoners were beaten and tortured. When malnutrition prevented their doing a full day's work, they were killed.
And remember this when someone says: "Oh, Germany's not so bad. They've never really hated the United States."
One of those men staring at the sullen sky—he was a blond youngster with a little hole in his neck where an SS bullet had killed him as he lay on his stretcher — was an American flier or paratrooper.
* * *
WHEN THE SS guards became uneasy April 3, they marched away those who could walk, put others on trucks and shot those too sick to travel. They took along an estimated 3,000 prisoners.
According to those who escaped the SS guards left behind some 2,000 others—buried in a huge pit a mile or so from the camp.
I cannot verify the 2,000 figure. But American newsmen who saw it before said the pit was there with the dead men's arms and torsos visibie[sic] in it. - History Unfolded Contributor
- Carlos G.
- Location of Research
- Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com)
Learn More about this Historical Event: Eisenhower Asks Congress and Press to Witness Nazi Horrors
- Ohrdruf (Encyclopedia Article)
- Liberation of Nazi Camps (Encyclopedia Article)
- 4th Armored Division (Encyclopedia Article)
Bibliography
Abzug, Robert H. GIs Remember: Liberating the Concentration Camps. Washington, DC: National Museum of American Jewish History, 1994.
Abzug, Robert H. Inside the Vicious Heart: Americans and the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Bridgman, Jon. End of the Holocaust: The Liberation of the Camps. Portland, OR: Areopagitica Press, 1990.
Chamberlin, Brewster S., and Marcia Feldman, editors. The Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps 1945: Eyewitness Accounts of the Liberators. Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Council, 1987.
Goodell, Stephen, and Kevin Mahoney. 1945: The Year of Liberation. Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1995.
Goodell, Stephen, and Susan D. Bachrach. Liberation 1945. Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1995.
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