Hell Before Their Very Eyes: American Soldiers Liberate Concentration Camps in Germany, April 1945

On April 4, 1945, United States Army units from the 89th Infantry Division and the 4th Armored Division seized Ohrdruf, the first of many Nazi concentration camps to be liberated in Germany. In the weeks that followed, as more camps were discovered, thousands of soldiers came face to face with the monstrous reality of Hitlers Germany. These men discovered the very depths of human-imposed cruelty and depravity railroad cars stacked with emaciated, lifeless bodies ovens full of incinerated human remains warehouses filled with stolen shoes, clothes, luggage, and even eyeglasses prison yards littered with implements of torture and dead bodies andperhaps most disturbing of allthe half-dead survivors of the camps. For the American soldiers of all ranks who witnessed such powerful evidence of Nazi crimes, the experience was life altering.