THIS DAY IN WWII -- Liberation of Ohrdruf

Ohrdruf Death Camp was one of the many concentration camps of the Nazi Germany era, located near the town of Weimar. Part of the larger Buchenwald Prison Camp complex, it housed over 11,700 prisoners during its single year of use. Through it's short life from 1944 to the end of the war, the camp inmates served as a source of forced labor, mainly for railway construction.

ON THIS DAY, April 4th, 1945, the 4th Armored Division and the 89th Infantry Division of the U.S. Army marched on Buchenwald. On that day, Ohrdruf became the first Nazi Concentration Camp to be liberated, and the first time that the world at large would become aware of the unbelievable atrocities being committed in the Nazi Death Camp system. Generals Omar Bradley, George Patton and Dwight Eisenhower all had the dubious honor of viewing the freshly liberated camp for themselves... all were appalled by what they witnessed, and would forever say it was this day that changed their lives.

In his diary, Patton would later recount his experience:

"In a shed . . . was a pile of about 40 completely naked human bodies in the last stages of emaciation. These bodies were lightly sprinkled with lime, not for the purposes of destroying them, but for the purpose of removing the stench. When the shed was full--I presume its capacity to be about 200, the bodies were taken to a pit a mile from the camp where they were buried. The inmates claimed that 3,000 men, who had been either shot in the head or who had died of starvation, had been so buried since the 1st of January. When we began to approach with our troops, the Germans thought it expedient to remove the evidence of their crime. Therefore, they had some of the slaves exhume the bodies and place them on a mammoth griddle composed of 60-centimeter railway tracks laid on brick foundations. They poured pitch on the bodies and then built a fire of pinewood and coal under them. They were not very successful in their operations because there was a pile of human bones, skulls, charred torsos on or under the griddle which must have accounted for many hundreds."

Photos obtained from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. -- http://www.ushmm.org.