Attached is Martha Gellhorn's (1908 – 1998) very disturbing eyewitness account of the Nazi concentration camp in Dachau, Poland:
"Nothing about war was ever as insanely wicked as these starved and outraged naked, nameless dead. Behind one pile of dead lay the clothed healthy bodies of the German guards who had been found in this camp. They were killed at once by the prisoners when the American Army entered."
The man primarily responsible for delivering the innocent into the ovens of the death camps was Obergrupenfuehrer Albert Ganzenmüller click here to read about him...
This is an Auschwitz testimony from a larger work titled The Camp of Disappearing Men. It was printed in 1944 by an organization called the Polish Workers Party and the singular voice giving the account is unidentified. This eyewitness does not explain how he made good his escape but the testimony was published in the Spring of 1945 - when the existence of the death camp was first discovered and made known to the world.
N.B.: Auschwitz was first called Oświęcim, named for the nearest Polish city. Here is an account by a war correspondent who was a part of the Allied advance through Germany. He filed this chilling report about the liberation of the Nazi death camp at Nordhausen:
"No one who saw the charnel house of Nordhausen ever will be able to forget the details of that horrible scene... The Yanks stood there stunned and silent,"
Howard Katzander of YANK filed this short dispatch regarding all that he witnessed following the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp in Weimer, Germany: "The camp is a thing that has to be seen to be believed, and even then the charred skulls and pelvic bones in the furnaces seem too enormous a crime to be accepted fully. It can't mean that they actually put human beings --some of them alive --into these furnaces and destroyed them like this."
Here is an eyewitness account of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp as experienced by U.S. Representative Clare Boothe Luce (R, Connecticut, pictured above):
"It was policy, Nazi policy, to work them and starve them and then throw them in the into the furnaces when they could no longer struggle to their feet. Dead men tell no tales. Well, the 51,000 dead of Buchenwald are talking now, and they are telling the people of the Democracies that they will have died in vain, unless we know and believe what excruciating sufferings they endured." This chronicle on the Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald was written by the senior American officers of the Displaced Persons Division, U.S. Group Control Council for the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces of the U.S. Department of War. It explains when and why the "camp" was created, who it was intended to incarcerate and how many. |