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On April 5, 1945, units from the American Fourth Armored Division of the Third
Army were the first Americans to discover a camp with prisoners and corpses.
Ohrdruf was a Buchenwald sub-camp, and of the 10,000 male slave inmates,
many had been sent on death marches, shot in pits, or their corpses were stacked
in the woods and burned. The Americans found the camp by accident they did
not set out to liberate camps, they happened upon them and found starved, frail
bodies of hundreds of prisoners who had managed to survive, as well as the
corpses. In Nordhausen, on the 11th, the American Timberwolf Division found
3,000 corpses and 700 starving, ill, and war-wounded survivors who were slaves
in the V-2 rocket factories.
An Austrian-born Jewish U.S. soldier, Fred Bohm, helped liberate Nordhausen.
He described fellow GI's as having "no particular feeling for fighting the
Germans. They also thought that any stories they had read in the paper, or that I
had told them out of first-hand experience, were either not true or at least
exaggerated. And it did not sink in, what this was all about, until we got
into Nordhausen."
When the American Combat Team 9 of the 9th Armored Infantry Battalion, Sixth
Armored Division were led to Buchenwald by Russians, the camp contained
30,000 prisoners in a pyramid of power, with German Communists at the top, in
the main barracks, and Jews and gypsies at the bottom, living in Little Camp, in
an assortment of barns.
Buchenwald barrack prisoners were reasonably healthy looking. The Little
Camp had 1,000 to 1,200 prisoners in a space meant for 450. Witnesses described
prisoners as "emaciated beyond all imagination or description. Their legs and
arms were sticks with huge bulging joints, and their loins were fouled by their
own excrement. Their eyes were sunk so deep that they looked blind. If they
moved at all, it was with a crawling slowness that made them look like huge,
lethargic spiders. Many just lay in their bunks as if dead." After liberation,
hundreds of prisoners died daily.
In those camps, the Jews who survived the Holocaust remained exposed to
antisemitic discrimination. They were living among antisemites who had hostility
toward them. Furthermore, only after liberation could survivors begin to feel, to
sense what had been lost. Others could return home, Jewish survivors had no
homes to which to return.