Allied armies liberated the Nazi camps

In the first months of 1945, the Allied armies liberated the Nazi camps one by one and discovered the scope of the massacres. In April, pictures of the horror were transmitted around the world and the survivors' repatriation was organised. Yet it took years to understand the reality of the concentration camp system and uniqueness of the genocide.

"The gates of hell have opened", American journalist John Berkeley wrote in May 1945. Horror sums up the discovery of the Nazi camps by the Allied armies. The event was the starting point for many stories, often highlighting the exceptional case of Buchenwald, where the prisoners took up arms to free themselves and expel their SS guards. A minority of the prisoners were lucky enough to be liberated under the agreements signed between the SS and the Red Cross, thus avoiding the deadly camp evacuations. But the most striking realities are those of the prisoners who were executed or left on the roadside or elsewhere, exhausted, and discovered by chance by the Allied troops, without a fight. Under these conditions, the repatriation of the prisoners was organised in an improvised manner. The event was nonetheless the source of understanding about the camps and déportations.

THE SHOCK OF THE DISCOVERY OF THE CAMPS in

At the end of July 1944, the war was not yet over and the Soviets entered the empty Lublin-Majdanek camp, where the gas chambers were still in place. At the end of November, the Americans and the French liberated the Natzweiler-Struthof camp, deserted by its SS guards and its detainees. The same situation was found at Auschwitz in January 1945, although a small number of prisoners were still there.

In liberated France, the press, which was unable to verify the information received and was still being censored, published little or nothing on the subject, notably so as not to frighten families awaiting the return of a loved one. L'Humanité dedicated two articles to the discovery of the camps in December 1944, then nothing until 5 April. Le Figaro published a paper on Struthof on 3 March 1945, three months after the camp was discovered. Even then, these articles were not "Front Page" material. The same discretion applied to the radio and cinema newsreels, which is why people were all the more stunned when the stories and photographs of this horror were published.

At the start of April 1945, first the Kommandos at Neuengamme were discovered. On 5 April, entry into the Ohrdruf camp, in Thuringia, presented the horror of the situation. More than 3,000 bodies lay there, naked and emaciated. On 11 April, the Americans entered the "little camp" of Buchenwald, a veritable slaughterhouse, from which convoys had left for Dachau during the previous days. Many prisoners were so exhausted that they barely understood that they were free. The sight of Boelcke Kaserne in Nordhausen, where the sick from Dora were parked, was another horrible scene: 3,000 bodies and 700 dying survivors. On 14 April, the carnage at Gardelegen was discovered, a little village where over 1,000 detainees were sent on a death march after the Kommandos evacuated Dora and were burnt alive in a barn. The next day, the British liberated the Bergen-Belsen death camp, where thousands of people were dying amidst the many cadavers. On 29 April, the Americans entered Dachau and discovered over 2,300 dead bodies in the station, left in a train that had arrived from Buchenwald. Faced with this horror, some soldiers could not stop themselves from killing the SS guards. In all, it is estimated that one-third of the 750,000 detainees in the concentration camp system died during the last weeks of the war, in the camps or during what the detainees called "death marches".

The Allied High Command was quickly informed of these terrible discoveries. On 12 April, Eisenhower, accompanied by Patton and Bradley, was at Ohrdruf. That very day, he decided to broadcast the news to all the press, even asking his troops nearby to come and witness the atrocious chaos. "We are told that the American soldier doesn't know what he is fighting for. Now, at least, he will know what he is fighting against," he declared. Visits were organised for journalists and parliamentarians a few days later. From then on, the lockdown of censorship was blown apart: the images of this horror, filmed or photographed, were legion. The aim was to show all the horror, to make it a "lesson". The American cameramen of the Signal Corps received strict instructions for filming the atrocities, the camps and the people who were there. Several war correspondents who saw these sites were also highly talented photographers – Margaret Bourke-White (of Life, at Buchenwald), Lee Miller (of Vogue, at Buchenwald and Dachau) and Eric Schwab (a Frenchman, at Ohrdruf, Buchenwald, Thekla and Dachau).

"The entire world has to know," said Sabine Berritz in the newspaper Combat of 3 May 1945. "Should we tell these horrifying stories?" she wrote. "Should we let our children see this mass of crimes? In the past we would have said no. We would have spoken out against the distribution of such atrocious documents. […] But now, the reviews and newspapers here and around the world must publish these stories and these photos. That is why, despite our repulsion, we must show them to our children, to all children. These abominable memories must leave a mark on their memories […]". The images of bulldozers pushing bodies into the mass graves at Bergen-Belsen were largely distributed. The French press which, up until then, almost never talked about the camps took up the subject in the second half of April 1945: three-quarters of the articles were dedicated to their discovery between mid-April and mid-June.

All the pictures published are pictures of absolute horror. They left their indelible mark on our consciences. With their power and their number, they form a veritable threshold, the threshold of how we represent mass murder. As Clément Chéroux demonstrated, if Word War I had shown death, it was still "individual" and it was mainly "that of the enemy". "It had nothing to do with the collective, mass murder of the camps, with piles of cadavers filling up the images" in 1945.