'Lest We Forget'...The liberation of a concentration camp 80 years ago

What American troops discovered upon entering Dachau was horrifying

The ruins of an English city neighborhood after being bombed during World War II

Over the years people have gifted me with various historical artifacts, thinking I might find them of use with an article. Which on occasion I have.

These items most often are old copies of the Fowlerville Review—the weekly newspaper started in 1874 that preceded my publication—saved by a long-ago reader for some reason or other, but of no importance to their descendants. Yet, to their descendant’s credit, there was an urge to perpetuate the memento rather than toss it into the trash can.

Other donations received have included old high school yearbooks, graduation programs, and small almanacs sponsored by a local merchant.

The common thread in these materials was a Fowlerville connection.

Not so with an envelope of old photographs given to me a few years ago by Rick Fraley, a gentleman who I first met as an advertiser and soon became a good friend. While Rick was not a native of the area, his wife Mary had grown up in community and we had known each other since our shared school days.

My enjoyment of chatting with Rick was helped by his compliments of my commentaries and our sharing similar political beliefs—although neither are a prerequisite of someone being a friend of mine or hopefully vice versa.

When Rick stopped by the office with the photographs, he and Mary had already sold their business and home and were preparing to move to the Grand Traverse area where Rick had lived prior to relocating to our neck of the woods.

“Maybe you can find some use for these,” he said, handing me the packet.

My way of explanation he noted that “Both of my mother’s brothers served in Europe at the end of World War II. We found these pictures when we were cleaning out my mom’s home after she died. They were among the stuff she had saved from my grandparents’ place after they passed away.”

To say it was an unusual donation would be an understatement. Like those other gift-givers, Rick no longer saw a reason to keep these items but hesitated to discard them.

Photo taken of survivors after the liberation of a German concentration camp by American troops

The two photos that accompany this essay are a sample of those that are part of the collection. There were several photos showing the ruins of various city neighborhoods. My guess is that they were of London or another of the large English cities taken during the Battle of Britain, victims of the German Air Force attacks. Of more poignancy, though, were those taken after the Americans had liberated a Nazi concentration camp, with one of the images showing the emaciated survivors while the rest depicted the corpses.

These snapshots were obviously not taken by either of Rick’s uncles, but somehow one of them had obtained the photographs and came back to Michigan with the collection. As a wartime souvenir, they were certainly not your usual fare.

Later, curious about the situation, I did a bit of research and soon learned that what happened to Rick, coming across these photographs in the family attic years later, was an experience shared by many other children and grandchildren of World War II veterans who’d served in the European Theater.

As to ‘how’ so many of them possessed these pictorial keepsakes—and perhaps more importantly ‘why’ they possessed them—was unclear, but the speculation is that the American commanders, possibly as high up as the Allied Supreme Commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, wanted this recorded evidence of Nazi atrocities brought back to the United States by the returning servicemen. That would explain the ‘how’. As for the ‘why’. . . well, maybe a case of “Lest We Forget.”

That slogan is generally used as a reminder of our need to remember and pay homage to those who lost their lives while serving in the Armed Forces, with the added caveat that these men and women did so “protecting our freedoms and way of life.”

But while such cost is ample reason for remembrance, what American soldiers found when stumbling upon the Nazi death camps in the final days of combat was an even larger purpose for risking life and limb beyond the ‘defense of nation’ and preserving ‘hearth and home.’

What they saw was a moral clarity between right and wrong and between a world based on humane and civilized standards and one fallen into barbarity and depravity. At the risk of hyperbole, they saw the face of evil and the weakness of men and women who succumb to its lures.

* * *

This past April 29^th marked the 80^th anniversary of American troops arriving at Dachau, the concentration camp located in southern Germany. A couple of smaller German detention facilities, housing inmates, had been liberated earlier in the month and gave a foreshadowing of what had happened at these prisons, but nothing prepared them for the shock by what they found at this larger facility.

In an article published five years ago by Dave Roos for history.com, the journalist wrote that “When the men of the 42nd ‘Rainbow’ Division rolled into the Bavarian town of Dachau at the tail end of World War II, they expected to find an abandoned training facility for Adolf Hitler’s elite SS forces, or maybe a POW camp.

“What they discovered instead,” he explained, “would be seared into their memories for as long as they lived—piles of emancipated corpses, dozens of train cars filled with badly decomposed human remains, and perhaps most difficult to process, the thousands of ‘walking skeletons’ who had managed to survive the horrors of Dachau, the Nazi’s first and longest-operating concentration camp.”

None of them, whether they were officers or common soldiers, had any concept of “what a concentration camp really was”—the level of obvious atrocities that had been committed—until seeing one up close. Words like ‘slavery’ and ‘oppression’ or even ‘brutal treatment’ were insufficient to describe the horror they found. Only visual images could do justice to this assault on their human senses and moral principles.

So, the photographers and newsreel cameramen were brought in.

As Roos noted, their work had an immediate effect. “…the wrenching images and firsthand testimonies recorded by Dachau’s shocked liberators brought the horrors of the Holocaust home to America.”

The personal accounts included describing the foul smell that greeted the infantrymen as they approached the site, described it as a “acrid odor” resembling “the sickening smell of feathers being burned off a plucked chicken.”

They encountered thousands of corpses that had been left in train cars to rot and elsewhere piles of dead inmates; their “bodies stacked like cordwood.”

Dachau had been opened in 1933, serving as a forced-labor detention camp for the political enemies of Germany’s newly-installed Nazi government. These included trade unionists, communists, and Democratic Socialists. The list was later expanded to other dissidents as well as “undesirables” such as Roma (Gypsies), homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and what became the primary target, Jews.

“The cruelly efficient operation of Dachau was largely the brainchild of SS officer Theodor Eike, who instituted a ‘doctrine of dehumanization’ based on slave labor, corporal punishment, flogging, withholding food and summary executions of anyone who tried to escape,” wrote Roos, adding that there was an on-site crematorium to handle those who perished from torture, malnutrition, disease, medical experiments, or the firing squad.

The camp would serve as a model for other concentration camps in Germany and then the occupied nations of Eastern Europe, including Auschwitz—the infamous extermination in Poland designed to eliminate as many Jews as possible as part of the Nazi’s ‘Final Solution.’

* * *

What was discovered 80 years ago at Dachau and other camps by Allied forces, shocking and novel at the time, soon became commonplace knowledge around the world. Images of both the skeletal survivors and the emancipated dead became a familiar sight, the first-hand testimonies of the liberators recorded in numerous books and documentaries, and the overall history of what happened well researched and chronicled. The concentration-camp photos given to me by Rick, for example, have been reproduced in numerous venues.

The Holocaust, as it became known, saw an estimated six million Jews fallen victim to the Nazi-inspired genocide, along with millions of others, with the ‘undesirables’, Poles, and Soviet POWs being primary targets of the death machine.

While time dulls the immediate revulsion and can unfortunately temper the vows of “never again,” the reaction to and echo of what happened remain vivid. True, there are those who question the authenticity of the historical record, others who find a thrill in being neo-Nazis, and too many who regard others as inferior or undesirable in a similar fashion as the Nazis did their victims, but many more who continue to tell the story of what happened and see it as a cautionary tale for what’s possible if the darker impulses are embraced or ignored.

There’s little I can add to the telling of the Holocaust, given my lack of expertise, and certainly not enough room in this article to go into much detail; however, I would like to conclude with an interesting anecdote.

General Eisenhower, accompanied by Generals George Patton and Omar Bradley, visited one of the concentration camps shortly after it was liberated and after learning what the soldiers had found.

“The things I saw beggar description,” said Eisenhower. “The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick…I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda’.”

As Roos pointed out, it was as if he “knew that the Nazi atrocities of the Holocaust would one day be dismissed as ‘exaggerations’ or denied outright.”

Which may be why those keepsake photos were given to the American servicemen and women as they were leaving the military and returning home to civilian life. A reminder to them (and now us) of what they fought for and also what they fought against… Lest We Forget.

Steve Horton is a mid-Michigan journalist.