Hell before their very eyes
Subtitle: American soldiers liberate concentration camps in Germany, April 1945
By: John C. McManus
Series: Witness to history; Witness to history (Baltimore, Md.)
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2015
Place of publication: Baltimore
Language: eng
Number of pages: 189
ISBN-13: 9781421417646; 9781421417653; 9781421417660
Subjects: Buchenwald (Concentration camp); Concentration camps; World War, 1939-1945; Ohrdruf (Concentration camp); Liberation; American Personal narratives; Dachau (Concentration camp)
Description: "April 4, 1945, United States Army units from the 89th Infantry Division and the 4th Armored Division seized Ohrdruf, the first of many Nazi concentration camps to be liberated in Germany. In the weeks that followed, as more camps were discovered, thousands of soldiers came face to face with the monstrous reality of Hitler's Germany. For the American soldiers of all ranks who witnessed such powerful evidence of Nazi crimes, the experience was life altering. Almost all were haunted for the rest of their lives by what they had seen, horrified that humans from ostensibly civilized societies were capable of such crimes. Military historian John C. McManus sheds new light on this aspect of the Holocaust. Drawing on a blend of archival sources and thousands of firsthand accounts--including unit journals, interviews, oral histories, memoirs, diaries, letters, and published recollections--Hell Before Their Very Eyes focuses on the experiences of the soldiers who liberated Ohrdruf, Buchenwald, and Dachau and their determination to bear witness to this horrific history."--Publisher information.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Prologue: Germany, 1945; title: Encountering Ohrdruf; title: "The smell of death was thick in the air": witnessing Buchenwald; title: Treating Buchenwald: medicine and Murrow; title: Dachau: the approach; title: "My heart was going a mile a minute": liberating Dachau; title: Dachau: the impact; title: Epilogue.