By Barbara Crownover
In July 2003, I went to the camps to do research on my master''s thesis. I spent two weeks in Germany and Poland collecting information on holocaust photography.
Buchenwald
Buchenwald survivor Ivan Ivanji remembers that 'one afternoon the inmates noticed that the guards were gone. And when it got dark in the evening, no spotlights or lamps went on. It was an April evening and there was a strong wind.' Liberation was at hand.
But when General Dwight D. Eisenhower, then the supreme commander of the Allied forces, entered Buchenwald Concentration Camp on April 11, 1945 with the 6th Tank Division of the U.S. Army, he was horrified at what he saw.
'I have never at any other time experienced an equal sense of shock,' he later wrote in his memoirs. What he and many other hardened front-line soldiers experienced made them recoil in disbelief: dead bodies piled up all over the camp; the dead and dying in the barracks; rampant disease and starvation.
Three days later, Signal Corps photographers arrived, along with newspaper and magazine photographers, to begin to document the atrocities for the U. S. Army.
All of them, as well as U.S. soldiers, needed to prove that this really did happen by taking as many photographs as possible, although some U.S. soldiers confessed that they left their film undeveloped for decades, 'not wanting to be reminded of the shock they had experienced in Buchenwald.'
Bergen-Belsen
On April 15, 1945, British troops liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp near Celle, Germany. As with the Americans at Buchenwald, what the British soldiers saw was so terrible that many still cannot forget it.
Staff Sergeant Ralph Shear, whose unit took part in the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, said 'the unbelievable sight of 14,000 corpses stacked as cordwood will forever be etched in my soul. I can never forgive nor can I ever forget the monstrosity, the German nation''s action against innocent human beings.'
At the time of liberation, typhoid was so rampant at the camp that buildings were burned and mass graves were dug. Within one of the numerous mass graves at Bergen-Belsen are Anne Frank and her sister Margot. Just weeks before liberation, they succumbed to Typhoid.
Auschwitz
On January 27, 1945, when Russian soldiers liberated Auschwitz, located outside Crakow, Poland, there were very few prisoners remaining.
The majority had been evacuated on the orders of Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, to concentration camps deep within Germany. All that were left were a few thousand people that were dead, too sick or old to travel or children.
As Russian soldiers neared the camp, the Nazis tried to destroy the evidence of their heinous crimes by blowing up the crematoriums and burning documents and personal items. But they were unable to destroy it all.
The height of the mass murder was in the summer of 1944. The killing mainly took place in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau, which was built about a mile down the road from the original concentration camp Auschwitz I when the first one became too small to handle the number of people being transported in.
Up to 24,000 people per day were murdered in the gas chambers. As people arrived, they were stripped of their clothing and belongings and herded into the gas chambers under the pretext of taking a shower. Instead, Zyklon B gas was dropped into the 'shower room' and used to destroy them.
Even after death the humiliation continued. Gold teeth were extracted, hair was cut off, and valuables were sold. Their bodies were then taken to the crematorium.
It is unknown exactly how many people died at Auschwitz because people were loaded off railroad cattle cars and marched directly into the gas chambers. It is estimated that between 1.1 million and 1.5 million people were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau; 90 percent of them Jews.
The Nazi death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau has become the best known death camp in the world. As stated by Teresa and Henryk Swiebocki, 'This camp has become a symbol of the Holocaust, of genocide and terror, of the violation of basic human rights and of what racism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, chauvinism and intolerance can lead to.'