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Click on an image to see a larger, more detailed picture.
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| 1945: Liberation and Rebuilding |
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pg. 609 |
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Two British soldiers guard the infamous Alex Bernard Hans Piorkowski, former commandant of Dachau. While relatively few of the inmates at Dachau were gassed, Piorkowski assured that conditions there were so appalling that inmates died by the thousands of starvation, disease, and abuse (including outright execution) at the hands of the camp's personnel.
Photo: UPI/Corbis-Bettmann
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Jack Hallett, an American soldier who helped liberate Dachau, noted that the "first thing I saw was a stack of bodies--oh, 20 feet long and about, oh, as high as a man could reach....And the thing I'll never forget was the fact that closer inspection found people whose eyes were still blinking maybe three or four deep inside the stack." A particularly haunting aspect of the terrible scene photographed here is the clothed young woman among the dozens of shaven, naked male bodies.
Photo: Philip Drell
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One of the first things the Allies did was assure that survivors got enough to eat. Here, a truckload of bread is distributed to survivors at Dachau. Tragically, many former prisoners, after months of malnourishment, overate to the point of death. They had gone so long without food that the heavy eating overloaded their digestive systems and killed them.
Photo: Philip Drell
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April 19, 1945: Leipzig, Germany, is captured by American forces.
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April 20, 1945: SS chief Heinrich Himmler meets with Swedish diplomat Norbert Masur to arrange for 7000 women, about one-half of them Jewish, to be transported from the Ravensbrück, Germany, camp to neutral Sweden. The scheme is Himmler's transparent bid to improve his position with the Allies.
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April 20, 1945: The SS evacuates the concentration camp at Flossenbürg, Germany; See April 23, 1945.
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April 22, 1945: Six hundred Jewish and Serbian prisoners at Jasenovac, Croatia, revolt against their guards. 520 prisoners are killed by machine-gun fire and grenades. The other 80, including 20 Jews, escape.
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April 23, 1945: The concentration camp at Flossenbürg, Germany, is liberated by the U.S. Army; 2000 inmates remain alive.
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April 23, 1945: The SS evacuates the concentration camp at Ravensbrück, Germany.
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April 23, 1945: German anti-Nazi Resistance members Frau Solf and her daughter are released from Moabit Prison due to bureaucratic oversight; See September 10, 1943; February 3, 1945.
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| 1945: Liberation and Rebuilding |
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pg. 609 |
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The Holocaust Chronicle
© 2009 Publications International, Ltd.
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