The Nazis had begun evacuating Jewish prisoners from Auschwitz on January 17, partly to cover evidence of the "Final Solution," partly to preserve slave labor, and also to prolong the policies of mass death. Without food or shelter during the bitter winter, some 60,000 Jews were force-marched toward concentration camps in the German interior. The death rates were immense. Once the prisoners reached camps such as Buchenwald or Bergen-Belsen, hopeless conditions awaited them.

While advancing Soviet forces reached Nazi camps in Eastern Europe--including Stutthof, Gross-Rosen, and Sachsenhausen--American and British troops came upon other concentration camps. On April 4, 1945, Ohrdruf, a Buchenwald satellite, became the first camp liberated by American troops. On April 12, the day that President Roosevelt died, American Generals Omar Bradley, George Patton, and Dwight Eisenhower saw Ohrdruf themselves. Eisenhower wrote that the scenes of brutality and starvation "beggar description." Ohrdruf was not the worst of the Nazi camps. American and British liberators encountered greater devastation on April 9 at Dora-Mittelbau and its satellite camps, where thousands of prisoners had slaved in unbearable underground conditions to manufacture V-2 missiles.

On April 11 American forces freed Buchenwald. One of the oldest concentration camps in the Nazi system, it held more than 238,000 prisoners during its eight-year existence, 43,000 of whom died or were killed. Four days later British troops liberated Bergen-Belsen, where they found 13,000 corpses and 58,000 prisoners--mostly Jews--still alive but in critical condition. Unable to recover from the abuse they had received, about 10,000 inmates perished in the next few weeks.