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| 1945: Liberation and Rebuilding |
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pg. 598 |
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American soldiers stride among the thousands of corpses that German guards had left to rot at the Nordhausen, Germany, concentration camp. As was often the case, the first thing that American GI C. W. Doughty noticed about the camp was the stench. "Oh, the odors," he said. "Well, there is no way to describe the odors....Many of the boys I am talking about now--these were tough soldiers, there were combat men who had been all the way through the invasion--were ill and vomiting, throwing up, just [at] the sight of this...."
Photo: Archive Photos
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Two former slave laborers clasp hands in victory beside a partially completed V-2 bomb they had built in a factory near Nordhausen. The hard labor, cruel working conditions, and near-starvation diet killed many of the factory's Russian, Polish, and French workers. The Americans who liberated the factory discovered a room with 20 bodies awaiting cremation.
Photo: U.S. Army Signal Corps/National Archives
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The end of the war provided survivors, at last, with the opportunity to grieve for those whom they had lost to the Nazi death factories. Scenes such as this one from Nordhausen were quite common. This Polish boy mourns his dead grandmother while his father prays over her body.
Photo: Nancy & Michael Krzyzanowski/United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archive
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March 20, 1945: An Allied air raid kills Jewish women in a camp at Tiefstack, Germany, near Hamburg.
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March 21, 1945: Red Army troops enter the Pruszcz, Poland, camp near Stutthof. Only about 200 women prisoners, out of an original 1100, remain alive.
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Spring 1945: The SS hatches a scheme to poison all inmates of the Dachau, Germany, concentration camp before Allied liberation. The idea is not pursued.
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March 24, 1945: A train carrying 200 Jewish women, exhausted from a death march from Neusalz, Poland, arrives at Bergen-Belsen, Germany.
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| 1945: Liberation and Rebuilding |
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pg. 598 |
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The Holocaust Chronicle
© 2009 Publications International, Ltd.
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