The liberation of Ohrdruf

On Wednesday 4 April 1945 units of the American 4th Armored Division and 89th Infantry Division, advancing through Thuringia as part of General George Patton’s Third Army, reached the barracks on the training ground near the small town of Ohrdruf, south of Gotha. They found an almost empty camp: several dozen bodies of shot prisoners on the roll-call square, a shed filled with naked, emaciated corpses sprinkled with lime and – a little further off – a grate made of railway rails on which the SS men had tried, in the last days, to burn bodies dug up from mass graves.

Ohrdruf was the first Nazi camp entered by the United States Army. Earlier, in the autumn of 1944, Western Allied soldiers had come upon the already abandoned Natzweiler-Struthof camp in Alsace, and the Red Army had liberated Majdanek in July 1944 and Auschwitz in January 1945. Ohrdruf, though much smaller than those camps, played a special role: eight days later it was visited by the three most senior American commanders in Europe, and the shock they experienced shaped how the Western world learned the truth about the German concentration camps.

Many chronicles call Ohrdruf a “death camp”. It was not, however, an extermination camp in the sense that Auschwitz-Birkenau or Treblinka were – it had no gas chambers, and prisoners were not brought there to be killed at once. It was a forced-labour camp subordinate to Buchenwald, in which people died in great numbers from exhaustion, hunger, disease and at the hands of the guards, and in the last days in executions and death marches.

Camp S III

Ohrdruf was set up in November 1944. The prisoners were housed in barracks built in 1940 for Wehrmacht soldiers training on the nearby range; when space ran out, they also lived in stables, tents and old ammunition bunkers. The camp – at first directly subordinate to the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office (WVHA), later incorporated into Buchenwald’s network of subcamps – bore the code name S III (from Sonderbauvorhaben III, “special construction project III”). It consisted of a northern and a southern camp; later a tent camp at Espenfeld and a camp at Crawinkel were added to it.

The prisoners built roads and railway sidings and drove tunnels into the slopes of the Jonastal valley. According to the plans, an underground communications centre and a hidden headquarters for the Reich leadership in the event of leaving Berlin were to be built there; in February 1945 part of the staff of the Army High Command was quartered in a nearby complex code-named Olga. The work was never completed, and its ultimate purpose remains disputed – besides a headquarters, armaments plants have been suggested, and some authors have put forward hypotheses about tests of a new weapon, which have not been confirmed.

At the end of 1944 some 10,000 people were held in the camp; according to estimates cited by historians, about 20,000 prisoners had passed through it by March 1945 – mainly Soviet citizens, Poles and Hungarian Jews, but also French, Czechs, Italians, Belgians, Greeks, Yugoslavs and Germans. In January 1945 the SS garrison was reinforced by guards from the evacuated Auschwitz. The working day lasted at first 10–11 hours, later as many as 14. There were no beds in the barracks, only straw, and there was a lack of water, sanitation, medical care, warm clothing and food. The SS sent the sick and those unfit for work to so-called dying camps – according to estimates, some 4,300 people ended up in Bergen-Belsen or in the Little Camp at Buchenwald, the same part of the main camp in which captured Allied airmen were held in the summer of 1944.

Evacuation and executions

At the end of March 1945 the Ohrdruf complex held, according to various estimates, between 11,700 and 13,000 prisoners. As the American spearheads, which had been thrusting deep into Germany since crossing the Rhine, approached Thuringia, the SS – in line with its general policy in the last months of the war – decided not to let the prisoners fall into Allied hands. From 1 April almost all of them were driven on foot or transported towards Buchenwald. Along the way SS men, members of the Volkssturm and the Hitler Youth killed those who could not keep up; the death toll of these marches is estimated at around 1,000.

In the camp itself the SS tried to cover its tracks. Prisoners were forced to dig up the mass graves and lay the corpses on makeshift pyres built of narrow-gauge railway rails, which were doused with tar and set alight. Those too sick to walk to the wagons were – according to survivors’ accounts – lured by the SS men to the roll-call square with a promise of food and shot, and their bodies were left lying on the ground. A few prisoners managed to hide or escape; after the Americans arrived, some of them returned and guided the soldiers around the camp.

It is estimated that some 3,000 people died of exhaustion or were murdered in Ohrdruf itself. Together with the victims of the marches and those who died after being moved to other camps, the total death toll of the S III complex is sometimes put at around 7,000; exact figures are lacking because the SS records were largely destroyed.

4 April

The soldiers of the 4th Armored Division who were the first to enter the camp, followed by the infantrymen of the 89th Division, were not prepared for what they saw. Few of them had had any idea what the German concentration camps were – many had regarded the reports about them as exaggerated. “We went into a shed and the bodies were stacked like cordwood. There are no words to describe it,” David Cohen of the 4th Armored Division recalled years later. What many soldiers remembered above all was the smell that hung over the camp.

The division commanders reported the discovery up the chain. The news reached Third Army headquarters and from there the Supreme Commander’s headquarters. The camp was secured and the bodies were not removed – they were to stay where they were as evidence. Photographers and cameramen of the US Army Signal Corps began documenting what had been found.

The generals’ visit

On Thursday 12 April 1945 the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe, General Dwight Eisenhower, the commander of 12th Army Group, General Omar Bradley, and Patton – after a morning visit to the salt mine at Merkers, where the Americans had found the Reichsbank’s gold reserves and looted property – came to Ohrdruf. They were shown round by former prisoners, who took the generals to the roll-call square, the shed full of corpses, the gallows, the whipping block and the grate on which bodies had been burned.

Patton, known for his toughness, did not go into the shed holding the bodies of those who had starved to death – as Eisenhower recorded, he said it would make him sick; according to witnesses he vomited behind one of the barracks. In his diary he called Ohrdruf “one of the most appalling sights” he had ever seen and described a pile of some forty naked bodies “in the last stage of emaciation”, sprinkled with lime to kill the stench. Bradley later wrote that the smell of death overwhelmed them even before they passed through the fence.

Eisenhower walked round the whole camp. That evening the generals spent the night at Patton’s headquarters, and only there, late at night, did they hear on the radio the news of the death of President Franklin Roosevelt at Warm Springs.

“First-hand evidence”

Ohrdruf made an impression on Eisenhower that changed his approach to the question of the camps. He ordered that all units in the area not actually in the line should be taken through the camp – the soldiers were to see with their own eyes whom they were fighting. According to accounts, he said at the time that since it was said that the American soldier did not know what he was fighting for, now at least he would know what he was fighting against.

On 15 April, in a letter to the Army Chief of Staff, General George Marshall, Eisenhower described the visit in words that have gone down in history: “The things I saw beggar description.” The visual evidence and the spoken testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality, he wrote, had been so overpowering that they had left him feeling a little sick. He mentioned three former prisoners with whom he had spoken through an interpreter, and added that he had made the visit deliberately, so as to be able to give first-hand evidence should there ever be a tendency in the future to dismiss these charges as “propaganda”.

A few days later, on 19 April, by which time the Americans and British had entered further camps, Eisenhower asked Marshall to send a delegation of Congress and the editors of the leading American newspapers to Germany. The Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, and the new president, Harry Truman, agreed that same day. The photographs and films from the liberated camps, shot on the orders of the command, were later used as evidence in war crimes trials, including before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg.

The people of Ohrdruf

The Americans did not allow the townspeople to pretend they had known nothing. On the orders of Third Army headquarters, the mayor and a group of Ohrdruf’s inhabitants were marched through the camp and made to look at the bodies; Germans from the area were also rounded up to bury the dead. On their return from the camp, the mayor and his wife – as Patton noted – took their own lives. In the following weeks the Americans and British staged similar “lessons” for the inhabitants of towns next to other liberated camps.

The victims of Ohrdruf were buried in mass graves. In the summer of 1945, when Thuringia fell to the Soviet zone of occupation, the Red Army took over the training ground and the northern camp was razed to the ground; at that time the first two memorials to the victims were erected. Little remains of the camp today – a few ammunition bunkers, in which prisoners were also held.

Its place in the war

The liberation of Ohrdruf opened the last and grimmest chapter of the Western Allies’ march through Germany. In April 1945 American and British units entered, one after another, the main camps and hundreds of subcamps in which the SS – evacuating prisoners on death marches – had left behind the dying and the dead. For the soldiers themselves, who since Normandy had fought the Wehrmacht as an opponent waging a “normal” war, Ohrdruf was a shock; for Western public opinion it was the first of a series of images that forever linked the name of the Third Reich with the concentration camps.

Eisenhower’s visit and his decision to document everything and show it to the world had long-term significance. Thanks to it, the crimes in the camps were described by the Allied high command, photographed and filmed before anyone had a chance to question them – exactly as the Supreme Commander had intended when he wrote of future attempts to dismiss them as “propaganda”.