The first concentration camp to be liberated was Ohrdruf, in April of 1945. It was a “work camp.” Or so the locals in the town of Ohrdruf told themselves. An American company discovered the horrifying reality.
The first thing the company saw inside the camp’s gates were thirty bodies, still wet: prisoners that the German soldiers had shot before driving off in trucks. As the GIs crept forward, the surviving prisoners who could still walk (about half of the 500 who were there) “cautiously” came out of the barracks. They told how the German soldiers had made a hasty attempt to cover up the almost 2000 slave laborers that Ohrdruf had killed. Half had been exhumed from a mass grave, and half had been stacked in several buildings awaiting incineration.
No one had seen anything like this before. While spies and even escapees had been telling of the concentration camps, their reports were not widely known or believed. The American GIs left all the bodies where they were, and notified the division commanders. They shared their rations with the survivors and waited. At noon the division commanders arrived, and Patton himself came at 3:30 pm. General Eisenhower flew in from Belgium early the next morning. The highest commander of the Allied forces had to see this, and decide what was to be done.
When Eisenhower left, Patton brought the mayor of Ohrdruf and his wife to the camp to see for themselves what they had been telling themselves they did not know. German guards came to Ohrdruf off-duty, spending their pay on drinks and women, and undoubtedly telling stories of what the place they worked. Then Patton ordered the mayor, his wife and all the other able-bodied townsfolk to come back the next day and dig individual graves for the dead prisoners. They completed 80% of the graves, and promised to come back the next day and finish the burials.
The mayor and his wife were found dead of suicide the next morning. Their suicide note said simply, “We didn’t know! – but we knew.”
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