April 4: The First Liberated Camp

The first Nazi concentration camp liberated by the U.S. military, Ohrdruf, was entered by the 4th Armored Division of the Army on this date in 1945. Ohrdruf had been established as a slave labor camp near Gotha, Germany only six months earlier, and days before its liberation the SS had evacuated most of its 11,000 prisoners on death marches to Buchenwald. General Dwight D. Eisenhower visited the abandoned camp on April 12th and cabled the following to General George C. Marshall of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: “The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. . . . I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’ ” Eisenhower also visited the nearby Kaiseroda salt mine, where the Nazis had hidden valuable paintings and $250 million in gold bars.

“My body was decimated, starved and thrashed to the point of no return in Ohrdruf for stealing a piece of a potato, and my flickering life was daily, and hourly, on the brink of being snuffed out from starvation or being clubbed for no reason. . . ” — Rabbi Murray Kohn