Caroline Moorehead

The unimaginable horrors confronting the Allies in 1945

As some 45,000 Nazi camps came to light, Allied soldiers were ordered to look closely, so as to understand what they were fighting against

A British soldier at Belsen in 1945. As the camps were liberated, the Allied forces were ordered to look closely, so as to understand what it was they were fighting against. [Getty Images]

No one had prepared the Allied soldiers, as they began their invasion of the Reich early in 1945, for what they would find. The discovery by the Soviets of the extermination camp of Majdanek in July 1944, and Auschwitz in January 1945, had not really registered, not least because they had been partly emptied and demolished by the retreating Germans. In any case, no one – not the International Committee of the Red Cross, nor the Vatican, nor the British and American governments – had been able, or wanted, to believe what they had been told. The scenes of slaughter and horror that awaited the British, Canadian and American troops were unimaginable.

Peter Caddick-Adams devotes considerable space in his detailed account of the last 100 days of the war in the west – a period he considers to have been somewhat overlooked by historians – to what the Allied forces encountered as they pressed west. Understanding what, ‘materially and spiritually’, Germany had descended to was like ‘conducting a series of archaeological digs’. One by one, including concentration and extermination camps, torture and detention centres and the places where the estimated12 million slave labourers were kept, some 45,000 camps came to light.

The sheer number was like a ‘sledgehammer’. Neuengamme alone had 99 satellite camps. Fighting their way forward against an enemy keen to hide evidence of their crimes, Allied soldiers found piles of unburied corpses, skeletal and dying survivors, typhus and trains full of rotting bodies. The stench was overwhelming. In Belsen, liberated on 15 April, 60,000 profoundly emancipated people, from 20 different nationalities, lay dying. As the camps were freed, the soldiers were ordered to look closely, so as to understand what it was they were fighting against. Come to grips with the Germans, they were told, and ‘kill lots of them’.

One by one, some 45,000 camps came to light as the Allied forces pressed west

Some four million soldiers, in seven Allied armies, took part in the invasion of the western Reich.

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