Ep 17 Liberators of the Holocaust Part 3 - Ohrdruf and the Forgotten Concentration Camps

Adolph Hitler’s “Final Solution” was carried out in an estimated 44,000 concentration camps, ghettos, and forced labor camps spread out throughout Europe.  An estimated 15 to 20 million people were murdered in these camps including six million Jews. For the young American GIs who liberated them, the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps far outweighed anything they had experienced in war.  Alex Bourdas liberated an auxiliary camp that had housed 20,000 POWs.  Their bodies were now stacked on carts and covered with lime to cut down the odor.  Tom Carr entered a small camp, the name of which he could not remember.  But he could never forget the emaciated prisoners still housed in the cells or the bodies stacked in piles outside.  General Patton himself sent down orders for his personnel to see what they were fighting for and against by visiting a small concentration camp near  Erfurt, Germany.  Mark Wilson recalled the few survivors they found there walked around in a daze, looking more like living skeletons.  In 1997, more than 50 years after the war had ended, Charles Savage returned to Marienbad, Czechoslovakia.  Accompanied by a local historian, Savage searched for the remains of Flashenhutten, the small camp that Savage had helped liberate and the mass burial site that had shocked him.  These stories and more in this 17^th episode of Always Remember World War II Through Veterans Eyes. 

General Dwight D. Eisenhower himself visited the first concentration camp liberated by GIs - Ohrdruf

General Eisenhower cabled General Marshall requesting that a Congressional delegation and reporters be sent to the camp so that the atrocities committed there would not be forgotten.

Fewer than 75 prisoners were found alive at Ohrdruf

Alex Bourdas liberated an auxiliary camp near Ranshofen, Austria

Tom Carr may not have recalled the name of the camp he liberated, but could never forget the horrors he witnessed there

Charles Savage liberated a small concentration camp near Pilsen, Czech Republic.  The camp was largely forgotten until he returned to the Czech Republic and, along with a local historian, found its remains.  Savage donated all of his photographs of the camp to the local museum.