When American soldiers first stumbled upon the Nazi concentration camps in 1945, they were confronted with scenes of unimaginable horror.
Trained for combat, prepared for battle, these young men had fought their way across Europe — but nothing could have prepared them for what they found behind the barbed wire fences of places like Buchenwald, Dachau, and Ohrdruf. The liberation of the camps marked one of the darkest and most emotional chapters of World War II, leaving a lasting impact on those who witnessed the atrocities firsthand.
The First Encounters
The first American unit to liberate a concentration camp was the 4th Armored Division of General Patton’s Third Army, when they arrived at Ohrdruf, a sub-camp of Buchenwald, in early April 1945. What they found was beyond comprehension — piles of emaciated bodies, mass graves, and survivors on the verge of death from starvation, disease, and abuse.
The soldiers were overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the suffering. Hardened by months of brutal fighting in the Battle of the Bulge and the slog across Germany, many wept openly at the sights and smells that filled the camps. General Patton himself was reportedly so physically sickened by the conditions at Ohrdruf that he had to step outside to vomit.
Reactions of Horror and Rage
American GIs reacted with a mixture of shock, horror, sadness, and rage. These camps were not something they had been fully briefed on. While some rumors of Nazi atrocities had circulated, few outside Europe fully understood the systematic nature and industrial scale of the Holocaust until they saw it for themselves.
Eyewitness accounts describe soldiers breaking down in tears, vomiting, or simply wandering the camps in a daze. Others grew furious, and some reportedly took immediate revenge on captured SS guards. There were documented cases where American soldiers beat or even executed guards found at the camps, unable to control their rage after seeing what had been done to innocent civilians.
Colonel Hayden Sears, an American officer at Buchenwald, later wrote,
"Nothing you ever heard about the camps can possibly prepare you for the reality. The filth, the death, the degradation, the cruelty — it is beyond human comprehension."