photo #9230257

On April 12, 1945, Dwight Eisenhower walked into Ohrdruf and threw up. It was the first Nazi camp liberated by American forces, a subcamp of Buchenwald in central Germany. Patton, who'd seen everything a soldier could see, stepped behind a shed and was sick. Eisenhower made himself look at all of it. The bodies stacked like cordwood. The shed where the SS had stored corpses with lime. The pyre of railroad ties where they'd tried to burn the evidence before they ran. He walked the entire camp. Then he went back to his headquarters and started sending cables. One went to George Marshall in Washington. Eisenhower wanted a delegation of congressmen flown to Germany immediately. He wanted editors and publishers from the major American newspapers brought over too. He wanted them on the ground, inside the camps, while the bodies were still there. His reasoning was blunt. He'd seen propaganda work in the last war and he knew what was coming. "I made the visit deliberately," he wrote, "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." In private he put it harder. He wanted witnesses so that no "son of a bitch" could ever stand up and claim it never happened. Marshall got the request to the White House. Within days, a congressional delegation was in the air. Newspaper editors followed. Eisenhower took them through Ohrdruf and Buchenwald himself, walking them past the same sights he'd forced himself to see. He ordered Signal Corps photographers and film crews into every camp the Army reached. Shoot everything, he told them. Every body, every barrack, every survivor, every oven. He wanted the footage filed, catalogued, and preserved. He ordered nearby German civilians marched through the camps so they could see what had been done in their name. The mayor of Ohrdruf and his wife were brought through on April 14. They went home and hanged themselves. The photographs and reels piled up in Army archives. They ran in Life and on newsreels in theaters across America. They were entered as evidence at Nuremberg. Eisenhower kept some of the prints in his own files for the rest of his life. He'd told the photographers to keep shooting. They did.