What Was the Liberation of Nazi Camps? | Holocaust Explainer

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]We had this patrol, and the patrol leader  called in by radio and said “We have come across something and we’re not sure what  it is– it’s a big prison of some kind. And there are people running all over. Sick  people. Dying people. Starved people.”

[00:00:25]Beginning in 1933, and during World War II,  Nazi Germany and its collaborators imprisoned millions of people throughout  Nazi-occupied Europe in camps.

[00:00:37]As Allied troops moved through Europe  in 1944 and 1945, they liberated tens of thousands of surviving prisoners in  horrific conditions inside the camps.

[00:00:56]Soviet soldiers were the first to enter two of the  largest camps: Majdanek in July 1944 and Auschwitz in January 1945. Along with the survivors, they  found bodies, bones and ashes of human remains.

[00:01:14]American and British troops encountered  more concentration camps in April 1945, including Dachau and Bergen-Belsen.

[00:01:24]There were seven or eight American soldiers  standing inside the camp. Apparently, they cut the wire and came into the camp. They were bewildered  by us, wild and unkempt and dirty and, I'm sure, smelly people, jumping and dancing and trying  to embrace them and kiss them. And I did, too.

[00:01:45]I also joined the crowd and yelled and screamed,  and somehow knew that day of liberation had come.

[00:01:56]Many prisoners inside the camps  needed immediate medical help.

[00:02:01]Allied soldiers set up hospitals in tents and evacuated the camps that  were riddled with disease.

[00:02:09]Ten of thousands of prisoners died after  liberation, despite receiving care.

[00:02:16]When American General Dwight D.  Eisenhower heard what the Allied troops were finding, he went to see for himself.

[00:02:24]He also sent American soldiers, journalists and members of Congress to document,  and collect evidence in the camps.

[00:02:32]Allied soldiers recovered files detailing the hundreds of thousands of prisoner  names and causes of death at the camps.

[00:02:41]This evidence was later used to help convict  Nazi perpetrators in post-war trials.

[00:02:46]I had seen dead people but  never anything like that. It was absolutely and totally unbelievable  that people could treat people like that.