Letters from Liberators

In April and May 1945, Allied forces liberated thousands of prisoners from Nazi concentration camps. Soldiers who had read and heard reports of Nazi crimes now confronted the evidence first hand. Shocked, angered, and horrified by what they saw, they recorded their observations in reports to their superiors and letters home to loved ones so as to ensure that others would know the truth about what they had seen. Historic film footage, artifacts from our collections, and oral histories provide further documentation of liberators' experiences at the end of World War II.

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On May 31, 1945, a group of Russian displaced persons crossed the Elbe in Magdeburg, Germany. RG-60.3580.

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On May 30, 1945, Julius Lewy, a Polish Jew who had recently been liberated at Linz, wrote a letter to his liberators asking to be transferred to an Allied hospital to recover and to begin a new life for himself. 

“Dear Liberators!      I know well I have no right to trespass on your dutiful time--but before entering into the subject I think some introductory explanations would be of importance. In any case I shall try to be as concise as possible, although the very nature of my topic is likely to let my pen ramble far beyond any preconceaved [sic] limits.      Who am I? A Polish Jew 28 years old, with University education; man deprived of everybody and everything, but instead rich of experiences; so that much more essential would be the question: Who have I been?      From the very beginning of this most tremendous of all wars I have been living in Poland, under German occupation facing the hello on earth as martyr and witness in one person. There is not any suffering imaginable, either moral, or physical or material I would not have gone through during those six fateful years.      Physically rather weak, I have had to my advantage another form of resistance: my spirit. For all this time I’ve never ceased to believe in the final victory of Humanity and Justice and never ceased to hope in my personal survival.      The conscience of possessing some quantity of Anglo-Saxon culture--I studied English literature in Cracow under [one] of greatest Polish analysts, Professor Roman Dyboski--has imparted to me the reassuring feeling that I am in a certain degree representative of Anglo-American potentialities. And it is, without doubt, this psychological attitude of mine which is to be seriously taken into account when I try to explain the phenomenon of my personal survival.      It was not earlier than the last period of my war biography, about two months before the end of the European cataclysm, that my physical organism collapsed: diarrhea, this mortal camp disease became my share too and in the course of following weeks I grew more and more exhausted and emaciated--till the miserable condition in which I was found by the Liberation. From then in a few days I was together with others transferred into the local hospital.      Since have passed several weeks. I was better already and I tried to descend steps. And then came a relapse with a heart disease.      For the time being I am very far from being healthy, indeed I don’t feel any bettering of my general state at all.      What are the reasons?      Here, in the hospital, all is lacking, all is failing. Medicaments as well as eating (quality and quantity!) treating as well as nursing.      Example: a daily ration 1/3 of brown bread; never any butter nor jam.      You are treated by a young German physician. An enemy of yesterday should be your benefactor today?      It would take much time to enlarge on the subject; and I won’t anoy [sic] you so long with my complaints.          My strongest wish now is to recover; to reaquire [sic] my health not in the more egoistical aim of enjoying my life, but to be able to serve and further my ideas and realise my life’s aim: which consists in becoming a writer (I’ve got a nerve for it0 in English language, nowadays a most universal means of literary expression (I already wrote several things in my Polish before the war).      That’s why I’ve decided to address myself to you. I beg you, nay, I implore you, to help me out of my predicament by transferring to the hospital of yours.      For years I have dreamed about your victorious arrival and now when the longed for time is come, I am away from you, cut off from any contact with the civilisation and culture that you represent and for which we have been so long and so desperately fighting.      The staying with you would prove, I presume, as most promoting my ultimate aims. I am ready to accompany you wherever you go and--as I know besides English and my mother-tongue Polish: German, French, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Jewish and Esperanto--I may be in Europe of some use to you (I’ve got a lot of practice as an interpret [sic]).      Who am I now? An orphan of the world. And you are in a position to restore the sens [sic] to my life: to create a new (first spiritual) home for me and the possibilities of fulfilling my life’s aims.      I hope you won’t refuse to make this salutary gesture...                           Yours truly,                           Julius Lewy P.S. I beg of you very much for an immediate answer; ill men are so impatient...” 2005.120.

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On May 29, 1945, US Army personnel deloused displaced persons, their clothing, and their bedding in Schwabisch Gmund, Germany. RG-60.0926.

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On May 28, 1945, Niels Bamberger and his family returned to Denmark from Sweden. In 1943, their grocer had helped them to flee Denmark from Sweden to escape deportation. RG-50.030*0013.

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On May 27, 1945, Z. Grinberg, MD, head doctor at the hospital for former prisoners in St. Ottilien, made a speech to his fellow former prisoners. “We have met here to-day to celebrate our liberation but at the same time it is a mourning for us. For every clear and joyful day at present and in the future is shadowed by the tragical events of the years gone. 1% survived to see the liberation and 99% out of this 1% are very ill. Are you able to enjoy it? Are you able to celebrate? Hitler lost all the battles on all the fronts except the battle against defenseless and unarmed men, women and children. He won the war against European Jews. He was helped to carry it out by the German nation. However we do not want any revenge. It is if we took vengeance this would mean to fall to those depths of ethic and moral the German nation has been at during these 10 years.” 2005.541.1.

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On May 26, 1945, Master Sergeant Samuel L. Sack of the the XV Corps of the American Army wrote to Miss Sydney Dutton of Pennsylvania.  Sack wrote from Salzburg, Austria, using stationary that had belonged to the regional leader of the Nazi Party of Salzburg. He described what he had seen earlier in Dachau.

“Death prevailed throughout the camp . . . Starved, shrunken bodies were piled in heaps. Many pictures were taken; however, I don’t suppose the public will ever see them—they are too horrible. Seeing is believing; so, you can take our word for it.” 2006.395.

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On May 25, 1945, Pvt. Thomas D. Wellford of the XII Corps Public Relations Section interviewed Dr. Alfred Semank, a survivor of Buchenwald. Corporal Alexander F. Sunshine of the United States Army translated Welford’s compilation of the interview into English. Semank described hearing the news that liberation was at hand. “Karl, the Block Leader, came up to my bunk and whispered into my ear: ‘Comrade, tomorrow you will be free. It’s quite certain, I got it from the office. But don’t say a word.’ I couldn’t sleep that night. My thoughts came and went, and my feelings were in a turmoil. That night I didn’t freeze, nor did it seem very long.” 2000.276.

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On May 24, 1945, a trial was underway in Dachau, Germany, for war crimes that Germans had committed against American soldiers in Malmedy, Belgium. RG-60.2283.

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In May 1945, Norman Nichols sketched Field of Corpses, which depicts a scene from the recently liberated Gunskirchen concentration camp. 1988.8.1.

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On May 22, 1945, Frida Lerner of Hungary was issued an identification card stating that she had been liberated from the concentration camp Mauthausen. 2004.643.1.

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On May 21, 1945, a group of German prisoners of war were released in Plauen, Germany. RG-60.0920.

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On May 20, 1945, Joseph A. Wyant, an American soldier, wrote to his father about the liberation of Dachau. “I wanted to see it; I wanted to smell it; I wanted to be there personally so that in years to come, I will know what this war was about and what can happen when any man—German or otherwise—sets himself up as better than his neighbor and attempts to establish a society based on oppression and intolerance.” 1991.220.

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In the spring of 1945, John Regnier visited the newly liberated camp Ohrdruf. In June 1946, he wrote a term paper about what he saw there. “Any doubts that I may have had as to our reasons for fighting World War II were removed once and for all after seeing two of these camps. When there is a nation, as strong as Germany was, performing such atrocities to human beings, there is no other choice than to beat them down and pray that they will be properly punished in time to come. If left unchecked there would have been no peoples in the world immune from this same type [of] treatment.” 2012.404.1.

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On May 18, 1945, Ernest L. Waller wrote a report describing both conditions at Bergen-Belsen when the British liberated it and efforts to care for survivors there. Waller was with the British Army's Royal Army Service Corps, attached to the 163rd forward ambulance group. Soon after liberation, the British burned down the camp to prevent the spread of typhus. “We are now burning down the Concentration Camp; and intended holding the Ceremony of burning the last hut on 21 May 1945 at six o’clock in the evening.

That should end the first chapter of the history of Belsen since the British came.

The next and final chapter will be the nursing back to health in the hospitals, of the thousands who are sick in mind and body.”  2011.334.1.

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On May 17, 1945, Major Robert Julian Weill, a Jewish American, wrote home to his wife Lou Ellen to tell her about his new role as temporary commander of a camp for German POWs near Kufstein, Austria. “What a laugh, when you think of  it, all these supermen bowing and scraping, and even dependent for their very food, on someone they would have persecuted but a few weeks ago.” 2004.196.

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On May 17, 1945, William C. Alston, Jr., visited Mauthausen. In 1992, he gave the Museum his notes from this visit along with other items. “I spoke in window of one barracks--sad ‘Americaner’ [sic]—and men—many to [sic] weak to raise up—began cheering and clapping their hands. A real thrill to be an American.” RG-04.047.

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On May 16, 1945, Robert Shoenfield of the 5th Infantry Division prepared a report on a Nazi massacre of prisoners that had taken place in Nammering, Germany, from April 19 to April 23, 1945. The prisoners had been buried in a mass grave. “After our troops found the grave several days ago, SS men from a neighboring PW were ordered to unearth the 800 bodies. The population of Nammering was ordered to visit the place. Individual graves are being dug in Nammering and three other villages.” 2006.307.