What was the nationality of the soldiers that liberated each of Hitler’s “death camps”? If I remember one of my classes correctly, the American 442nd Japanese-American army liberated Dachau. (Mr. Wantannabe will kill me!) Who liberated Triblinka, for example?
This web page says and this web site I get the following:
Soviet army liberates Maidanek camp in July 1944.
Soviet army liberates Auschwitz camp in January 1945.
American army liberates Buchewald in April 1945.
British army liberates Bergen-Belsen camp in April 1945.
American army liberates Dachau camp in April 1945.
Mathausen camp liberated in May 1945 but it doesn’t say who did it (Germany surrendered a few days later).
There appears to be some debate as to who “really” liberated Dachau. Units from the 42nd Division, 45th Division and the 442nd Regimental Combat Team all make claims to the liberation. A plaque within the camp apparently gives the credit to the 42nd.
Here is a claim from the 442nd.
Here is a recounting of the liberation from a member of the 157 Infantry Regiment of the 45th Infantry Division, staking their claim.
IRIC, Treblinka (the site of a notable inmate rebellion) was completely torn down and plowed under after the rebellion. Hence, no “liberation”. Recollection based on a book about the uprising read 30 years ago. (A quick web search seems to confirm this.)
Minor note : Some of these (Dachau, Buchenwald) were not ‘death camps’ in the technical sense. The camps are often generically called ‘concentration camps’ (a term that predates Nazi Germany). The horrible conditions in the camps has made many call them ‘death camps’, so you’re not wrong to call them that.
The camp system included the official concentration camps, work camps, and the death camps (or extermination camps). All the extermination camps were located in Poland, so most literal ‘death camps’ would have been liberated by the Soviets.
Not that the Nazis were trying to keep people alive at the other camps, though. I believe that at Dachau (the first of the camps) roughly 1/3 of those ever interned there died (most due to illness or exhaustion, some killed for often capricious reasons) and many more were simply held until they could be sent to a death camp. A crematorium & gas chamber were installed there towards the end of the war to handle the killing locally, as it were, but were never used.
Also, the reason for the seemingly conflicting claims for liberation is that each camp eventually grew to have many sub-camps (20-30 for some of them) associated with it. So different units may have liberated some of the attached camps, which leads to the varying claims.
How many need to die to make it a Death camp? Just because its gas cahmebr seems to have been unused it is not a Death Camp? 5 ovens to cremate the bodies of those killed there is not enough? People were brought to Dachau to be killed. Over 200,000 had been taken there but only 65,000 were there when it was liberated.
The Nazis marched Soviet prisoners-of-war to Dachau and murdered them there; Nazi medical “researchers” committed some of the worst atrocities of all time in the name of science there, and thousands of political prisoners were executed there. While Dachau’s gas chambers were never used, at least 100,000 people died there. I find it quite utterly fair to call Dachau a “death camp”.
Well since most of my WWII history knowledge comes from war movies, I would guess that the US 101st Airborne Division (as seen in Band of Brothers) and the US 1st Infantry Division (as seen in The Big Red One) liberated concentration camps.
Nobody wants to minimize the evil done at any camp, but there was a distinction between work camps (where inmates did labor and died of exhaustion, disease, or guards) and death camps (where inmates were simply slaughtered with no pretense of actually getting labor out of them). It may be a nice distinction, but it can logically be made.
As I explicitly stated, it is entirely appropriate to call the camps ‘death camps’ and I was making a technical distinction . And I am corrected by lee’s numbers for Dachau – it was 1/3 who survived, not 1/3 who died.
Nor do I feel the technical distinction to be meaningless nitpicking either. The progress of the camps from ‘simple’ concentration camps mainly for political prisoners in 1933 to the unholy efficiency of the later places designed to exterminate as many people as possible is an important part of the history of the Holocaust. The extermination camps did not spring up full-grown and they were entirely different from any other camp in history. Confusing them could cause misunderstanding both of how something like this could happen and the full extent of what occurred. (e.g. Holocaust deniers can point out that “the gas chambers at Dachau weren’t used, so they weren’t killing people at the camps”. They can prove this point but knowing that all ‘camps’ are not the same (and all killing was not performed the same way) is crucial to defeating this argument.)
Even the extermination camps are often referred to as ‘extermination centers’ which is possibly even more appropriate. No one lived in them as one would live in a camp. Also, the philosophy of the work camps was to work the prisoners to death.
Here’s a site that gives a map showing where all the camps associated with a location are : http://www.keom.de/denkmal/karte/index_lager.html#
(The site’s in German, but clicking the second bit of blue text across the top – the one that says “Konzentrationslager” brings up a list. Clicking a name will call up a javascript map for each camp. . The location of extermination camps can be seen by clicking on “Vernichtungslager”.)
The camp liberated by the regiment in “Band of Brothers” was one of those near Landsberg, and was a satellite camp of Dachau.