Hell before Their Very Eyes: American Soldiers Liberate Concentration Camps in Germany, April 1945

On April 4, 1945, United States Army units from the Eighty-Ninth Infantry Division and the Fourth Armored Division seized Ohrdruf, the first of many Nazi concentration camps to be liberated in Germany. In the weeks that followed, as more camps were discovered, thousands of soldiers came face-to-face with the monstrous reality of Hitler's Germany.

These men discovered the very depths of human-imposed cruelty and depravity: railroad cars stacked with emaciated, lifeless bodies; ovens full of i...