After finishing the Band of Brothers series I am a little confused on one aspect of WW2. A lot of popular movies such as Saving Private Ryan act as though the American soldiers new all about concentration camps long before they ever hit German lands and actually looked upon these death camps themselves. Band of Brothers makes it seem like only after discovering the camps did the soldiers and higher command of the Allies find out about what the Nazi's had been doing. Can anyone shed some light on this subject?
They had known about concentration camps even before the war, but they had never imagined what conditions were actually like: the extreme emaciation, the piles of corpses, the diseases, the complete and utter dehumanisation of the inmates is what shocked them.
By the way, the concentration camps in Germany that were liberated by the Western Allies weren't death camps. That term is reserved for the extermination camps in Poland: Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec and Chelmno. Death camps were camps where industrial-scale gassing of inmates went on. The camps the Western Allies liberated were prison and labour camps.
You have to keep in mind that the Allies knew about Concentration camps prior to WW2 starting off. Dachau, for example, was a poltical prisoner camp. Camps of the sort were nothing new at the time (Britain had used them during the Boer Wars, and America during westward expansion) and the Allies generally had no want to intervene in what was considered internal politics. My understanding is that these camps being turned into extermination centers didn't begin taking place until after the start of the war, as most death camps are located within Poland. Perhaps someone else can comment on this.
The first confirmation of death camps was intelligence passed from the Polish Underground (Jan Karski (check Wiki) being credited as a major source of this information) to the Polish government in exile. The first major camps were captured by the Soviets in the winter of '44/'45 (Majdanek and Auschwitz), and the first captured by the U.S. was April '45 (Ohrdruf a "sub-camp" of, and followed by, Buchenwald).
Generals Eisenhower and Patton both personally visited Ohrdruf as it was the first camp discovered by the U.S. and both were extremely disgusted by what they found and Eisenhower did his best to publicize it. To this end he requested both politicians and reporters be brought in in order for the camps to be documented and not written off as propaganda by future generations.
If I'm remembering correctly, Saving Private Ryan never actually brought up mention of death camps. Just the mistreatment of Jews which was well known. That may be where the confusion comes from. They knew of camps, but no one could know just how horrible the situation was on the ground at that point.