Part 1/2

The portrayal in Band of Brothers is to a certain extent a dramatization. Not just in the sense of the adaption for the mini-series but also in the sense that the 101st Airborne Division was not the first unit of the US Army to reach the Kaufering Concentration Camp (the Kaufering Camps were a number of sub-camps of the Dachau Concentration Camp) but arrived only a day after the 134th Ordnance Maintenance Battalion of the 12th Armored Division had liberated the camp on April 27, 1945. In this sense, the measure of locking the camp again in order for the former prisoners to stay in place until a larger detachment arrives to care for them is part of the dramatization of the series.

However, the Allies in general, meaning both Western forces as well as the Red Army, did try what they could to have liberated prisoners stay where they were at least initially, meaning directly after liberation. While I know of no case where this consisted of locking the camp again as portrayed in the series, they had several reasons to do so: First, there was the fear of people in dire medical condition spreading epidemics in occupied Germany. Secondly, there was the experience Allied troops had in places they liberated elsewhere where former forced laborers who had escaped their camps after German troops had retreated were forced to pillage for food and rioted against the German populace. Such was e.g. the case in Ludwigsburg where Polish forced laborers set the houses of some of the people that had exploited them ablaze. And thirdly, with housing already sparse and the supply situation in Germany being dire in the first weeks after liberation of several places, there was the distinct impression among the Allies that to keep former prisoners in one place and care for them rather than force them to make their way in freshly liberated Germany was the better course of action.

Also, while liberation in the strictest sense took place once Allied troops arrived at a camp site, historians tend to speak of liberation as a much longer process with several parts to it, including medical and psychological liberation that took much longer to set in.

When the allies – Western Allies as well as the Soviet troops – first liberated the camps, most of them were completely shocked. The Soviets had liberated camps well before the Western Allies starting in July 1944 with Majdanek and moving on in January 1945 to Auschwitz. The first camps liberated by the Western Allies were Natzweiler in Alsace, liberated by French troops in November 1944 and the Ohrdruf sub camp of Buchenwald, liberated by US troops on April 4, 1945.

As I said, the first reaction to liberation was shock. In the Soviet case, the camps they came across were mostly empty by the camps standard because the Nazis had moved the prisoners west before the Soviet troops arrived. In Majdanek about 2.000 and in Auschwitz about 6.000 people were liberated, most of them too sick to be moved by the Nazis or having hidden themselves in the camps. The shock and horror they encountered is apparent in an essay by Vasily Grossman, a Soviet writer who witnessed the liberation of Majdanek and then went on to describe the extermination camp of Treblinka, whose remains Soviet troops encountered at the same time as they liberated Majdanek.

Grossman - under the impression of what he has seen at Majdanek - writes

Stories of the living dead of Treblinka, who had until the last minute kept not just the image of humans but the human soul as well, shake one to the bottom of one's heart and make it impossible to sleep. The stories of women trying to save their sons and committing magnificent doomed feats, of young mothers who hid their babies in heaps of blankets. (...) Inhabitants of the village of Wulka, the one closest to Treblinka, tell that sometimes the screams of women who were being killed were so terrible that the whole village would lose their heads and rush to the forest, in order to escape from these shrill screams that carried through tree trunks, the sky and the earth.

Grossman also suffered a nervous break down after writing this piece and took several weeks to recover.

Western Allied troops had a similar experience. Seeing the emaciated bodies of Concentration Camp prisoners who had been starved by the Nazis for weeks, witnessing their exhausted and tortured state, and hearing them recall the horrors of the camps left a very deep impression with liberating troops. In this letter, Aaron A. Eiferman, soldier of the 12th Armored Division, describes the liberation of the Dachau sub-camp in Landsberg. Writing among other things that "We have seen what can be called the living dead (...) the sight that hit me was more than a person could express (...) It was to much for me, for I had tears in my eyes."

In the last camp liberated, the Ebensee camp, US soldiers came to face inmates who had been forced to use their frozen comrades bodies' as mattresses and were there also had been cases of cannibalism in the last weeks of the war. The shock was profound. So was the logistical challenge of providing thousands of people with help.

It was under the impression of this that Allied soldiers, those who had immediately liberated a camp, had started giving out food – the famous chocolate that killed people. One survivor of the Bergen-Belsen Camp, Joop Zwart, who was chosen to be the spokesperson of the liberated prisoners gave an account of how he perceived the situation. When the British troops under command of Captain Derrick Sington first entered the camp, Zwart asked the British officer if the troops could provide the survivors with rice in warm water as a means to get them fed. Apparently, this advise wasn't heeded by Sington because Zwart goes on to report that the British troops gave out corned beef and allowed the survivors to slaughter and cook the SS's pigs. According to Zwart:

On the day of the liberation and the night following it from four thousand up to five thousand persons died in the camp, most of them because of eating too heavy food. It has taken us days to convince the British that a lean diet was the best thing for the inmates of the camp. Finally, they agreed, but then the catastrophe had already happened. We found young Ukrainians dead with a pork chop in their hands. Others had not been able to walk more than twenty meters away from the kitchen where they ate their too savory meal. They died in the main street of the camp.

Belsen, as I will go into, turned out to be an especially difficult case in terms of medical liberation but in general this practice of giving out too heavy foods to people who could not eat them did stop with the arrival of troops that were trained as medical professionals. It was also these troops who often advised that people remain in place so that they could care for them. Because this kind of care represented a massive logistical challenge.

In Belsen, 70% of all surviving inmates would have required immediate hospitalization, which due to the circumstance that the war was still ongoing and that the liberating troops were first and foremost combat troops, not medically trained professionals, was impossible. Furthermore, in the chaos of the immediate aftermath of the liberation it was difficult to get a grasp on both the survivors as well as individual soldiers because liberating troops were on the one hand careful not to immediately use force against survivors and with individual soldiers of the liberating armies, it was hard to enforce orders which seem to mandate to be not empathetic towards the liberated prisoners.

In the Belsen case, it was on April 16, 1945 that especially requested water and food for the survivors – described as "gruel" – arrived. On April 25, six Red Cross teams arrived to take care of the survivors who had not only to contend with the war-caused shortages of everything from food to bed sheets but had to make some rather difficult choices in deciding who of the survivors was to be granted access to the limited number of medical facilities. As one nurse who arrived in June describes in letters home:

A policy was adopted that the greatest number of lives would be saved by placing those who had a reasonable chance of survival under conditions in which the natural tendency to recover would be aided by suitable feeding and prevention of further infection, with rest in bed and elementary nursing for the very sick.

It was in the end of April 1945 that teams from both UNRRA (the United Nations Relief Agency) and the Quakers arrived in Germany and started devising a standardized treatment for camp survivors. This included the development of a diet consisting of intravenous hydrolysates (a high-calorie mixture designed to enter straight into the blood stream) and a semi-liquid feed, which was also given to the former inmates in order to re-acclimatize their stomachs to more solid food and in order to be able to establish in the first place, what kind of other treatments were required for the survivors.

One of the Quakers, a medical student like many of his colleagues, wrote in his diary that the most important first issue with many of the survivors was to cure the diarrhea that plagued them. Once the diarrhea, most of the patients started regaining their strength and appetite. One week after the Quakers arrived in Belsen, the death rate was halved.