On April 11, 1945, American soldiers entered the Nordhausen area of central Germany and encountered something that no battlefield could have prepared them for.
They had seen destruction.
They had seen death.
They had seen the consequences of war.
But at the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp complex, they encountered human beings who had been reduced to the edge of survival by forced labor, starvation, disease and systematic brutality.
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The soldiers of the US 3rd Armored Division and 104th Infantry Division found the camp after the SS had already begun evacuating prisoners.
What remained behind was horrifying.
At the Boelcke-Kaserne subcamp near Nordhausen, American troops found corpses scattered throughout the camp and hundreds of severely ill and starving prisoners. Some survivors were so emaciated and weak that they could barely move. Many were suffering from tuberculosis and other diseases.
For the soldiers entering the camp, the war suddenly became something different.
