Someone had hopes.
Someone had ordinary plans for an ordinary future.
The Nazi concentration-camp system attempted to reduce people to prisoners, laborers and numbers.
Remembering them as individuals is therefore essential.
The soldiers had to confront what they had discovered
American soldiers were trained for combat.
They expected enemy fire.
They expected destroyed buildings.
They expected wounded comrades.
They were not prepared for the sight of concentration camps.
At liberated Nazi camps across Europe, Allied soldiers confronted mass death, starvation and disease.
The discoveries were so horrifying that they became part of the evidence documenting Nazi crimes.
The liberation of the camps helped reveal to the outside world the scale of what had happened behind the barbed wire.
At Dora-Mittelbau, soldiers and medics worked among people who were desperately sick.
Archival footage preserved by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum shows American soldiers and medical personnel evacuating sick and dying survivors from the camp.
