Monday, April 25, 2011

The Liberation of Dachau, Gun


  • In the closing weeks of the war, Allied troops liberated German concentration camps

  • They revealed the full horror of Nazi atrocities to a shocked world

  • On April 29,1945, American soldiers entered Dachau

  • One of the liberated prisoners was Nerin E. Gun, a Turkish Catholic journalist

  • He was imprisoned by the Nazis for his reports about the Warsaw Ghetto and his prediction that the German armies would meet defeat in Russia

  • Gun describes Dachau in his book The Day of the Americans (1966)

  • From a detour through the marshaling yard, where convoys of deportees normally arrived, American soldiers discovered some 50 cattle-cars

  • "At first sight they seemed to be filled with rags, discarded clothing. Then we caught sight of hands, stiff fingers, and faces"

  • The train was full of corpses, piled one on the other, 2,310 to be exact

  • They were Hungarian and Polish Jews who had come from Birkenau

  • Around the camp were the infernal sights of the thousands of living skeletons on the other side of the placid poplars

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