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