A few hours later, while Roosevelt slept in Warm Springs, it was Thursday morning, April 12, 1945, in Germany. Generals Eisenhower, Bradley and George Patton were shown a concentration camp, Ohrdruf Nord, near Gotha, discovered the previous week by the Allies.
Before this day, as Eisenhower later recalled, he had known about the Nazi death camps “only generally or through secondary sources.” Demanding to be shown every corner of Ohrdruf Nord, the old soldier later wrote that he had never before “experienced an equal sense of shock.” He wrote to his wife, “I never dreamed that such cruelty, bestiality and savagery could really exist in this world!”
Ike later told General Marshall that he wanted to be able to provide “first-hand evidence” of the camps in case anyone ever claimed that they had never existed. As he left Ohrdruf Nord, he asked a U.S. Army entry, “Still having trouble hating them?”
Source:
Beschloss, Michael R. “No Earthly Powers Can keep Him Here.” The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman, and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1941-1945. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2007. 212. Print.
Further Reading:
Franklin Delano Roosevelt / FDR
Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower (David Dwight Eisenhower)
General of the Army Omar Nelson Bradley
Kek.