That week, the entire world was discovering the hell of the concentration camps. As British tanks crashed through the gates of Belsen, the first large death mill to be liberated, skeletal women and men staggered to their feet as British soldiers cried through bullhorns, “You are free! You are free! You are free!”
From another liberated camp, Edward R. Murrow told Americans over CBS Radio, “I pray you believe what I have said about Buchenwald.”
[…]
Even now, however, Stimson could not comprehend the historic enormity of the death camps. In his diary, he persisted in referring to the “so-called atrocities.” After receiving a congressional delegation just back from touring Buchenwald, Dachau and Nordhausen, he wrote that his visitors had “unanimously” concluded that Hitler’s government had made a “deliberate and concerted attempt” to “eliminate by murder, starvation and other methods of death large numbers of Russians, Poles, Jews and other classes of people whom they did not wish to have survive.”
Source:
Beschloss, Michael R. “What Will We Make of It?” The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman, and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1941-1945. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2007. 224. Print.
Further Reading:
Bergen-Belsen concentration camp
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