Not only did Allied commanders parade German civilians in front of the dead found in liberated concentration camps; they too sometimes left corpses in public view as a warning to anyone who might be tempted to resist the occupation.
In the first half of 1945 carrying out one’s daily tasks frequently meant encountering the dead on the streets – corpses of soldiers and civilians, of strangers and acquaintances, of people who no longer could be recognized. As never before, death became part of everyday life.
Source:
Bessel, Richard. “Conclusion: Life After Death.” Germany 1945: From War to Peace. New York, NY, HarperCollins, 2009. 388. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
See, for example, the photo of British soldiers examining a corpse isplayed along a street next to a sign reading ‘This man shot at our sentry during the night of 3 to 4 May’, in Charles Whiting, Norddeutschland Stunde Null April-September 1945. Ein Bild/Text-Band (Düsseldorf, 1980), p. 167.
See Richard Bessel, ‘The Shadow of Death in Germany at the End of the Second World War’, in Alon Confino, Paul Betts and Dirk Schumann (eds.), Between Mass Death and Individual Loss: The Place of the Dead in Twentieth-Century Germany (Oxford and New York, 2008), pp. 51-68.
Also american and British soldiers raped woman and girls, forced woman into prostitution, beat and torture men and boys . used German pows for target practice. Eisenhower violated the 1929 Geneva convention and become a war hero and president.