Erla

At the Erla Camp, the SS guards prepared to massacre the prisoners as the U.S. Army approached. The prisoners knew what was coming, but most of them were too weak to try to escape, though a Czech, prisoner had short-circuited the electric fence. From Erla, TIME Correspondent Bill Walton reported the atrocity as pieced together 'from the stories of the few survivors:

All day Tuesday the SS guards made their preparations. All day the prisoners moved weakly around their barracks or stretched restlessly in the hot April sunshine in the narrow gravel yard around their barracks. Among themselves they discussed all the possible fates the brutal Germans might be planning for them, talked of escape and what to do, but none of them did anything. Years of imprisonment had taken too heavy a toll of their capacity for action.

Song for the Doomed. Shortly before noon the guards herded the few remaining able-bodied prisoners into the barracks of the weak and ill, saying that a noon meal would be served there. Two hundred and ninety-five men were crowded into that barracks--40 ft. by 120 ft.--jammed in and the doors locked after big tubs of soup had been brought in.

Once the doors were locked the SS men began to work with furious speed. First they nailed army blankets over every window. Then they hauled up huge cans of highly inflammable acetate. The 13 guards were all ready, armed with every weapon in their bursting arsenals. At a signal all sprang into action.

The low murmur of worried conversation turned to cries of fright when the guards unlocked the two doors and hurled in acetate, dousing the tinder-dry buildings and splashing over the prisoners crowding close to the only routes of escape.

In one split second the acetate ignited and burst into a roaring inferno. Cries of fright changed to screams of terror and of mortal agony that were soon drowned by the leaping flames and the bursting of hand grenades tossed into the open doorways.

At least 100 flaming men clawed their way through the exits, packed with crazed, dying men. Through spattering gunfire from SS machine pistols and bazookas, most of the men staggered blindly for the nearby latrine even though it too was aflame. In a last gasp of agony they threw themselves into the excrement-filled trench where SS guards shot them and clubbed them to death, their bodies sinking slowly into the filth.

Ribbons of Flesh. A few others got as far as the low, 3-ft.-thick band of barbed wire beside the electric fence before they were shot or died of burns. So awful was their agony that they paid scant attention to the angry prongs of barbed wire and wiggled under even though it ripped their flesh to ribbons. A handful, protected by the mad confusion, succeeded in getting over the fence, hastily stripped off their burning clothes, and started running eastward across the flat plowed field. On the other side of the field was a tank also retreating eastward.

Hitler Youths, manning that tank, turned their guns toward the blazing barracks and mowed down the naked prisoners running and falling and rising to run again across the open field. Only four made it to safety. Only four out of 295 survived the hell carefully planned and executed by the Germans, in a fury because they couldn't carry their prisoners with them when Leipzig fell.

Belsen From the Belsen camp LIFE Correspondent George Rodger reported: As Winston Churchill addressed the British troops on the banks of the Rhine on March 26, I heard him say: "We are now entering the dire sink of iniquity." These seemed strange words and I did not understand the full meaning of them until today, when at Belsen I witnessed the ultimate in human degradation. There the six-square-mile, barbed-wire enclosure in the heart of a rich agricultural center has been a hell on earth for 60,000 men, women & children of a dozen different nationalities who were being gradually starved to death by SS guards under a brutish, pigeyed leader, Captain Kramer. During the month of March, 17,000 people died of starvation, and they still die at the rate of 300 to 350 every 24 hours, far beyond the help of the British authorities, who are doing all possible to save as many as still have strength to react to treatment.

Children & Corpses. The magnitude of suffering and horror at Belsen cannot be expressed in words and even I, as an actual witness, found it impossible to comprehend fully--there was too much of it: it was too contrary to all principles of humanity--and I was coldly stunned. Under the pine trees the scattered dead were lying, not in twos or threes or dozens, but in thousands. The living tore ragged clothing from the corpses to build fires over which they boiled pine needles and roots for soup. Little children rested their heads against the stinking corpses of their mothers, too nearly dead themselves to cry. A man hobbled up to me and spoke to me in German. I couldn't understand what he said and I shall never know, for he fell dead at my feet in the middle of his sentence.

The living lay side by side with the dead, their shriveled limbs and shrunken features making them almost indistinguishable. Women tore away their clothing and scratched the hordes of lice which fed on their emaciated bodies; rotten with dysentery, they relieved themselves where they lay and the stench was appalling. Naked bodies with gaping wounds in their backs and chests showed where those who still had the strength to use a knife had cut out the kidneys, livers and hearts of their fellow men and eaten them that they themselves might live.

Fat, Fleshy, Inhuman. Over all this the SS guards--both girls and men--had watched coldly and unmoved. I saw them too--fat, fleshy and inhuman. Now they have a different role in the camp. Under British guard they are made to collect the dead and drag them to a mass grave. From dawn to dusk the SS girls and men alike hold in their arms the bodies of the men, women & children whom they killed, and

British Tommies, roused for once to a burning fury, allow them no respite. It is their just reward. Perhaps it can all be summed up in the few croaking words that came from a pitiful pile of rags and bones that lay at my feet: "Look, Englishman, this is German culture."

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