"How Awful!"

The stench of Buchenwald would reek in history. But how much of it was known to German civilians even in nearby Weimar? Sick with disgust, tough General George S. Patton ordered the burghers of the town to be taken through Buchenwald and shown its obscenities. Twelve hundred men & women of Weimar walked unwillingly through the camp and wept, retched, fainted. A young Hitler Madchen sobbed: "How awful!"

General Dwight D. Eisenhower was so stirred that he forthwith invited Prime Minister Winston Churchill to send a British Parliamentary delegation to see Buchenwald. With them came a group of American Congressmen touring Britain. The visitors froze with horror. Said Sir Henry Morris-Jones: "It beggars description." Said Representative Gordon Canfield: "This is barbarism." Others would soon be coming to see as well.

The remedial idea spread fast. In Gardelegen, where 1,100 political captives were incinerated in a straw-filled death chamber, civilians were marched in by U.S. troops and made to bury the blackened bodies. At Belsen where British forces' found cadavers piled like cordwood in a ditch, SS men were compelled at rifle point to bury bodies.

Romps In the Garden. Taken alive was the Belsen commandant, powerful, thug-like Josef Kramer, expert in the methods of mass murder. To a British reporter

Kramer brooded on his past, said sadly that he missed his wife and children, with whom he used to romp in the garden of his Belsen home (he loved flowers, especially roses). Mused Kramer: "I love my wife and children. I love all children. I believe in God." He became a Nazi in 1933 because he had to choose between National Socialism and Communism. His conscience, he added, was not bad. "The death rate here is quite small, only about one thousand a month." Later Kramer was reported executed.

Like the G.I.s, the battle-hardened Tommies were numbed by their glimpse of Nazi savagery. The shattering experience was one that must be shared not only with German civilians, who must measure their own guilt, but with Allied civilians, who must measure the Nazi crime. In London, queasy moviegoers, unable to stomach atrocity newsreels, started to leave the theater but were turned back by Allied soldiers in the audience.

Not all of the Nazi pit had yet been plumbed. Still ahead, near Munich, lay Dachau the unspeakable, on whose walls an inmate had once scribbled: "This is the camp where you enter by the door and leave by the chimney."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.