Hell Before Their Very Eyes: American Soldiers Liberate Concentration Camps in Germany, April 1945 by John C. McManus (review)

Recently, a spate of scholarly research in English has appeared in Holocaust studies on topics such as the death marches, displacement, and postwar trials.¹ Each in its own distinct way, these studies have revealed the complexity of the final weeks of the war, as well as the protracted and tumultuous nature of the recovery, reconciliation, and the search for justice.

The liberation of Nazi concentration camps has also received more scholarly attention of late.² By examining liberation, we can better appreciate the difficulties survivors and military personnel faced in the postwar period. In Hell Before Their Very Eyes, John C. McManus contributes to our understanding of this challenging subject. Employing an array of firsthand accounts, the author examines the experiences of American soldiers who liberated three concentration camps in Germany: Ohrdruf, Buchenwald, and Dachau. Throughout, we learn that American GIs were both traumatized and disillusioned by what they observed in the camps.

According to McManus, a general pattern emerged during liberation. Unprepared, American soldiers were invariably shocked by the dreadful scenes they encountered. In the days and weeks that followed the discovery of the camps, scores of American GIs arrived to bear witness to the crimes. During the initial chaos, units came to assess the dire situation and assist those in need. Doctors tended to the sick, engineers sanitized facilities, and commanding officers took control of the camps. German civilians were regularly ordered to tour the camps to see firsthand the crimes of their countrymen. This process was repeated, the author maintains, at sites across occupied Germany.

In addition to Ohrdruf, Buchenwald, and Dachau, the United States Army was involved in the liberation of numerous other camps across Germany. McManus explains: “For the sake of brevity, I have opted to focus on the liberation of three camps … as representatives of the larger whole” (p. xii). However, can these three camps adequately typify the American experience of liberation? Such sweeping claims disregard the differing challenges American soldiers faced at concentration camps throughout Germany. For example, on May 5, 1945 troops from the 11th Armored Division of the Third U.S. Army liberated Mauthausen, arguably the most brutal of the camps liberated by Western Allies. Indeed, Mauthausen was one of the few camps in Western Europe to regularly employ a gas chamber—and this one had remained in operation until the last days of the war. American investigators and curious GIs inspected the gas chamber, viewing the clearest evidence of murder on an industrial scale.³ Moreover, as McManus covers in great detail, American troops killed unarmed camp guards at Dachau after they had already surrendered. The author correctly notes that such reprisals did not occur at any other camp liberated by the United States Army. It is therefore inaccurate to suggest that Ohrdruf, Buchenwald, and Dachau are necessarily representative of the American experience at liberation; stark differences abound.

McManus’s most substantial contribution concerns the topic of revenge. As Berel Lang has noted, the subject has been largely absent from scholarship on the Holocaust.⁴ Extreme acts of violence and retaliation, by former inmates or by military personnel, did occur after liberation. Revenge took on a variety of forms. McManus considers the desire and willingness of some American GIs to exact vengeance on guards and soldiers in enemy uniform. The author also calls our attention, though, to numerous instances in which U.S. military personnel allowed survivors to mete out punishment against unarmed kapos and members of the Schutzstaffel (SS).

McManus describes in minute detail a notorious incident that occurred on April 29, 1945 at the Dachau concentration camp. According to the author, men from the 157th Infantry Regiment rounded up a group of SS-men and brought them to a partially enclosed area that had been used for storing coal. American troops opened fire, in less than thirty seconds killing...