Soldiers Reaction to Jewish

Concentration Camps

Daniel Winn

Contemporary America- U.S. History

Professor Lark

August 8th 2019

 Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933 and the Nazi began to purify the

Germany culture. By 1935 the Jewish citizens of Germany had been removed from their jobs

in schools and college universities. The movement to get Jews out of Germany had begun to

grow in size. Property, savings were taking away and Jewish owned businesses were

boycotted. On November 9th 1938, The“Night of Broken Glass” occurred and over 250

synagogues were burnt to the ground along the looting of over 7,000 Jewish businesses in

just two days. The police and fire departments just watched and provided no resistance. The

morning after the pogroms 30,000 German Jewish men were arrested for the “crime” of

being Jewish and sent to concentration camps, where hundreds of them perished. Jews were

not allowed to reopen unless they were managed by non-Jews. Curfews were placed on

Jews, limiting the hours of the day they could leave their homes. (1) President Franklin

Roosevelt quickly condemned the German’s violence and it was hoped that Washington was

going to take more action. Unfortunately, the United States did very little to intercede. The

American Consulate became overwhelmed by German Jews wanted to leave the country.

Anti-Semitism immigrant rules and regulations made the process of obtaining a Visa very

difficult to get for the Jewish people.

During World Was II, Americans had no framework with which to understand the

Nazis’ attempted annihilation of European Jews, and no word—not “Holocaust,” “Shoah” or

until December 1944, “genocide”—to understand the crime. To them, rumors of villages

being wiped out seemed a particularly brutal component of the war, and in war civilians die.

Americans knew that Nazi ideology always held a special hatred for the Jews, so isolated
stories were fathomable. But an actual extermination plan was not. It took time to realize

that such stories were not only different—separate from wartime propaganda about the

cruelty of the enemy—but true. (2) In the spring of 1945, the Allied troops were marching

across the middle of Germany; they came across their first major concentration camp to be

liberated, Bergen-Belsen. The soldiers noticed the apple orchards and the well maintained

farms along the country side, but an odd smell was in the air. It was coming from the

concentration camp in the distance. Bergen-Belsen was surrounded by sharp barb wire and

watch towers. Inside the camp, the people had not eaten in six days and the water had been

shut off. The soldier’s food stock was quickly given away to the hungry captives. They had

estimated 60,000 prisoners with most of them starving and 13,000 unburied corpses lying

around. Most of the people were beyond recovery and close to death. Overcrowded, lack of

food along with unsanitary conditions caused typhus, tuberculosis, typhoid fever ran in the

camp. The huts were impossible to inhabit because they filled with mangled dead bodies.

Bodies stacked in heaping piles with no relief in sight. The captured SS Guards were well fed

and dressed, now they were faced with the unpleasant job of burying the dead something they

would have forced the inmates to do. This after all was nothing to these men, they the master

race had been taught to be hard. They could kill in cold blood, it seemed proper to the Allied

troops that they bury the nameless, hopeless creatures they had starved to death.(3). The

water was turned back on in a few hours and the inmates were able to wash again. Hot water

was provided, at first they were afraid to go near the bath unit expected to be beaten. The

local official’s were brought in to view the camp and tried to say it was none of their

business. The living were transported to cleaner places and the diseased infective huts were

set on fire. While Bergen-Belsen contained no gas chambers, an estimated 50,000 people
died of starvation, overwork, disease, brutality and evil medical experiments.(4). As the first

large concentration camp to be liberated by the allies, news events about the Holocaust were

sent first hand around the world. The German people could no longer deny the events.-

Endnotes

1 https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-night-of-broken-glass

2 Rebecca Erbelding, “Rescue Board” Doubleday, 2018

3 “Memory of the Camps” PBS Home Video,2005

4 https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/history-and-overview-of-bergen-belsen

Annotated Bibliography;

1 https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-night-of-broken-glass

This article describes the early persecution of Jewish people in Germany.

2 https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-night-of-broken-glass

Describes how Americans did not understand extermination.

3“Memory of the Camps” PBS Home Video,2005

Describes the conditions of the concentration camp.

4 https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/history-and-overview-of-bergen-belsen

Describes the reasons for the prisoners death.