| Original caption: “General Dwight D. Eisenhower watches grimly while occupants of a German concentration camp at Gotha demonstrate how they were tortured by the Nazi sadists operating the camp. Generals Bradley and Patton are at his right.” Former prisoners demonstrate how they were beaten by Schutzstaffel (SS) guards at Ohrdruf Konzentrationslager (“Concentration Camp”), a subcamp of the Buchenwald prison network. Among those pictured are United States Army General Dwight D. Eisenhower (October 14, 1890 – March 28, 1969), Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force, (center), 12th United States Army Group Commander Omar Bradley (February 12, 1893 – April 8, 1981), 2nd from the left, and 3rd Army Commander General George S. Patton (November 11, 1885 – December 21, 1945), left. Jules B. Grad (February 26, 1915 – October 24, 1989), far right, pool correspondent for the Stars and Stripes, is taking notes. The mustached soldier who is pointing at the demonstrated torture victim is Alois J. Liethen (July 6, 1908 – December 16, 1961) of Appleton, Wisconsin, who served as the interpreter for the tour of Ohrdruf. Created in November 1944 south of Gotha, in Thuringia, Germany, Ohrdruf was initially a separate forced labor camp directly controlled by the SS-Wirtschafts und Verwaltungshauptamt (SS-WVHA; “Main Economic and Administrative Office”) but then became a subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar. It made use of huts originally built in 1940 for Wehrmacht troops using the Truppenübungsplatz (“Military Training Area”) nearby as well as other facilities. The camp, code-named Außenlager (“External Camp”) S III, consisted of a northern and a southern camp; later, a tent camp at Espenfeld and a camp at Crawinkel were added. The camp supplied forced labor in the form of concentration camp prisoners for a planned railway construction project for an immense communications center inside the basement of the Mühlberg castle in Ohrdruf. Inmates had to work to connect the castle to the main railroad line and to dig tunnels in the nearby mountains, which would be used as emergency shelter for the train that contained the Führerhauptquartier (“Führer headquarters”). The proposed communication center was never completed due to the rapid American advance. By late 1944, 11,700 prisoners were housed here; through March 1945, the total number sent here was around 20,000, mainly Russians, Poles, Hungarian Jews, some French, Czechs, Italians, Belgians, Greeks, Yugoslavians and Germans. Conditions were atrocious: in the huts there were no beds, “only blood-covered straw and lice.” Despite the season, not all prisoners were housed in huts—some were accommodated in stables, tents and old bunkers. Work days were initially 10 to 11 hours long, then later 14 hours, involving strenuous physical labor building roads, railways and tunnels. In addition, inmates had to cope with long marches and musters, total lack of sanitary equipment and medical facilities, and insufficient food and clothing. In January 1945, the SS guards were reinforced by units from Auschwitz. In early April, with the oncoming advance of Allied forces, the SS evacuated almost all of the prisoners in a death march to Buchenwald. Many prisoners who were too weak or ill to partake in the march were summarily killed. In addition to those killed on the death marches, an estimated 3,000 inmates died from exhaustion or were murdered inside the camp. Together with those worked to death here but moved elsewhere to die, estimates of the total number of victims are around 7,000. When the soldiers of the United States 3rd Army, 4th Armored Division entered the camp, they discovered piles of bodies, some covered with lime, and others partially incinerated on pyres. The ghastly nature of their discovery led Eisenhower to visit the camp on April 12, with Bradley and Patton. After his visit, Eisenhower cabled United States Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall (December 31, 1880 – October 16, 1959), describing his trip to Ohrdruf: “The most interesting—although horrible—sight that I encountered during the trip was a visit to a German internment camp near Gotha. The things I saw beggared description. While I was touring the camp I encountered three men who had been inmates and by one ruse or another had made their escape. I interviewed them through an interpreter. The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where they were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said that he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’” Eisenhower requested that members of Congress and journalists be sent to liberated camps to witness and document the horrific scenes American troops were uncovering. At Ohrdruf concentration camp, 4th Armored Division soldier David Cohen said: “We walked into a shed and the bodies were piled up like wood. There are no words to describe it.” He said the smell was overpowering and unforgettable. Seeing the Nazi crimes committed at Ohrdruf made a powerful impact on Eisenhower, and he wanted the world to know what happened in the concentration camps. On April 19, 1945, he again cabled Marshall with a request to bring members of Congress and journalists to the newly liberated camps so that they could bring the horrible truth about German Nazi atrocities to the American public. That same day, Marshall received permission from the United States Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson (September 21, 1867 – October 20, 1950), and United States President Harry S. Truman (May 8, 1884 – December 26, 1972) for these delegations to visit the liberated camps. Ohrdruf had also made a powerful impression on Patton, who described it as “one of the most appalling sights that I have ever seen.” He recounted in his diary that, “In a shed …was a pile of about 40 completely naked human bodies in the last stages of emaciation. These bodies were lightly sprinkled with lime, not for the purposes of destroying them, but for the purpose of removing the stench. When the shed was full — I presume its capacity to be about two hundred, the bodies were taken to a pit a mile from the camp where they were buried. The inmates claimed that 3,000 men, who had been either shot in the head or who had died of starvation, had been so buried since January First. When we began to approach with our troops, the Germans thought it expedient to remove the evidence of their crime. Therefore, they had some of the slaves exhume the bodies and place them on a mammoth griddle composed of sixty-centimeter railway tracks laid on brick foundations. They poured pitch on the bodies and then built a fire of pinewood and coal under them. They were not very successful in their operations because there was a pile of human bones, skulls, charred torsos on or under the griddle which must have accounted for many hundreds.” Following the generals’ visit to the camp, Eisenhower ordered all American units in the area and not engaged in frontline battle to be sent to Ohrdruf. Additionally, the generals discovered the prisoner who acted as their guide during their visit to Ohrdruf was recognized by another prisoner as a former camp guard, and was beaten to death. On April 15, 1945, Patton wrote to General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force: “It may interest you to know that the very talkative, alleged former member of the murder camp was recognized by a Russian prisoner as a former guard. The prisoner beat his brains out with a rock.” United States Army Lieutenant Leo S. Moore (May 21, 1904 – July 22, 1981) was working in public relations in London when Eisenhower selected him to be his personal photographer. He often joined Eisenhower on his travels. He photographed the Ohrdruf Konzentrationslager. Moore was with Eisenhower for his nicer-tape parade in New York City in June 1945. He was head projectionist for Metro Goldwyn Meyer after the war. | |
| Image Filename | wwii0550.jpg |
| Image Size | 581.13 KB |
| Image Dimensions | 2924 x 2392 |
| Photographer | Leo Moore |
| Photographer Title | United States Army Signal Corps |
| Caption Author | Written or Adapted by Jason McDonald |
| Date Photographed | April 12, 1945 |
| Location | |
| City | Ohrdruf |
| State or Province | Thuringia |
| Country | Germany |
| Archive | National Archives and Records Administration |
| Record Number | NWDNS-111-SC-203475 |
| Status | Caption ©2026 MFA Productions LLC Please Do Not Duplicate or Distribute Without Permission; Image in the Public Domain |
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