| Original caption: “Four survivors of the Hanover-Ahlem concentration camp pose inside of a barrack.” United States Army 335th Infantry Regiment, 84th Infantry Division, liberate survivors of Ahlem Labor Camp. The photographer, Corporal Vernon Tott (December 22, 1924 – March 1, 2005), later located 10 survivors still alive over 50 years later. On April 10, 1945, Vernon Tott, a 20-year-old American GI from Sioux City, Iowa, stumbled upon a compound outside Hanover, Germany. He and his buddies in the 84th Infantry had just routed the few remaining Germans. The compound, called Ahlem, ringed in barbed wire, displayed a sign warning Schutzstaffel SS troops not to enter for fear of disease and lice. To Vernon’s horror, he saw emaciated men barely able to stand, others lying in their urine and feces, racked with dysentery, still others stiff and cold, dressed in tatters and dead for days. “We were witnessing hell on earth,” Tott recalled decades later. “Piles of dead bodies. Men in ragged clothing that were just skin and bones…Me and the soldiers with me, it made us sick to your stomachs and even cried what we seen there.” Not quite believing what he saw and wanting to share his horrified disbelief with family back in Sioux City, Iowa, Tott pulled out his pocket camera. After the war, Tott stashed his photographs from Ahlem in a shoebox on a shelf in his basement in Sioux City. He put the war behind him. Stepson Jon Sadler remembers rummaging through the basement with his friends and sneaking peeks at the photos. “In junior high, we’d open up the box and think, boy, this is terrible,” Sadler said. “Look what my dad saw in the war. We just always assumed nobody …in those pictures [survived]. They looked so horrible and sick.” For 50 years, Tott held the same assumption. Then, in his army newsletter in 1995, Tott spotted an inquiry from Sieradzki, a retired engineer in Berkeley, Calif. Ahlem Labor Camp survivor Ben Sieradzki (February 4, 1927 – July 1, 2011) was searching for whoever took photographs of himself and other prisoners when the camp was liberated. Tott went into his basement and found his old shoebox. He called Sieradzki, who remembers, “The telephone rang. ‘My name is Vernon Tott and I think you’re looking for me.’ And I said, ‘Are you still a tall blonde fellow?’ And he said, ‘Not any longer.’” Just hours before that picture was taken, the prisoners were handed some civilian clothes. Sieradzki changed out of his striped, ragged uniform into a “funny looking” jacket, hat and pants, which were too long, so he stuck them in his socks. This is the only known photograph of Sieradzki at liberation. Sieradzki was 18 years old and weighed less than 80 pounds. He had endured more than 5 years of unimagined misery. It started in 1939, when his family was forced to live in a rundown slum district in Lodz, Poland, with 200,000 other Jews, called the Lodz Ghetto. During this time, Sieradzki’s parents and 1 sister were taken away and killed. His other sister died in the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. Sieradzki survived 3 concentration camps, including Auschwitz, and eventually ended up in the slave labor camp called Ahlem, near Hanover, Germany. Near the end, his worsening health confined him to the barracks. “They called people like me musselmen — goners,” he writes in a short story about the war years. “Other prisoners started to steal my ration of food. There was no use to waste food on the likes of me.” An older cousin of Sieradzki’s arrived as a new prisoner to the camp and urged him to eat. He says his cousin, a man who already lost his wife and young children in the gas chambers at Auschwitz, gave him hope. When Sieradzki saw Tott’s pictures of the Ahlem camp 50 years later, he was angry at 1st. The photographs released a flood of dark memories. But then Sieradzki was grateful, he said, “because I had no record of that horrible time, and here I am.” Tott realized there might be other survivors, like Sieradzki. And perhaps, he could provide them a piece of their past. So, he launched a quest to track them down. Eventually, Tott located nearly 30 Ahlem survivors, across the United States and in Canada, Sweden and Israel. More than 16 are in his photographs. In 2001, he returned to Hanover with 3 of those survivors to help dedicate a memorial at Ahlem. And he traveled to Poland for the 60th anniversary of the liquidation of the Lodz Ghetto. In 2003, Tott’s name was inscribed on a wall of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. | |
| Image Filename | wwii0618.jpg |
| Image Size | 442.88 KB |
| Image Dimensions | 3049 x 2117 |
| Photographer | Vernon Tott |
| Photographer Title | |
| Caption Author | Written or Adapted by Jason McDonald |
| Date Photographed | April 10, 1945 |
| Location | |
| City | Hanover |
| State or Province | Lower Saxony |
| Country | Germany |
| Archive | United States Holocaust Memorial Museum |
| Record Number | 29451 |
| Status | Caption ©2026 MFA Productions LLC Please Do Not Duplicate or Distribute Without Permission; Image in the Public Domain |
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