14-355 Garand Picture of the Day

[Snafu]

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[AZPhil]

This looks like the mass graves the german civilian were made to dig by the Allies to bury the consentration camp victims.
Semper Fi.
Phil

[browningautorifle]

My guess too Phil.

[Bill Hollinger]

My guess also.

[Mikesm44]

I have a copy of this photo saved on my computer. Here is the note I have with it.

Nordhausen, on the edge of the Harz Mountains, is thirty-eight miles east and south of Goettingen. First Army’s VII Corps, moving fast, took the town on 11 April. Again the Americans were astonished and shaken by what they uncovered: a concentration camp with 3,000 rotting, unburied bodies and 2,000 survivors all sick and nearly all in the last stages of starvation; a slave labor camp; two complete underground factories; and a treasure mine with unusual contents. The corps G-5 rounded up several hundred German civilians to bury the dead in the concentration camp and evicted several hundred others from their homes in the town to provide accommodations for the survivors. The 23,000 displaced persons and prisoners of war in the slave labor camp had been employed in the Mittelwerk, one of the underground factories. In the last months they had been dying at the rate of 150 a week; and 9,000 were sick, 1,000 with tuberculosis. The Nordwerk, the other factory, was an assembly plant for jet aircraft engines.

[Bob Seijas]

There's a fascinating book on the use of slave labor by Nazi industry: The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben. Lots of really surprising things in it, including the trading our companies did with them as late as 1943. Did you know that of the five largest chemical companies in the world today, four of them were divisions of IG Farben before we split it up after the war? The book is worth hunting up.

[gtodan]

Been to Nordhausen briefly. Did not know this, Thanks.