12-217 Garand Picture of the Day - GERMANS DIG GRAVES

[Mark in Rochester]

for concentration camp victims at Nordhausen.



GERMANS DIG GRAVES
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.

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