Martha Gellhorn and The Liberation of The Nazi Concentration Camps – 1945

In early 1945 Martha bought a small house in South Eaton Place, London. But no sooner had she moved in than she found herself heading back to Germany after the news that the Soviet Army had discovered, in Poland, on the 27th of January 1945, the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

As Martha travelled further and further into Germany she met thousands of refugees heading out, many of whom had themselves been inmates of concentration camps. They began to tell Martha of the horrors.

The US 7th Army reached Dachau on April 29th, 1945, finding over 3,000 prisoners murdered by the Germans before they fled, with some 33,000 prisoners remaining, some of whom had been in the camp for nearly twelve years. Dachau had been Hitler’s model SS camp, which had been set-up in 1933. In the words of Caroline Moorehead, Martha’s biographer, it was a camp…

‘…to hold people in protective custody, [Hitler's] euphemism for political prisoners. Leon Blum, the former French President, had been in Dachau, and Stalin’s son Jacob, and the Protestant priest, Martin Niemeller. Dachau was where Martha’s German friends in the International Brigade in Spain had tortured. In her [Martha's] wanderings around Germany, seeing for herself the legacy and the victims of Nazi rule, Dachau had become, for her, its symbol, something to hate with a single-hearted passion.’

When allied troops first encountered the ordinary German civilian they were surprised how very much like themselves they were: clean, hard working, and outwardly civilised. Only when the Allied Armies penetrated deeper into Germany did their attitudes change.

A couple of weeks before the US 7th liberated Dachau the US 3rd Armoured Division arrived in Nordhausen in central Germany. Captain Belton Cooper was at the head of the advance guard of the Division as they worked their way into the town when suddenly:

‘…a strange apparition emerged from the side of one of the buildings. A tall frail-looking creature with striped pants and naked from the waist up. It appeared to be a human skeleton with little signs of flesh, if any. The skin appeared to be like a translucent plastic stretched over the rib cage and sucked with a powerful vacuum until it impinged to the backbone in the rear. I could not tell whether it was male or female. There was no face, merely a gaunt human skull staring out. The teeth were exposed in a broad grin and in place of eyes were merely dark sockets. I did not see how it was humanly possible for this pathetic creature to have enough strength to walk. As we proceeded down the road, we encountered more and more of these gaunt figures standing or sitting but most of them were sprawled on the road where they had collapsed. In their last struggle to survive, they had attempted to walk as far away from their tormentors as possible.’