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

Martha’s article is long and unforgiving in its detail, and at no point does she make judgements, or comment upon man’s brutality to man. It is a simple laying out of the facts. But as I’ve said there is an underlying anger that must have twisted Martha’s insides into a million notes, and like those POWs returning on that C-47 she needed to talk to someone about it, to shed tears in private. There could only be one person for her to talk to, General James Gavin. But it would be another couple of months before she found him.

In the meantime, as if addicted, Martha visited Belsen and watched as the Allied troops buried tens of thousands of bodies, occasionally finding someone alive but too far gone to help. She saw the first women prisoners come back from Ravensbruck, ” shrunken and dressed like scarecrows, with grey-green skin and the sorrowing eyes of people who had almost died.”

She visited over fifty German cities, all of them in ruins, and she talked to people who had no gas or electric or jobs or medicines or food but who had not been in the concentration camps and she felt no pity for them, not then, not ever.

Martha spent VE day in Paris wandering the streets looking for Gavin, but she didn’t find him. Instead she bumped into an old friend and went back to his hotel and lay in his arms and cried her heart out and told him about Dachau and that nothing would ever wipe that cruelty from her mind. And as she cried and those survivors of the camps gradually recovered their strength and made their way back to homes that had probably been destroyed, the French couture houses were already planning their new collections with over three million French men and women either missing or dead.

In August 1945 Gavin was given command of the American forces in Berlin, and in early September Martha joined him. If only he’d been in Paris on VE day.