World War II Day by Day

Warsaw, Liberated Poland · January 17, 1945

On this date in 1945 Warsaw fell to Soviet and Polish Com­munist forces as the Nazis beat a hasty retreat from the ruins of Poland’s capital. In moving against the retreating Wehr­macht (German armed forces), the Soviets lib­er­ated 800 Jews in Często­chowa and 870 Jews in Łódź, Poland. Ten days later, on Janu­ary 27, 1945, Soviet troops lib­er­ated the Auschwitz-Bir­ke­nau con­cen­tration/­forced labor/­death camp in South­west Poland, where an estimated 1.1 mil­lion to 1.5 mil­lion people died, the most of any of the 15,000 camps and sub­camps the Nazis had erected in occupied Europe. The troops found 648 corpses and 7,000 sur­vivors. In the store­houses they un­covered 836,255 women’s coats, 6 tons of human hair, carpets, eye­glasses, artificial limbs, and more.

To the west, units of the U.S. Army on April 11 freed POWs in concen­tration camps at Buchen­wald, where 56,000 had died, and on April 29 at Dachau, where 28,000 had perished between 1940 and 1945. Amer­i­can soldiers were so horri­fied by con­di­tions at Dachau that a few GIs exe­cuted some of the SS per­son­nel found there, including sev­er­al pulled from the camp infir­mary (charges against the men were dis­missed); many guards were also killed by some of the 32,000 lib­e­rated pri­soners. On April 15 Brit­ish and Cana­dian units reached the Bergen-Belsen concen­tration camp in north­ern Ger­many, where they were met by horri­fic scenes—mass graves, un­buried bodies, and nearly 40,000 “living skel­e­tons,” ema­ci­ated and filthy men, women, and chil­dren who were starving to death or dying from typhus. On May 5, about 50 hours before Ger­many surrendered uncon­di­tionally, a U.S. armored unit reached the main Maut­hausen camp in Upper (western) Austria, where 119,000 had died.

Three days later, on May 8, 1945, VE Day, Polish and Soviet units freed the camp at Stutt­hof (Sztutowo), Poland. A day later Soviet troops reached the Czecho­slo­vak camp and ghetto of Theresien­stadt (present-day Terezín in the Czech Republic), where they found 19,000 sur­vivors. Even after lib­er­a­tion death took its toll: many victims suc­cumbed to the effects of dehydration, starvation, disease, and exhaustion.

The monstrous crimes uncovered by camp liberators figured prom­i­nently in the cases brought against leading Nazis before the Inter­national Mili­tary Tribunal at Nurem­berg, Germany in 1945–1946 (Trial of the Major War Crimi­nals) and several of the subse­quent Nurem­berg trials (formally the Trials of War Crimi­nals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals) in 1946–1949.

Dachau Concentration Camp on Liberation Day, April 29, 1945

Left: Liberated Dachau inmates cheer U.S. troops. Many broke into tears of joy, laughed, danced, and sang their national anthems—there were more than 40 nation­alities at the Dachau concen­tra­tion camp. The camp lay a scant dozen miles/­19 km northwest of the Bavarian capital of Munich.

Right: Female prisoners at Dachau wave to their liber­ators. On April 26, 1945, as Amer­i­can forces approached, there were 67,665 regis­tered pri­soners in Dachau and its sub­camps. Of these, 43,350 were categorized as poli­tical pri­soners, while 22,100 were Jews, with the remainder falling into various other categories.

Left: U.S. 7th Army soldiers force boys believed to be Hitler Youth to exa­mine open box­cars con­taining 2,300 bodies of pri­soners starved to death by the SS. Pro­vi­sioned with little food or water the Dachau Death Train of nearly 40 box­cars had trans­ported between 2,000 and 3,000 pri­soners from Buchen­wald con­cen­tra­tion camp 19 days earlier to the Dachau con­cen­tra­tion camp 250 miles/­402 km to the south in the last days of the war. Upon their arrival only 1,300 inmates out of the 5,000 who had left Buchen­wald were able to shuffle the short distance from the rail spur into the Dachau compound.

Right: Thrown off balance by the sight of starvation, cruelty, besti­ality, and death all around them on the day of Dachau’s libera­tion, a small group of U.S. 7th Army soldiers exe­cuted at least 17 SS pri­soners and wounded many more who fell to the ground in a coal yard next to the camp’s heating plant. Many of the liber­ated camp inmates beat SS men, informers, and Kapos (inmates who were given privi­leges in return for super­vising pri­soner work gangs) to bloody pulps or to death with fists, sticks, and shovels. Few of their American liberators intervened.

Dachau Concentration Camp Liberation, April 29, 1945