07/14/2026
We must never forget.
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Nothing New Press
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Award-winning history on a Biblical foundation
On April 12, 1945, Dwight Eisenhower walked into Ohrdruf.
It was the first N**i camp liberated by American forces, a subcamp of Buchenwald in central Germany. Patton was with him. So was Omar Bradley. The bodies were still where the SS had left them, some shot in the head days before, others stacked and partially burned.
Patton, a man not known for squeamishness, walked behind a shed and vomited. Eisenhower made himself look at everything.
Then he gave the order that mattered.
He wired Washington and London and demanded that congressmen, senators, and reporters be flown to Germany immediately. He wanted them to see it while the evidence was fresh, while the bodies were still there, while nothing could be cleaned up or explained away.
He also ordered that every American soldier in the area who was not on the front line be brought through the camp. In his words, they were fighting to defeat an enemy, and now they should see what that enemy had done. He wanted them to know, in specific and physical terms, what they had been fighting.
And he ordered the mayor of the nearby town, along with the townspeople, to walk through Ohrdruf and look at the dead. Many of them claimed they hadn't known. The mayor and his wife went home that night and hanged themselves.
Eisenhower's reasoning, written in a cable to General Marshall, was blunt. He said he made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there developed a tendency to charge these allegations to propaganda.
He already knew. Before the war was even over, before the full scale of the camps had been uncovered, he understood that people would try to deny it. So he brought witnesses. He brought cameras. He brought film crews. He brought soldiers, journalists, politicians, and German civilians, and he made them look.
The photographs and footage taken at Ohrdruf and the camps liberated after it became the foundation of the visual record. They were shown at Nuremberg. They were shown in newsreels. They are still shown today.
Eisenhower saw four more camps in the weeks that followed. He never spoke about them lightly.
He had understood, standing in that yard in April, that memory would need protecting.
Image: public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
