DAYS OF REMEMBRANCE – LIBERATION OF DORA-MITTELBAU


On 11 April 1945, less than a week after the liberation of Ohrdruf, units of the U.S. Ninth Army stumbled across another Nazi concentration camp, this one near the Thuringian town of Nordhausen: Dora-Mittelbau. 

Originally a sub-camp of Buchenwald, Dora-Mittelbau was established in 1943 as a forced labor camp dedicated to the production of armaments for the Nazi war machine, particularly the infamous V-1 and V-2 rockets. Dora-Mittelbau swelled in size as Allied bombing campaigns obliterated Germany’s industrial capacities, and the camp’s prisoners were put to work excavating a subterranean factory complex; by October 1944, the camp was made independent from the sprawling Buchenwald camp system.

As elsewhere, the approach of the U.S. Army prompted the camp’s SS guards to flee, liquidating and evacuating as many of their captives as possible through forced death marches further into Germany. Despite this, when G.I.’s of the 3rd Armored and 104th Infantry Divisions arrived in the area on 11 April, they discovered hundreds of starving survivors among nearly a thousand unburied corpses abandoned at the factory camp.

Outraged by the atrocities they had uncovered, American soldiers gathered up the local civilian population at gunpoint, forcing them to transport and bury Dora-Mittelbau’s victims. This practice was commonplace wherever the Americans uncovered the victims of Nazi atrocities and was widely documented by U.S. Army and civilian personnel.

The U.S. Army CMH’s webpage on Army involvement in the liberation of Nazi concentration camps can be found at.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Yawa – As Man Who Raped A Mad Woman Was Ordered To Choose Between Going To Jail Or Marry Her.

Image
Yawa – As Man Who Raped A Mad Woman Was Ordered To Choose Between Going To Jail Or Marry Her. A man was caught red-handed in an uncompleted building r@ping a mad woman. He was spotted when a passerby heard them groaning in ecstasy. At first, the man thought it was two lovers making out there, he said he only wanted to spy and see the action, but to his surprise, it was a young man raping a mad woman. Youths of the town were very aggrieved and were about to give him the beating of his life when an elderly man calmed them down and made them take the man to the elders. He confessed that it was not the first he had been having s£x with the mad woman, he said it was not for ritual purposes, he was only having some nice time with her. They said he would be taken to police and sentenced to jail, but he could also avoid jail term if he agrees to marry the mad woman. Many people questioned the judgment as they thought he should have been handed over to the police for prosecution, while others l...
Read more

THE EXECUTION OF THE EXECUTIONER ( THOMAS PIERREPOINT "THE HANGMAN").

Image
Thomas Pierrepoint (1870 - 1954) hangman. Thomas William Pierrepoint was born in Sutton Bonnington, Nottinghamshire in 1870 and by 1891 the family was living at Clayton, near Bradford in Yorkshire where Thomas and his father were employed in a stone quarry. Thomas worked as a hangman for 40 years before being removed from the official list in 1946 due to his age, as he was by then 76 years old. He assisted at 35 executions and carried out 203 civilian hangings in England and Wales and five in Scotland during his period on Home Office List from 1906 to 1946. His brother Henry persuaded him to become a hangman and trained him in the job.  Thomas had no difficulty passing his official training at Pentonville and was added to the official list in 1906. On the 4th of October 1906 he got his first appointment as an assistant to his brother for the execution of Harold Walters at Wakefield.  Wakefield had just had the first purpose built execution chamber constructed within the prison...
Read more

Bill Tymchuk was born January 6, 1921 in Ukraine, when it was under Polish control; he went to school there for 2 years and immigrated to Canada in 1930 (his father had settled down in Canada in 1928).

Image
 Bill Tymchuk was born January 6, 1921 in Ukraine, when it was under Polish control; he went to school there  for 2 years and immigrated to Canada in 1930 (his father had settled down in Canada in 1928). His family was on the farm, and he started school and learned English quickly. Later his family went to Stayner, Ontario and bought a farm there. His family couldn’t afford to send him to high school, so he went to work at the age of 16. Bill was raised in the shadow of the Great Depression, the rise of Nazis, and he later became a soldier fighting for Canada against Germany on the battlefields of Europe. Bill was keen to join the Canadian army, and to fight in the war as a Canadian soldier in the Lake Superior Scottish Regiment. He is proud to be a Canadian, and he chose to fight for the country he called his home land. Once overseas Bill spent time in Britain, then he went across the Channel to fight in the Battle of Normandy. From there he went on to liberate both Belgium a...
Read more