Scenes From Hell
Pfc. Harold Porter - Atrocities at Dachau Concentration Camp, 1945
During the twelve years of the Third Reich (1933–45), the Nazi regime and its dreaded SS established and operated a system of concentration camps to imprison those groups of people whom its leaders perceived to represent a “racial” or political threat to Nazi authority. Nazi leaders identified the European Jews as the priority enemy of Germany and sought to physically annihilate them. The Germans and their Axis partners murdered approximately six million Jews, as well as millions of other innocent men, women, and children during the era of the Holocaust.
Dachau was the first concentration camp established under the authority of the SS. More than 28,000 people died at Dachau between 1940 and 1945, but the total number of deaths at the camp is not known. By April 1945 the water, sewage, and electrical systems had all failed; 32,000 sick and starving prisoners had been jammed into a space intended for one-third that number; and more than 39 railroad boxcars filled with dead people had been transported there for disposal. The U.S. Army’s 116th Evacuation Hospital was one of the first medical units to enter the camp after its liberation.
As the 116th labored to restore civility and order to a world that had descended into barbarism and chaos, a young American medic, writing home to Michigan, struggled to describe a scene that lay beyond his worst imaginings.
Letter from Pfc. Harold Porter, a medic with the 116th Evacuation Hospital, to his parents, May 7, 1945, page 1
Using stationery found in the abandoned office of the camp commandant, Porter found himself at a loss to convey the horrors he encountered at the Dachau concentration camp: boxcars filled with thousands of decomposing bodies, the crematorium surrounded by stacks of nude corpses, and the stacks of carefully sorted clothing belonging to the victims.
His account is unsparing and graphic, with descriptions of what the bodies looked like, the sounds they made as they were being moved, and their odor. Days after entering the camp, he was still trying to grasp the reality of what he saw.
National Archives, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum, Abilene, Kansas. Courtesy of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Sonya Porter Collection
Excerpt:
“Certainly, what I have seen in the past few days will affect my personality for the rest of my life. . . . It is easy to read about atrocities, but they must be seen before they can be believed.”
—From Harold Porter’s letter to his parents
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Letter from Pfc. Harold Porter, a medic with the 116th Evacuation Hospital, to his parents, May 7, 1945, page 2
Using stationery found in the abandoned office of the camp commandant, Porter found himself at a loss to convey the horrors he encountered at the Dachau concentration camp: boxcars filled with thousands of decomposing bodies, the crematorium surrounded by stacks of nude corpses, and the stacks of carefully sorted clothing belonging to the victims.
His account is unsparing and graphic, with descriptions of what the bodies looked like, the sounds they made as they were being moved, and their odor. Days after entering the camp, he was still trying to grasp the reality of what he saw.
National Archives, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum, Abilene, Kansas. Courtesy of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Sonya Porter Collection
Excerpt:
“...as we came to the center of the city, we met a train with a wrecked engine—about fifty cars long. Every car was loaded with bodies. There must have been thousands of them—all obviously starved to death. This was a shock of the first order, and the odor can best be imagined. But neither the sight nor the odor were anything when compared with what we were still to see...”
—From Harold Porter’s letter to his parents
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Gates at the main entrance to Dachau concentration camp, 1945
National Archives, Records of the Office of War Information (OWI)[208-AA-206K-11]
Reproduced courtesy of Keystone Picture Agency/ZUMA Press.
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“Tattered clothes from prisoners who were forced to strip before they were killed, lay in huge piles in the infamous Dachau concentration camp,” 1945
National Archives, Records of the Office of the Chief Signal Officer [111-SC-206193]
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Railroad cars at Dachau concentration camp, 1945 (Detail)
National Archives, Records of the Office of War Information (OWI) [208-AA-206-K16]
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