When Utah first glimpsed German concentration camps
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Ogden Standard-Examiner, April 9, 1945. Image via Utah Digital Newspapers, University of Utah
Confirmation of the Holocaust's horrors reached Utah 81 years ago this week, shortly after Allied forces liberated the concentration camp at Ohrdruf.
- This is Old News, where we reexamine cautionary tales we've heard before.
The big picture: Nazi death camps in occupied Europe had made the news long before April 1945, but the atrocities in Germany itself forced the world to internalize a sinister reality:
- Ordinary people had allowed unthinkable violence and suffering to happen in their backyard.
Allied commanders who arrived in Ohrdruf in early April forced 40 townspeople to tour the concentration camp and "see what S.S. brutality had done in their midst," read the Ogden Standard Examiner's front page story.
What was inside: The dispatches described masses of naked bodies, in burn pits and in buildings, stacked like wood. Many more were cremated, their "ashes poured into one great hole."
- Scholars estimate 7,000 people died there in the previous four months.
Friction point: Some Germans slipped into denial, saying, "The S.S. isn't like that."
- After seeing the camp, a German major said, "I wouldn't believe it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes."
Reality check: Residents' letters and journals show they saw starving prisoners being beaten and murdered.
- The mayor asked officers to reroute prisoners' daily marches so townspeople wouldn't have to see their "unpleasant" plight. He and his wife died from suicide after touring the camp.
Zoom out: It was the first concentration camp viewed by Gen. Eisenhower, who immediately insisted on thorough documentation of the Holocaust as a duty to prevent history's repetition.
Zoom in: A Carbon County woman later received a report from an enlisted family member, clipped from the military newspaper Stars and Stripes. The Sun-Advocate reprinted it in full, calling it "required reading."
