Buchenwald, 1945

Buchenwald, 1945
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Buchenwald, 1945

LIFE photographer Margaret Bourke-White was with General George Patton’s troops when they liberated the Buchenwald concentration camps. Forty-three thousand people had been murdered there. Patton was so outraged that he ordered his men to march German civilians through the camp so that they could see, with their own eyes, what really happened to innocent people in these horrible “death camps” and so they could see what their own nation had wrought. Bourke-White’s pictures carried the horrible images to the world. In America, the pictures proved that reports of the Nazi’s methodical extermination of the Jews were true, and the country began a long process of rethinking its behavior, such as the decision not to bomb the camps. Bourke-White said, "I saw and photographed the piles of naked, lifeless bodies, the human skeletons in furnaces, the living skeletons who would die the next day... and tattoed skin for lampshades. Using the camera was almost a relief. It interposed a slight barrier between myself and the horror in front of me." LIFE published in their May 7, 1945 issue many photographs of these atrocities, saying, "Dead men will have indeed died in vain if live men refuse to look at them."

Landsberg, Alison. "America, the Holocaust, and the Mass Culture of Memory: Toward a Radical Politics of Empathy." New German Critique 71 (1997): 63-86.