Eisenhower, Dwight David -- Letter to George C. Marshall (15 Apr 1945)

Dave — Thu, 06 Aug 2015 12:59:48 +0000

But the most interesting — although horrible — sight that I encountered during the trip was a visit to a German internment camp near Gotha. The things I saw beggar description. While I was touring the camp I encountered three men who had been inmates and by one ruse or another had made their escape. I interviewed them through an interpreter. The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where there were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to “propaganda”.

Dwight David Eisenhower (1890–1969) American general, US President (1953–61)
Letter to George C. Marshall (15 Apr 1945)

Referring to the Ohrdruf concentration camp, part of the Buchenwald network of camps. It was the first camp liberated by US troops.

WIST Quotations

Eisenhower, Dwight David -- Letter to George C. Marshall (15 Apr 1945)