Liberation
As the Second World War in Europe came to an end, mass evacuations from other camps put tremendous pressure on the Mauthausen complex, the last remaining concentration camp in the area still controlled by the Nazis. The 25 Ebensee barracks had been designed to hold a hundred prisoners each, but they eventually held as many as 750 apiece. To this number, one must add the prisoners being kept in the tunnels or outdoors, under the open sky.
The crematorium was unable to keep pace with the deaths. Naked bodies were stacked outside the barrack blocks and the crematorium itself. In the closing weeks of the war, the death rate exceeded 350 a day. To reduce congestion, a ditch was dug outside the camp and bodies were flung into the quicklime. On a single day in April, 1945, a record eighty bodies were removed from block 23 alone; in this pile, feet were seen to be twitching. During this period, the inmate strength reached a high of eighteen thousand.
American troops of the US 80th Infantry Division arrived at the camp on May 6, 1945 - though for many inmates liberation came too late and they died of hunger, disease and exhausion despite the efforts of American doctors to save them.
Read more about this topic: Ebensee Concentration Camp
Famous quotes containing the word liberation:
“Its not greed and ambition that makes warsits goodness. Wars are always fought for the best of reasons, for liberation or manifest destiny, always against tyranny and always in the best interests of humanity. So far this war, weve managed to butcher some 10,000,000 people in the interest of humanity. The next war, it seems well have to destroy all of man in order to preserve his damn dignity.”
—Paddy Chayefsky (19231981)
“The message of womens liberation is that women can love each other and ourselves against our degrading education.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)
“Childrens liberation is the next item on our civil rights shopping list.”
—Letty Cottin Pogrebin (b. 1939)