Top Photo: Freed prisoners at Dachau scavenging in the dump. All rights reserved. Her final reports from the European theater would feature some of the most iconic images from World War II. Catching wind that a concentration camp had been liberated, she hitched a ride to Buchenwald, near Weimar in east-central Germany.
The camp had been liberated by the 6th Armored Division on April 11, A few days prior, as the SS fled, prisoners took control of the camp and hoisted a white flag, awaiting the arrival of liberating troops who could provide them with food, transportation, and medical care.
Though American troops had recently liberated Ohrdruf , a subcamp of Buchenwald, many of the soldiers were unprepared for the horrors of a major concentration camp. They entered a camp packed with nearly 21, prisoners, emaciated and near death. While the SS did not perpetrate mass executions or gassings at the camp, the American forces discovered a block for medical experimentation, sites for execution and torture, and a crematorium.
Bodies of prisoners were piled high, stacked like wood, and more prisoners were confined to their bunks, unable to move and slowly dying. Miller arrived in the camp several days after liberation, around April 17, At this point, many of the bodies had been buried and an effort had been made to create a more hygienic environment for the survivors awaiting relocation.
As Miller wrote in her report for Vogue :. The six hundred bodies stacked in the courtyard of the crematorium because they had run out of coal the last five days had been carted away until only a hundred were left; and the splotches of death had been washed from the wooden potato masher because the place had to be disinfected; and the bodies on the whipping stalls were dummies instead of almost dead men who could feel but not react.
