Liberation - Mittelbau-Dora Memorial

Seven American soldiers on the road in front of the destroyed vehicle garages of the satellite camp Boelcke-Kaserne. — 1/4

Liberation of the Boelcke Barracks concentration camp in Nordhausen, 1945. Photo: Sherman Capone Hart.

©Concentration Camp Memorial Mittelbau-Dora

Surviving prisoners of Mittelbau-Dora Concentration Camp in one of the vehicle garages used as prisoners' quarters at the Boelcke Barracks satellite camp. — 2/4

Liberated prisoners talking with U.S. soldiers shortly after liberation of Boelcke Barracks, 1945. Photo by Allan Jackson.

©Buchenwald Memorial

Residents of Nordhausen carry dead prisoners out of the Boelcke barracks and lay them down in front of it. Almost the entire frame is filled with dead bodies. — 3/4

Dead prisoners carried out of Boelcke Barracks, 1945. Photo: US Signal Corps.

©Buchenwald Memorial

Residents of Nordhausen, under the supervision of American soldiers, carry deceased prisoners of the satellite camp Boelcke-Kaserne to the funeral. — 4/4

U.S. soldiers supervising the carrying of deceased prisoners from the camp, 1945. Photo by John R. Driza.

©National Archives, Washington

The majority of the Mittelbau camps were completely vacated. Only a few small camps with populations consisting solely of Italian prisoners of war were not “evacuated”. The SS moreover left several hundred sick and dying inmates behind in the Dora camp and the Boelcke casern. They were liberated on 11 April 1945 when American troops marched into Nordhausen.

On the days that followed, American war correspondents took photos and films of the enfeebled and starving inmates in Dora and the Boelcke casern – images that soon went around the world and are today among the most well-known testimonies to the Nazi crimes.

For the most part, the survivors of the clearance transports and death marches were liberated in the casern camp of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and in other camps in mid April 1945. However, a number of survivors remained in the hands of their tormentors, not to be liberated until early May 1945 in Mecklenburg and Austria.