(No) Liberation - Mittelbau-Dora Memorial

Liberated French, Belgian, and Dutch prisoners in the former Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, April 25, 1945. SS and Wehrmacht guards had driven many of them on clearance transports from the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp to Bergen-Belsen shortly beforehand.
Photo: Harry Oakes (Imperial War Museum, London)

On the afternoon of 11 April 1945, US troops discovered the Mittelbau main camp on the Kohnstein. They liberated the few hundred prisoners remaining in the camp. Almost all of the forty or so subcamps in the area had been completely abandoned.

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Former prisoners of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp after their liberation, April 1945. After the arrival of the US troops, the former main camp of the Mittelbau concentration camp complex was used for the temporary accommodation of liberated prisoners (“displaced persons”) from Nordhausen and the surrounding area. The liberated prisoners, now safe, sitting in the sun in front of the barracks where they had once been held.
Footage: George Stevens / US Army Signal Corps (Library of Congress, Washington)

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By the time they were liberated in the spring of 1945, most of the prisoners had spent years in various concentration camps. Now they could slowly regain their health. Many, however, remained scarred by their imprisonment for the rest of their lives, or died after their liberation as a consequence of the treatment and conditions they had suffered.
Footage: George Stevens / US Army Signal Corps (Library of Congress, Washington)

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A former prisoner in the liberated Camp.
Footage: George Stevens / US Army Signal Corps (Library of Congress, Washington)

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The roll call square of the main camp of the former Mittelbau concentration camp after its liberation, spring 1945.
Photo: unknown (Ghetto Fighters‘ House Archive)

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The entrance gate to the liberated Ellrich-Juliushütte subcamp in the spring of 1945. Like most of the Mittelbau concentration camp's subcamps, the camp had been abandoned by the time US troops arrived in April 1945. Shortly before, the SS and Wehrmacht guards had cleared the camp and forced the prisoners towards other camps in order to prevent them from falling into the hands of the advancing soldiers.
Photo: George Phillips (Sammlung K.-H. Schwerdtfeger)

In the days before, the SS and the Wehrmacht had forced most of the prisoners from the Mittelbau concentration camp and its subcamps on murderous clearance transports and death marches. Those prisoners who survived were liberated in other places, such as Bergen-Belsen and Mauthausen, or when the troops encountered forced marches or transports that had been randomly underway for days.

Numerous prisoners did not survive these evictions. They died of exhaustion en route, were shot along the way, or were killed in massacres such as that at Gardelegen, when the prisoners were forced into a barn of the Isenschnibbe estate. Members of the SS and local Nazi organizations set it on fire. Civilians also participated in violence against prisoners.