[Campion]

The "extermination camps," or "death camps" were all in eastern Poland, except for Auschwitz, which was in southwestern Poland. All of them were liberated by the Soviets, although several of them had been shut down and destroyed by the Nazis long before the Soviets arrived.

(The term "death camp" is a bit of a misnomer, except for Auschwitz. In the rest of the "death camps," almost nobody "camped" there; they were industrial murder mills which killed people almost as fast as they arrived.)

The camps Eisenhower liberated were KzL's (concentration camps) in Germany. A lot of people died in those camps due to starvation, disease, abuse, etc., but they were not built for the sole purpose of killing people. They were built, mostly long before the Wannsee Conference, to imprison and intimidate Hitler's political enemies.

[MD Expat in PA]

While not mass "extermination camps", dedicated solely to the extermination of Jews, Dachau and Buchenwald, liberated by the Americans, were death camps too. Horrible human “medical experiments” were carried out at both. Both had crematoriums to dispose of the bodies of those who died including those who died from the forced labor and from near starvation and disease due to the inhumane conditions.

Initially most of the prisoners at Buchenwald were political prisoners but after Kristallnacht nearly 10,000 Jews were sent there. It also held Jehovah's Witnesses, Gypsies and German military deserters and later on allied POW’s .

“Periodically, the SS staff conducted selections throughout the Buchenwald camp system and dispatched those too weak or disabled to work to so-called euthanasia facilities such as Bernburg, where euthanasia operatives gasse them as part of Operation 14f13, the extension of euthanasia killing operations to ill and exhausted concentration camp prisoners. SS physicians or orderlies killed, by phenol injection, other prisoners unable to work.”

As the US forces came near, many were shot and thrown into mass graves in an attempt to cover up before the Germans fled. Townspeople could smell the crematoriums and many knew what was going on there and yet turned a blind eye and denied they knew what was taking place there.

Have you ever seen the footage and interviews of the US troops who liberated Dachau and Buchenwald? Many of these men, who had seen years of hard combat were reduced to tears, some sobbing uncontrollably over the horrors of what they saw in those concentration camps.

[Verginius Rufus]

The Soviets liberated Auschwitz? I thought Obama said his grandfather did.

[dfwgator]

Auschwitz was essentially three camps in one.....Birkenau was the death camp section, another section was generally where political prisoners, and Russian POWs were sent, and the third Auschwitz camp was were companies like IG Farben set up factories to utilize slave labor.