Martha Gellhorn and The Nazi Concentration Camps
“ A couple of weeks before the US 7th liberated Dachau the US 3rd Armoured Division arrived in Nordhausen in central Germany. Captain Belton Cooper was at the head of the advance guard of the Division as they worked their way into the town when suddenly…”
In early 1945 Martha bought a small house in South Eaton Place, London. But no sooner had she moved in than she found herself heading back to Germany after the news that the Soviet Army had discovered, in Poland, on the 27th of January 1945, the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
As Martha travelled further and further into Germany she met thousands of refugees heading out, many of whom had themselves been inmates of concentration camps. They began to tell Martha of the horrors.
The US 7th Army reached Dachau on April 29th, 1945, finding over 3,000 prisoners murdered by the Germans before they fled, with some 33,000 prisoners remaining, some of whom had been in the camp for nearly twelve years. Dachau had been Hitler’s model SS camp, which had been set-up in 1933. In the words of Caroline Moorehead, Martha’s biographer, it was a camp…
“…to hold people in ‘protective custody’, [Hitler’s] euphemism for political prisoners. Leon Blum, the former French President, had been in Dachau, and Stalin’s son Jacob, and the Protestant…
