Liberation of the camps

April 1945

As Allied armies advanced across Europe in the spring of 1945, they walked into places whose names would become synonyms for horror: Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Auschwitz. Skeletal survivors; corpses stacked like cordwood; the machinery of genocide laid bare for the cameras. Six million Jews had been murdered, along with millions more. Soldiers wept. The century had found its bottom.