Documenting Nuremberg

Midway through the recently released film “Nuremberg,” General Dwight D. Eisenhower is shown walking through a newly liberated Nazi work camp. Many other famous historical figures also appear throughout the movie, but, unlike them, no actor plays the Allied Supreme Commander. He appears in documentary film footage originally shown, with great effect, during the eighth day of the trial of the major German war criminals (Nov. 29, 1945).

Seven months earlier Eisenhower had toured a facility at Ohrdruf, Germany, accompanied by generals Omar N. Bradley and George S. Patton, Jr. He had conducted a thorough inspection in order “to be in a position to give first-hand evidence” of the “starvation, cruelty and bestiality” he saw, evidence of things that were “so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick.”

The film clip had recorded that shocking visit, during which the Americans had come across a room in which “were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation.” Patton, unlike Eisenhower, “would not even enter. He said he would get sick if he did so” (ltr., Eisenhower to George C. Marshall, Apr. 15, 1945).

Ohrdruf, the only camp Eisenhower visited personally, was not an extermination camp like Auschwitz. It had no gas chamber or high-capacity crematorium. It was a death camp only in the sense that men were starved to death, worked to death, executed, or died in large numbers from disease and neglect. As American forces had approached in the Spring of 1945, the fleeing SS guards had failed to dispose of the many emaciated corpses, leaving ample evidence of their acts.

He had indeed borne witness, but Eisenhower knew more was needed. As his armies continued to uncover even worse atrocities, he persuaded U.S. Army Chief of Staff Marshall and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to send prominent media and political leaders to see for themselves the “conditions of indescribable horror” that would “leave no doubt in their minds about the normal practices of the Germans in these camps” (cable, Eisenhower to Marshall, Apr. 19, 1945). He encouraged his subordinates to let their off-duty soldiers visit the areas and arranged for noted Hollywood directors then serving in Europe to film an extensive documentary record of Ohrdruf and the other camps. It was this film in which he appeared and which helped convict the prominent Nazi defendants at Nuremberg.

Ike would continue his efforts to make sure that the world remembered what had happened. After he left the Army to become president of Columbia University, he successfully prodded General J. Lawton Collins, then serving as the Army’s Chief of Staff, to declassify and make available the complete Nuremberg record. In 1950 he met with the Secretary of Defense on behalf of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to urge complete publication of the multi-volume set of Nuremberg volumes. In this he was also successful.

Eisenhower had feared that future generations might one day be tricked into believing that the evidence of German atrocities was little more than propaganda manufactured by the victors of World War II. His vigorous and effective actions have for the most part prevented such a calamity.

Dr. Daun van Ee is an historian and editor for the Eisenhower Papers Project at Johns Hopkins University and a Trustee of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Society. The Eisenhower Society is dedicated to promoting the memory and legacy of leadership of Dwight D. Eisenhower through educational programs, scholarships, grants, and special events. Learn more at dwightdeisenhowersociety.org.