It was slave labor of the worst kind: twenty thousand died of exhaustion, disease, starvation, in accidents, or at the end of a noose. In 1947, the Americans tried nineteen former Nordhausen guards and kapos at Dachau, of whom fifteen were convicted and one executed. In an act of gross hypocrisy, the Americans also recruited Arthur Rudolph, one of the Nordhausen rocket scientists, under Operation Paperclip, and he went on to enjoy a distinguished career at NASA before being thrown out of the country in the 1980s.
The US, I want to say was just as bad, but they weren’t, however their government had piles of secret & not so secret trials & tests on its own citizens, it treated anyone ‘different’ disgustingly, trials of drugs & chemicals on black Americans, lobotomies, sterilization - of people they decided were not fit to have a child, how they treated the native Indians, the list goes on.
Hitler didn’t start it, but he took it, just about as far as it could go, the world was suddenly shown the repugnant conclusion of where all of this would go, & thank god took a step back & halted most things, along with the war to stop the fatal endings that NO living creature should suffer through.
