“And now, let me tell you this in the first person,” Edward R. Murrow said over CBS Radio on Truman’s third day as president. Murrow had visited Buchenwald, where the Nazis had murdered at least 56,000 male prisoners, roughly 11,000 of them Jews. Murrow told of bodies “stacked up like cordwood,” innumerable victims of starvation and torture, and hundreds of dying children. “God alone knows how many men and boys have died there during the last twelve years . . . At Buchenwald they spoke of the president just before he died. If there be a better epitaph, history does not record it.”
