The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World

by A.J. Baime

“We saw, of course, what everybody has seen there,” Senator Alben Barkley reported, “the instruments of torture, the starvations, barbarisms, unsanitary conditions, dead, cremations, strangulations, everything that has been represented as being there . . . We found in that camp [Buchenwald] where they had a crematory that had six ovens, six compartments, and the capacity of that crematory was to burn 200 a day.” Barkley told of a room with forty-eight hooks, where prisoners were strangled with rope, and if they did not die fast enough, they were beaten with mallets to quicken the process. “They told us that one day they had executed 126 of these people on these hooks.” “By strangulation?” asked Stimson. “Yes, and by the use of this mallet.” The senators and congressmen continued with details “so gruesome that it is difficult to realize that such a thing could happen,” as Barkley put it. Congressman James Richards of South Carolina ended the meeting on a sickening note. “Many of the inmates of the camps we inspected,” he said, “testified to us that other camps were much worse to be in than the camps we saw.”

Seeing death camps