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

by A.J. Baime

On April 15, three days after FDR’s death, the British Second Army reached Bergen-Belsen. What they found there defied description, according to the Second Army’s commander, General Miles Dempsey. “Anything you have seen doesn’t even begin the story,” he told reporters. Prisoners from camps closer to the front had been moved to Bergen-Belsen over the past year, swelling the population to about sixty thousand living people. Due to sanitary conditions, the camp was rife with typhoid, tuberculosis, and other diseases. Heaps of corpses lay scattered around, with one major pit filled with blackened bodies. The victims were Jews, political prisoners, “asocials,” Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals, among others. “There were children—500 of them—in the midst of this,” reported the Chicago Tribune. “Babies were born here daily.” Estimates put the death toll at thirty thousand, just in the previous few months, and more investigation would push that number considerably higher.