Like innumerable other Americans, Eisenhower had read of these death camps; now the general was seeing the evidence with his own eyes. He felt it his “duty” to witness the camp’s “every nook and cranny.” In the camp’s center courtyard, dozens of human bodies lay where they had fallen, victims of point-blank gunshots less than two weeks earlier. The Nazis had done this work as they fled Ohrdruf. As Eisenhower would later learn, some twelve thousand prisoners from Ohrdruf had been forced on a death march to Buchenwald, some forty-five miles away, as the Allied troops closed in. In one section of
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