Finding food and water for that many prisoners was a challenge, and civilians often came to the perimeter looking for loved ones who might be inside.īy May 8, the war was over in Europe. In Ingolstadt, 30,000 prisoners were held in a single hastily-secured camp. Then the unit broke up and fanned out, peppering the landscape with cages, some large and some smaller. On April 12, the MPs took over another former concentration camp, to use as a cage for German POWs. Bauknecht visited that camp, referring to the carnage as "the infamous atrocities." Eisenhower to admit the sight made him sick. There, piles of emaciated corpses and evidence of a mass burning of bodies led top general Dwight D. "We interrogated them, got information, found out where the next battle might be coming up," he said.īy April 1945, Allied troops had advanced far enough into Germany to liberate the first of many concentration camps, Ohrdruf. They put their prisoners in "cages," which he described as any structure that could be secured: a house, a barn, any building. The MPs moved along with the infantry, rounding up prisoners as they went. "They were still fighting through the hedgerows," Bauknecht said. 29, 1944, Bauknecht and his fellow MPs crossed the English Channel into France, three months behind the Allied invasion on D-Day.
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