How Allied photos revealed true horrors of the Nazi death camps
Images of what the Allies found when they liberated the Nazi death camps towards the end of World War II brought the horror of the Holocaust to global attention.
Many of the ghastly pictures were at first held back from the broader public, partly out of concern for those with missing relatives.
The concentration and extermination camps were liberated one by one as the Allied armies closed in on Berlin in the final days of the 1939-1945 war.
The first was the Majdanek camp near Lublin in eastern Poland, whose surviving prisoners were freed by the Soviet Red Army on 24 July, 1944. The last camps to be liberated were Theresienstadt, near Prague, just after Germany surrendered on 8 May, 1945, and Stutthof near Gdansk in northern Poland.
'Death Marches'
In June 1944, SS leader Heinrich Himmler ordered some camps to be evacuated before they were reached by Allied troops, with prisoners to be transferred to other camps.
SS officers were ordered to cover up all traces of crimes before fleeing.
The sprawling Auschwitz-Birkenau complex in southern Poland, the largest concentration camp, was gradually dismantled from mid-1944 and 60,000 emaciated prisoners forced onto "Death Marches" to other camps.
When the Soviets arrived on 27 January, 1945, only 7,000 prisoners remained, mostly those who had been unable to walk with the others.
The discovery of the first camps had little impact on the public at large because the images were not widely shared.
Read more on RFI English
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