Patton, Eisenhower, and Bradley visit a concentration camp, April 12th, 1945
Generals George Patton, Dwight Eisenhower, and Omar Bradley tour the newly liberated concentration camp at Ohrdruf, Germany. A former inmate shows them the gallows where men were hanged for trying to escape and the whipping table where beatings were administered at random. “Just beyond the whipping table,” Patton later wrote, “there was a pile of forty bodies, more or less naked. All of these had been shot in the back of the head at short range, and the blood was still cooling on the ground.” Patton, who has seen men blown to pieces and others lose their entire faces to exploding shells, excuses himself and vomits against the side of a building.