how to make the German people realize the horror

Ohrdruf-Nord was not a proper concentration camp. It had no gas chamber or high-performance crematorium. The deaths there were caused by disease and neglect, helped along by overwork and brutality. The inmates had been employed at digging a tunnel, probably as a site for an underground factory. A thousand had been there a week before the Americans came. In the succeeding days the guards had marched those who could walk away to the east. At noon on the 6th two busses had come to take out the bedridden sick. By then American artillery fire could be heard coming close, and the commandant lost his nerve, sent the busses away empty, and shot the prisoners with his pistol. A dozen men had hidden in the camp buildings and survived to tell about the last days [231] at Ohrdruf-Nord and to identify the dead, among whom was an American pilot who had been imprisoned there after being shot down nearby and had contracted typhus. Among the first persons that Lt. Col. James H. Van Wagenen, the 4th Armored's military government officer, took on a tour of the camp was Albert Schneider, Buergermeister of Ohrdruf. Schneider had been a party member since 1933, but he had also been an honest and conscientious mayor, and he had not skipped town ahead of the Americans as other Nazi officials were doing. He was shocked by what he saw. Admitting there had been rumors in the town, he claimed simply not to have believed Germans capable of such atrocities. On Van Wagenen's orders, he agreed to summon twenty-five prominent men and women who were to be taken to view the camp the next morning. In the morning, a soldier who had been sent to fetch him after he failed to appear at the stated time found him and his wife dead in their bedroom, their wrists slashed. G-2 investigators concluded the Schneiders' suicides were motivated by sincere shock and regret over what had happened in their town. One of the most frustrating psychological problems of the early occupation was going to be how to make the German people realize the horror of the concentration camps. In Ohrdruf, however, after the Schneider's' suicides and after others had been taken to see the camp, the citizens seemed to be convinced. 12 (1) Hist Rpt, Third Army, G-5, 1-30 Apr 45, in SHAEF G-5, 17.16. (2) Hqs, 12th AGp, P&PW, Daily Summary of Intelligence, 12 and 15 Apr 45, in SHAEF G-5, 17.11, jacket 9.