The graves of prisoners who died at the Nordhausen concentration camp were laid out in two rows on May 3, 1945. On April 10, 1945, a unit of the U.S. First Army entered Nordhausen. The Nordhausen concentration camp was opened by soldiers of the U.S. Army's 1st Third Armored Division and 104th Infantry Division. Hundreds of corpses of former Nazi slave laborers were found. The corpses, reduced to skeletons, were buried by German civilians who were forced to dig graves for mass burials.
On April 3, Allied bombing targeted Nordhausen. The bombs hit a small camp and killed about 1,500 prisoners of war. The Nordhausen concentration camp, located about 193 kilometers southwest of Berlin, was the Nazis' base for the production of V-missile weapons. on April 4, the Nazis were forced to make the excruciating death march from Dora Mittelbau to Bergen-Belsen and Ravensbruck. on April 7, the Allied First Army began an eastward march toward Leipzig and Dresden and the VII Corps crossed the Weser River as they began their eastward march toward Dresden. With sporadic resistance, the VII Corps moved eastward into the southern Harz Mountains; on April 11, the 104th Infantry Division entered Camp Dora and the 3rd Armored Division entered the Boelke-Kasernet sub-camp. Bodies and the dying were scattered and piled on top of each other. Abandoned by the SS were some 3,000 corpses and about 750 emaciated survivors; on April 12, the announcement of President Roosevelt's death compounded the somber events for the Allied forces.
The Nordhausen concentration camp was a massive complex of concrete facilities and hangars. There were no sanitary facilities, and prisoners remained in the hangars night and day, without food, until they died. Even those in good health were fast becoming extremely weak. For prisoners who were already exhausted and ill, the brutal living conditions were miserable and indicated immediate death.
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