Archival

To the whole free world, the stunning news has come that Franklin Roosevelt is dead.

Kirk Saduski

April 12th, 1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt has suffered a cerebral hemorrhage while in Warm Springs, Georgia. The American president is dead. At 7:09 p.m. in Washington DC, Harry Truman raises his right hand and takes the oath of office. Within hours, Secretary of War Henry Stimson notifies President Truman of an urgent matter, the bomb. There is no modern equivalent to the month of April, 1945, a period of massive rapidly developing events. Allied forces and the Soviet Red Army are closing in on Nazi Germany. The death of FDR and the suicide of Adolf Hitler occur within weeks. And the American generals see concentration camps firsthand for the first time. Joining us today, John C. McManus, author of the books "Hell Before Their Very Eyes: American Soldiers Liberate Concentration Camps in Germany, April 1945," as well as a trilogy on the US Army in the Pacific War, and a newly published version of "American Courage, American Carnage." Thank you, John, for joining Don and me today.

John McManus

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Kirk Saduski

It's a real honor. Thank you so much.

Donald Miller

It is.

John McManus

Appreciate it, thank you.

Kirk Saduski

Well, let's get right into it. April, was it that T. S. Elliot said, "April is the cruelest month?"

Well, in some ways, because American, I should say Western Allied troops, begin to discover something that was just almost unthought of before. You take it from there.

John McManus

Yeah, so you see this process in which Allied soldiers are discovering the Holocaust, as we eventually call it. Now, that term doesn't come into play really until the late 1970s, but that's the general term we've settled on. Most of the American soldiers had no idea of the existence of these camps, much less how bad they were. So the process begins on April 4th, 1945, when the 4th Armored Division and elements of the 89th Infantry Division liberate a camp called Ohrdruf. Now, this was just a low-level labor camp that is kind of an adjunct of Buchenwald, which is better known, of course. And it is absolutely horrifying. There are thousands of bodies collected outside the camp because the SS had pulled them out and had tried to basically incinerate them before the Americans came. The Americans also saw a few survivors in odd uniforms that they couldn't process, and that's of course the famous prison garb of concentration camps. So this begins a discovery process that goes on for about the next month. And the thing that really struck me in writing that book about this is how ignorant the soldiers were, and not just the privates, but I'm talking the generals too. Everybody on down had really very little idea of what this meant. Okay, so that had consequences. And the main consequence was, we're not prepared to deal with this. So the average American soldier, when they come into Ohrdruf, or about a week later, Buchenwald, Dachau at the end of the month, name a camp, their first inclination when they see people starving and in terrible condition is to feed them. And what do we have? We have a lot of food. We have hypercaloric K and C rations and all this stuff. That's the last thing we should be doing, because in many cases, that will be too much for their system and they'll be killed, they'll die. So you have some really gut-wrenching moments of American soldiers who were literally killing them with kindness. And that's something these guys had to process the rest of their life. The other elements of this, just from the American soldier's perspective, there's a lot of guilt. There's guilt at the revulsion that many feel when they encounter these survivors, many of whom are 70, 80 pounds underweight, they have typhus, they have dysentery, they're terribly dehydrated, they're traumatized like you wouldn't believe, and they wanna reach out and touch you and hug you. And many of the Americans are just revolted by them. And there's a tendency to dehumanize, to say, "These poor creatures," or whatever. And that was a tough thing for many the Americans. The second thing is that they have to continue to incarcerate them, because if you're a survivor at one of these camps, the first thing you wanna do is get out of there once the Americans come. But we can't let you do that because wandering around on your own out in Germany, you're gonna starve to death. So we need to give proper medical care, food, so on and so forth. So many of the Americans, it was a very tough thing for them to see the looks in the eyes of the people they had just liberated, that they were gonna have to tell them, "You have to stay here."

Kirk Saduski

You mentioned that even the leading generals were unaware. There's some very famous, I mean, obviously General Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander, insisted on seeing it, and then insisted on sending the local Germans through, and I want you to tell us about that, and also some of the other generals that accompanied Ike.

John McManus

Yeah, so about a week or so after Ohrdruf is liberated, Eisenhower, Bradley, Patton, Walton Walker, several other high-ranking officers, went through Ohrdruf. Eisenhower, to his credit, I think was the first one really to anticipate Holocaust denial. He wanted everything documented, he wanted to see it with his own eyes so that he could always say, if someone ever denied, he could say, "I was there, I saw it."

Kirk Saduski

And what's surprising though, again, Don, that you would think, "Well, of course, they had the intelligence, Ike and Patton, Bradley, et cetera, they would have some idea," but just the visceral reactions says otherwise, no. Of course, they knew Jews were being mistreated, and I wanna get into some specifics in a minute, Don. But these are hardened men, right? They had seen everything, these are the leading generals for the Western Allies, and yet even they're shocked.

Donald Miller

A lot of them wanna take action, allow their troops to take care of the Germans.

John McManus

Well, there's a lot of anger simmering over this and--

Donald Miller

Yeah, must've been hard to control.

John McManus

It was, and I think really this becomes a leadership problem to try and maintain discipline when naturally many of the soldiers would wanna have reprisals. If they capture guards, for instance, who are they? You assume that they are the perpetrators. They may or not be, because of just how things are in chaos at that point. Dachau you have famously executions that go on there. I think it's amazing that the discipline was as strong as it was when you're considering all of these camp discoveries and liberations that are going on throughout the spring. They're rife with the same kind of tension. Eisenhower immediately took steps to make sure that this would get known in the outside world. He invited parliamentary delegations, congressional delegations to come and see this, and also media. So there were select media from various major newspapers and electronic media, including famously Edward R. Murrow. So in terms of documenting what we come to call the Holocaust, Eisenhower takes steps very early. And he's also, Don, to your point, he's really worried about soldier discipline, because if we have these reprisals, he's worried what that will mean for war crimes that the Allies are gonna try the Nazis for after the war.

Donald Miller

Well, a lot of those reporters, some of those reporters were in there with movie cameras.

Kirk Saduski

Don, tell us about Lee Miller. I know, particular, you were writing about Lee Miller for a while. Tell us about what her experience was.

Donald Miller

Lee Miller is a fashion model, Vogue, who through a series of circumstances, gets involved with the war at Saint-Malo, but gets pulled into it and becomes a war correspondent, I think one of the best in Europe. I was telling someone earlier that her accounts, which she would send back to Vogue, London, Vogue US, the assignment was generally 1,000 words or so. She'd write 6,000, 7,000. And they're in her archive in England, and it's fantastic reporting, it's, in my estimation, the best reporting in Europe. She's working for the Air Force. The Air Force allowed her and a couple of other women photographers, they gave them planes, pilots, things like that. And they were supposed to just fly around Germany and examine the damage. But in walking through the countryside and things, they discovered a lot of small camps. And her and her gang saw this one small camp up on a hillock. And they went up there and the gates were open, there were prisoners hanging from the wire. They had been electrocuted, and they were still there. And she couldn't even photograph, she was so stunned. What the Nazis had obviously done is, they left, they activated the wire, opened the doors, told the prisoners they could leave, but they couldn't go out the main gate, they had to go over the fence. I don't know how many died like that. And she hadn't been to a major camp before. And what happened with a lot of these reporters is, after the war, they suffered post-traumatic stress disorder. She became an alcoholic. She was never the same. Margaret Gellhorn was never the same.

John McManus

Maggie Higgins was deeply affected too, Dachau.

Donald Miller

Higgins, although Higgins went on to Korea.

John McManus

Some heavy combat in Korea.

Donald Miller

Heavy combat.

John McManus

Yeah, yeah.

Donald Miller

Yeah, won a Pulitzer. I mean, she was only 19 years old, smuggled her way onto it.

Kirk Saduski

Well, again, what's interesting is, when you put it into context, it would be one thing is if you came across, anybody, man, woman, young or old, came across as horrific a manmade phenomenon as there has ever been, but when you consider the world had been at war by this point for almost six years. And Warsaw had been bombed, Manila had been raped, I don't think that's too strong, and on and on, but there was no film, so nobody had really seen it. And so for these people at that time, despite the context of extreme universal violence, weren't prepared for what they came across it. They think that's--

John McManus

It's a different kind of thing, I mean, it's one thing if civilians are killed in the context of combat operations, or even terror bombings, or whatever, which for the bombers are still quite disassociated on some level. This is face-to-face, deliberate, calculated atrocities toward your fellow human beings, to degrade them and dehumanize them and humiliate and destroy them in any way you possibly can. And it seems a trite point, but I always think it's worth making, that we all came of age in a world in which we knew these things had happened. You could learn about what had happened in World War II, and we knew that humans were capable of this. But for the average GI encountering this in 1945, there is no historical base point, none, to see exactly what could be possible. And now it's right in front of you, and of course, like you said, Kirk, the images hadn't quite been out there just yet, and now they're going to be, as we've discussed, but also the smell, the feel of it, the personal aspect of this was so difficult and traumatic. And in some ways, what drew me to this topic is, I tend to be a combat-oriented historian, is how many people I knew or how many accounts I saw from combat soldiers, infantry soldiers, who said, "You know, the thing that was sort of tougher for me to process was encountering a camp," not just liberating, but there's the liberating experience and there's the witnessing experience. Two very different things, of course, but still, you're in the mix. And that for some was more difficult to process as time went forward than their combat experiences.

Kirk Saduski

I'll be personal for a second. When we were developing "Band of Brothers," we invited Major Richard Winters to our offices in Santa Monica, Playtone. And he spent the day with us, and he walked us through his experience and the experience of Easy Company. And then we got to towards the end of the war, he stopped and he had a little bit more of a difficult time. And Richard was a, Dick was a very eloquent man, but he was struggling, because he was about to tell us about stumbling across a camp that I believe was in the Dachau system. It was a labor camp. And all of a sudden, he lost almost the power of articulation, even 40, 50 years later, because he said exactly what you just said, John, "We had no frame of reference." This was a man, and Easy Company, these were men who had been in constant combat for almost nine months now, right? They had seen things, and some cases, maybe done things that were very difficult. This caught them up short. He said, "We had no frame of reference." He used a phrase I'll never forget, "It was as if we came across a field of martians." You know you're seeing something you've never seen before and you don't know what part of your imagination should be absorbing this. And it was very difficult.

John McManus

There's no way to process that.

Kirk Saduski

No.

John McManus

All of this is happening too, by the way, in the context of military operations that we are carrying on. And this isn't safe in April, 1945, our casualty rates in the US Army are almost as high as they were the summer before in Normandy. So there's a lot of ways still to get killed at the end. And so our main preoccupation is that, pursuing the war to its end, and then we've gotta deal with this humanitarian operation. This is a really daunting thing from Eisenhower on down. And much less what this means for the liberated, how they're gonna process all this and what this means. There's this great ecstasy of liberation, but then what? And that's very vexing too, because then you're into the DP camp thing and all that, so.

Donald Miller

Going through Germany, I mean, escapees from some of the, Americans who escaped from Zemke's Stalag and things like that, have written accounts that are just absolutely harrowing, driving through small towns where children were grouped together on a corner with little signs on them saying, "This is my name, please take me in." Four-year-old children, unbelievable.

Kirk Saduski

In the book, "Paris: After the Liberation," authors Anthony Beevor and Artemis Cooper paint a vivid portrait of Holocaust survivors arriving in France.

Patricia Clarkson

On April 14th, 1945, at the Gare de Lyon, an official reception committee, including General de Gaulle, waited to welcome back the first group of 288 women. Wellwishers carried lilac blossom to present to them, and women brought lipsticks and face powder to distribute. They expected the returning prisoners to look thin and tired from their experiences, but not much more. If you imagined the reality of the virtual skeletons dressed like scarecrows. Some were too weak to remain upright, but those who could, stood to attention in front of the welcoming committee and began to sing the Marseillaise in cracked voices, their audience was devastated.

Kirk Saduski

Back home in America, President Truman had an impossible task of assuming the presidency after the sudden death of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin explains FDR's impact and legacy, and the early days of President Harry Truman. Talk about FDR's health in those last few months.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

Yeah, he was diagnosed in March of '44 actually with congestive heart failure. And in those days, they just didn't have as much we could do about it as we do now. Had he been with that kind of illness today, I think they could've probably kept him going much longer. But by '45, and March, and especially by February and March after he's back from Yalta, it's really hurting him. And he has periods of time where he is exhausted, and he kept going. And what happened is they decided that he would go to Warm Springs in April. And Warm Springs had always been magical for him, the place where he had recovered from the initial polio attack. And every time he went there, somehow the relaxation of being there away from the turmoil of Washington had gotten him better. So they all had great hopes when he went to Warm Springs that somehow the magic would happen again. And it seemed in that first week he was there that his color was better, his appetite was better, and the people who were close to him thought, "Oh my God, it's working again." It was partly, of course, because Lucy Mercer, the woman he had once loved and almost gotten a divorce over, but agreed to stay with Eleanor and Eleanor agreed to stay with him. So he hadn't seen her for a period of time, she was there during that period. Finally on the day that he died, and he woke up that morning feeling pretty well. He'd worked on a speech that he was gonna give later the day before, and was feeling good about that speech, he went through his mail, and then just about time when they said that lunch would be ready in 15 minutes, he told the portrait artist who was making a picture of him to give to Lucy's daughter, "I've only got 15 minutes now left," meaning for lunch, but then at a certain moment, he just got a terrible pain in his head. He put his hand on his forehead and he said, "I have a terrific pain," and collapsed. And they called the doctor in, they brought him into his bedroom, and the doctor knew then that he'd had a cerebral hemorrhage. So it was really something.

Kirk Saduski

Yeah, I think, let's go back, Doris, and in only the way you can, help us understand how our country and then how the world discovered that Franklin Roosevelt had died, and what the impact of that had.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

Well, what happened is, once he died, they decided to call the White House 'cause Eleanor was giving a speech and they didn't want to talk about it publicly until they could reach Eleanor. So they reached Eleanor and she came home and found out about it, and then the word went out. And in America what happened was, then when the word spread, there were strangers on the streets who would just come out of their houses and they would put themselves crying. And people said you could walk down the street and see people literally crying and they would hold hands with one another or hold hands around their shoulders just to lean on one another. And when Churchill heard the news, it was said he heard the news after midnight, and he said he felt as if he had been struck by a physical blow, that it was an irreparable lost. When they had left Casablanca together, Churchill had said, as Roosevelt's plane flew off, "I don't know what I'd do if anything ever happened to him. He's the greatest man in the world." So there was a real sense of that partner being gone. And that's when newspaper editorials talked about the passing of a great person. "The New York Times," as I said earlier, said, "Men 100 years from now will get on their knees and they will thank God that Roosevelt was their leader during this time." For many people, they'd not known any other president, young people for 12 years. So there was a real sense of people said, "My friend is gone, my friend is gone." Can you imagine that? Millions of people feeling like he had been their friend. That's how he addressed them in those fireside chats. "My friends, I've come to speak to you tonight and explain a problem to you." So that voice, that smile, that optimism, that constant belief that he had from the beginning of the war to the end, that somehow we would get through. There was a real rupture, I think, in American life at that time.

Kirk Saduski

Speaking of what "The New York Times" said, one of the most moving, I think, tributes to Roosevelt was the simplest, many newspapers, I'm thinking particularly most famously of "The New York Post" on the day that he died, "The papers in those days ran, I don't know if there was weekly or daily, Army-Navy casualty figures. And on April, I guess it would've been 13th, "The New York Post" and other papers basically put Franklin Delano Roosevelt, commander-in-chief, as the number one casualty of the war.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

That's so moving, I've seen that as well. And there's something about that, you realize obviously the pressures of the war, what he had to go through, maybe not taking care of himself as much as he would've had he just been another person just worrying and going to the doctor the time. The first casualty of the war, yes, that was so moving to see that.

Kirk Saduski

Well, let's talk about the man who was there then. And that of course was Harry Truman. No president that I know of, no man I can imagine, please correct me, has ever been thrust into a situation quite like Harry Truman?

Doris Kearns Goodwin

Oh, I mean, think about it. I mean, he'd had so little contact with FDR during that period of time, not surprisingly perhaps. I mean, FDR is at Yalta during that launch period of time, and then he comes home, and then he goes to Warm Springs not long thereafter. Truman not even privy to what the decisions had been made and what the progress was on this experimental bomb, the atomic bomb, and thrust into a situation overnight. I mean, just he gets called into the White House, and he was in the middle of playing poker, I think, or being with friends at any rate. He gets called in there, and Eleanor is the one to tell him, "Harry, the president is dead." And it is remembered evidently that he couldn't speak for a moment. And then he just said, "What can I do for you?" And then Eleanor says, "No, what can we do for you? Because you're the one in trouble now." So, I mean, I can't imagine what that moment was like for Harry Truman, except there was something about this man, this humility, this plain spokeness, this sense of self, this confidence that really was there underneath him that allowed him to be the right man to follow Roosevelt. I mean, it seemed at first when he gave a statement to the press where he said something like, "I felt like the sun and the moons and the stars all fell on my head," that was not a great statement because then people would wonder, "Well, if he feels that way, then what are we supposed to feel, right? We need strength from our leader." But somehow he was able to make decisions. Lyndon Johnson said to me one time that he just envied Harry Truman because Harry Truman was able to make that ultimate decision about the atomic bomb without looking back, that as far as he knew, Harry Truman didn't go over and over in his mind, say, "Could I have done that? What could I have done differently?" Which is something Lyndon Johnson did all the time. So there was a real inner strength in this plain-spoken man from Missouri, that, again, America was very lucky that he's the one that followed FDR, even though it might not have seemed so at the moment when he took the presidency.

Kirk Saduski

We're gonna continue with Truman in a minute, but before we leave, and we can never actually really leave FDR, particularly if we're talking about World War II, he's always around the corner. But there is an interesting thing because just a couple of weeks after President Roosevelt died, Adolf Hitler died, committed suicide actually, in Berlin. And I've always been struck by the parallel between these two men. They came into power into office right around the same time, and then they died within two weeks of each other. And I've always kind of thought, and here, we're strolling down a historical fantasy lane again, Doris, but I've always thought in some ways Roosevelt was put on earth by God to challenge Adolf Hitler. Their times in power are absolutely parallel. And it was almost as if FDR stuck around long enough to ensure that that guy wasn't going, he wasn't going to win, he wasn't going to persist.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

I think it's so interesting, there's a moment when FDR was about to give the inaugural address in 1933, and somebody said to him, "You know, if your program works, you're gonna be one of the great presidents in history," meaning that he'd already started the program in New York of really allowing the government to come in and step in and have a major hand in dealing with the Depression in a democratic way. And then the guy said, "But if your program fails, you're gonna be one of the worst presidents." And he said, "No, I'll be the last American president." He knew that what was online was democracy. And he decided when he went to that congress for that emergency session, that he was gonna remain a democratic leader, he was gonna ask for government help to deal with the economic problems of the Depression, which the Republican, Hoover, had not been willing to give, and yet he was not gonna become a dictator. And the same Depression that had happened all through the world produces a Stalin, produces a, well, produces a Mussolini, produces a Hitler. So it's so interesting what you say about the fact that their tenure was at the same period of time almost exactly. One goes the Democratic route and the other one goes the dictatorial route. One destroys their people, the other one keeps their people going and uplifts them and makes them a better people by the end of it. What a story it is. And again, so sad that it didn't allow him to see that ending, but the country knew. And people live on in the memory of others, and Roosevelt will live on. And so even though he might've lived another couple years, maybe he could've gone to VE Day, and we would've liked that to happen, but he's there, I mean, he's absolutely there no matter what. He's there in the memory of all those people that he had led in the Allied forces and he's there in Churchill's mind as well.

Kirk Saduski

On April 15th, 1945, just three days after the death of FDR, millions of Americans turned on their radio and tuned in to CBS News. Journalist Edward R. Murrow delivered a groundbreaking report from Buchenwald concentration camp. A portion of that report from CBS News archives will be played now. This broadcast is 80 years old, a shortwave transmission.

Edward Murrow

Permit me to tell you what you would've seen and heard had you been with me on Thursday. It will not be pleasant listening.

Kirk Saduski

Murrow describes the dead and dying all around him.

Edward Murrow

It appeared that most of the men and boys had died of starvation. But the manner of death seemed unimportant, murder had been done at Buchenwald. I have reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it, for most of it, I have no words. If I have offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I'm not in the least sorry.

Kirk Saduski

Earlier I spoke with Rebecca Erbelding of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum about the legacy of this broadcast. By April of '45, we are starting to come, Allied troops are beginning to come across camps in Germany, concentration camps, war camps. Tell us about that. And I eventually wanna get to Buchenwald and Edward R. Murrow.

Rebecca Erbelding

Yeah, liberation happens very, very quickly in the spring of 1945. Really in a span of about six weeks, the Allied forces are liberating hundreds of thousands of people in concentration camps, large and small, throughout really central Germany at this point. So the military, the Allied military, as they are attempting to win the war, and in the final weeks of the war, trying to race to Berlin, trying to race to meet up with the Soviets and actually cut any sort of escape off, they hope. They are also dealing with a humanitarian crisis that no one had really anticipated, nobody had planned for, and nobody had ever experienced anything like this before. It is triage and chaos in the spring of 1945 in Europe.

Kirk Saduski

Tell us what General Eisenhower, when he got word of the first camp I think that was liberated by the Western Allies.

Rebecca Erbelding

Yeah, the first camp with prisoners still surviving that was liberated by the Allies was Ohrdruf. It was liberated in early April, 1945. It was a sub-camp, it was not a main camp, but it was a medium-sized camp. When the Allies liberated it, and news came to Eisenhower as supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe, he says, "I want to see this." And he flies into the area to tour it. He is with Patton at the time. And they tour around, Patton refuses to go into one of the buildings, saying he thinks he'll be sick if he goes in and sees anything more. But they witness piles of corpses, they witness gallows that had been set up, they witness a pile of ash and bone that had been left behind, and they talked to some of the prisoners. Eisenhower writes to the Pentagon and says, "I could scarcely believe what I had seen." And he makes a request that journalists and editors, newspaper journalists and editors from the United States, be brought to the European theater immediately and that members of Congress be brought immediately. The same day that Eisenhower tours Ohrdruf, Franklin Roosevelt dies of a cerebral hemorrhage in Warm Springs, Georgia. So Roosevelt does not live to see any images of liberation. And as Roosevelt's funeral is being organized and taking place, congressmen and senators boarded military planes and they go to the European theater. And I believe they are still on the ground when Dachau was liberated. And so some of them tour Dachau, and same thing with the newspaper reporters, they tour Buchenwald, and they write back bespoke articles to their newspapers. Joseph Pulitzer tours and writes for his newspapers all about what they are seeing. And so these are trusted Americans, these are people that were imbued with a lot of respect. And so they are sharing what they have experienced. And to many Americans, this was the first long-form testimony that they are getting. And then in the mail a few days later, they'll receive some sort of letter from their son or from their daughter saying, "I saw this." Eisenhower encouraged soldiers, even as they are fighting, even as they are still racing towards Berlin and still racing towards the front, he said, basically, "If you're in the vicinity of a camp, you should tour it." He wanted Americans to witness this so that it would never be charged as propaganda, so that Americans would know that this was real and that this had happened. And so many soldiers wrote back and said, "I want you to publish this in the paper. I want you to share this letter. I want you to keep this letter. This is the most important letter I've ever sent you." Many of them wrote, "Now I know what I was fighting for."

Kirk Saduski

Well, let's talk about, you mentioned the journalist that Ike invited over. One of them, maybe the most famous, was Edward R. Murrow, who by this point, in 1945, was easily the most recognized and influential and important American broadcast journalist. Tell us about what happened, what was his experience when he visited one of these camps?

Rebecca Erbelding

Yeah, Murrow did not wait for the invitation. Murrow was already on the ground in Europe and embedded, kind of following some of the armies around. And he was present at the liberation of Buchenwald. He was there within 24 hours and toured it on April 12th, 1945. So again, the same day that Eisenhower is in Ohrdruf and that Roosevelt dies. And it takes him a couple of days to issue a report about it. I think people speculate now, and I don't know if he ever said this himself, but people speculate that it took him a couple of days to kind of process what he had seen. He gives this radio broadcast, about 11 minutes, in which he talks about what he sees in Buchenwald. He talks about watching men fall over dead. He talks about interviews that he did with people. He talks about looking at corpses in piles. And he says that the people that he talked to were thinking about Roosevelt, were talking about their gratitude to the Allies. And he said, "This is a massive tribute to Roosevelt that the liberated were so relieved that Roosevelt and his men had come." But he concludes it by saying, "Murder has been done at Buchenwald. God alone knows how many men and boys have died there during the last 12 years. Thursday, I was told that more than 20,000 in the camp, there had been as many as 60,000. Where are they now?" I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchwald. I reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it, for most, I have no words. If I've offended you by this rather mild account of Buchwald, I'm not in the least sorry." And we estimate that about 50% of the American people heard that broadcast. It was huge. And to hear it from Murrow, from one of the most trusted journalists in the United States, saying, "I personally saw this." And for a man that Americans are used to having all the words, for him to say, "I have no words that I can use to describe this and properly convey this to you," I think it was a really important moment.

Kirk Saduski

Yes, and I because of his credibility, and again, 50%, 50%, that's an extraordinary number, obviously demonstrating how trusted, how important Edward R. Murrow was to the American war effort. As you said, this most eloquent of men couldn't find the words. And I think part of it when you listen to it is the sense of immediacy. You really are with someone who's coming across this unprecedented thing. It's almost as if God had put the most articulate, eloquent possible person at this place, and he couldn't speak. And it was the perfect witness, that he would be there and would be there and get that firsthand account. And if he couldn't process it, how was the rest of the world gonna process this?

Rebecca Erbelding

Murrow is a journalist, he's seen some things. And then I think about the 18 and 19-year-old boys who are witnessing this, who also have no context, who are trying to figure out how to articulate this to their families back home, who have never been to Europe, have never seen war, and to say, "This is the thing that's going to haunt me for the rest of my life, not the Bulge, this," it really shows how horrific liberation was and how important American witnesses knew it to be already. They came across this and they knew that this was going to be really, really important to capture.

Kirk Saduski

Join us next time as we turn to the Pacific. The Battle of Okinawa is underway. Efforts to build the atomic bomb reach climactic stages. And President Truman faces more far-reaching decisions than almost any president before him.