Desperate for slave labor to continue the doomed war effort and fearful of camp survivors exposing Nazi crimes, German decision-makers put in motion nearly three-quarters of a million concentration camp prisoners. Of this number, 250,000 died in these death marches.

For the last several days of its existence, before soldiers of the United States Seventh Army arrived, Dachau was a small, self-enclosed universe of decay and death.

Tensions arose almost immediately in Buchenwald between liberators and liberated.

American personnel faced a humanitarian catastrophe when they liberated Buchenwald Concentration Camp. 

Sgt. Thomas Sweeney, 71st Infantry Division, was one of the many American medics and liberators who found themselves woefully underprepared in rendering aid to survivors of Nazi atrocities. At the Gunskirchen Concentration Camp in May 1945, they found thousands of individuals barely clinging to life.

The Red Army's liberation of Majdanek in July 1944 was one of the most significant moments in the history of World War II and the Holocaust.

A look back at some of our best past programs covering the Liberation of concentration camps.

Mauthausen, one of the worst of the Nazi concentration camps, was liberated by the American 11th Armored Division on May 5, 1945.

On April 4, 1945, the US 4th Armored Division and 89th Infantry Division of the Third US Army came face to face with the horrors of Nazi brutality. The men discovered Ohrdruf, a Nazi labor camp and a subcamp of the Buchenwald system.