Issue of YANK newspaper - first publication in the United States of the atrocities committed by the Germans in the ...

Issue of YANK newspaper - first publication in the United States of the atrocities committed by the Germans in the death camps, May 1945

Issue of the American newspaper YANK - First exposure of the atrocities committed by the Germans in the death camps. New York, May 18, 1945. On the title page are photographs of American prisoners captured by the Germans and found in Nazi concentration camps after being horrifically tortured.

The first pages of the issue are entirely dedicated to the events in the death camps following their liberation by the Allies, and testimonies from prisoners at Dachau, Buchenwald, and others camps are included here. "Now American soldiers have opened some of the wounds of Hitler's Reich. They have liberated concentration camps and prison camps and found starvation and murder and torture practiced as Nazi weapons upon American prisoners of war with the same merciless violence with which they had long been inflicted on Germany's slave laborers of "inferior races". They saw shattered bodies that once belonged to good American names like Smith and Jones and Johnston, saw emaciated bundles of men with faces like skulls who used to ride the New York subways to work in their civil lives or plow...The 90th Infantry Division moved into Flossenburg, Germany and found a concentration camp where 12,500 prisoners had been butchered...The SS guards, who retreated before the Americans... had burned 300 prisoners alive because they could not take them along..." In Struthof, France, GI's found a model concentration camp. "It might have been a camp of the Civilian Conservation Corps", said a New York Times writer. It had an untouched crematorium for burning bodies, and racks, like a butcher shop, for holding the bodies before burning. The list goes on and on. At Auschwitz...3,500,000 Jews were killed. At Buchenwald, Germany 50,000 prisoners were killed. At Nordenhausen, Germany 2,700 Allied and political prisoners were killed. At Gardelegen, Germany, 1,100 prisoners were killed by strangulation and fire. You can go on counting for a while. The full list is not in yet, and will not be until long after the war...".

Among others things, the writer Saul Levitt brings testimony from an American soldier who was one of the liberators of Buchenwald, recounting: "At Buchenwald B, I saw baking ovens. Instead of serving to bake bread, they were used to destroy people...There was also a table where gold fillings were removed from skulls...There were long steel stretchers on which the prisoners, still living, were rolled into the stinking heat of the ovens. I don't know how far German efficiency went, but I'm sure the heat from so many tons of sizzling flesh could not have been wasted. Perhaps it was piped through asbestos conduits to heat the quarters of the SS guards...". There is also a harrowing testimony about the appalling condition in which soldiers of the Fourth Division found the prisoners in the Ohrdruf concentration camp: "Some of the bodies were dressed in rags and some were completely naked. One body was that of an American soldier, and the few survivors pointed him out..."

The issue is accompanied by the first shocking photographs from the death camps published in the United States. Disturbing images taken by the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Among them: bodies of political prisoners in a mass grave in Nordenhausen, a prisoner - former American soldier who was tortured in the Limburg camp and survived, a horrific pile of bodies at Buchenwald, German civilians from Weimar forced to look at the corpses of the victims, countless bodies scattered on the ground in the Nordenhausen concentration camp, and more.

23 p. 36 cm. Complete issue. Minor tear at the top left of the title page. Overall good condition.