German Civilians forced by the US Army to Visit Buchenwald. Image by Margaret Bourke-White
(source)
Margaret Bourke-White – who also took this famous photo of Gandhi – was with General Patton’s Third Army when they reached Buchenwald on the outskirts of Weimar. Patton, outraged by what he saw, ordered his police to get a thousand civilians to make them see with their own eyes what their leaders had done.
Bourke-White said, “I saw and photographed the piles of naked, lifeless bodies, the human skeletons in furnaces, the living skeletons who would die the next day… and tattoed skin for lampshades. Using the camera was almost a relief. It interposed a slight barrier between myself and the horror in front of me”.
LIFE magazine decided to publish these photos in their May 7, 1945 issue many photographs of these atrocities, saying, “Dead men will have indeed died in vain if live men refuse to look at them”. (source)
Margaret Bourke-White prepares to take a photo of corpses, April 16, 1945
(source)
More iconic images of the holocaust. More information on the holocaust. See the whole series on iconic images of human rights violations.
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