BUCHENWALD LIBERATED.
An element of the US 6th ('Super Sixth') Armored Division's, 9th Armored Inf.Bn. [Task Force 9 - Combat Team Bennett].entered the vast Thuringian camp at approx.1600 on April 11th, 1945. Driving in an M8 Armored recon vehicle, Capt.Frederic Keffer, Spokane, Wash., T/Sgt. Herbert Gottschalk, Bronx N.Y., Sgt. Harry Ward, Seattle, Wash.,driver, and Pfc.James Hoyt, Oxford, Iowa, radio-operator were the first US Army troops to enter the infamous 'KL Buchenwald' eight (8) kilometres north of Weimar on the Ettersberg. There, an estimated 21,000 political and military prisoners, slave-laborers, and Jews, including ca.900 children, were found in various states of starvation and broken health after years of terror under the Nazi regime. Although it was not a site of planned Genocide, mass killings of prisoners (including military POWs) took place during the war through selection, labor, disease, starvation, and medical experimentation by the SS. More than 250,000 people were held captive in the camp between 1937 and 1945, and an estimated 50,000 prisoners died during this period.
[See also: http://www.koch-athene.de/6th/weimar-buchenwald/bu-hot2.htm and:
http://members.aol.com/super6th/ - 6th Armored Div. Vet website.]
More about conditions at the camp(s) before and after liberation can be found in these works:
David A.Hackett (trans.), 'The Buchenwald Report,'[Westview Pr., 1997] ISBN 0813333636 - this is the original report prepared for the Allied Control Commision for evidence in the Nuremberg trials, which one of the prisoner contributors, Eugen Kogon, based his seminal work, 'Der SS-Staat', [republished in many printings over the years as 'The Theory and Practice of Hell.']
Robert H.Abzug, 'Inside The Viscious Heart: Americans and the Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps,' [Oxford Univ.Press, 1987] ISBN 0195035976. (Recounts the discovery of the Camps through US GI's viewpoint.)
Wolfgang Sofsky, 'The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp,' [Princeton,1999] ISBN 0691006857. (An excellent scholarly examination of the hellish KZ experience.)