introduction on liberators (1000 word)
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A liberator is someone who sets people free from captivity. Abolitionists were liberators who fought to free African-American slaves from bondage in the years before the Civil War.
Both liberator and liberty derive from the Latin liberare meaning "to set free." A liberator is someone who provides liberty, or freedom, to people held captive or repressed. At the end of the Holocaust, allied forces entered Germany and Poland, acting as liberators for millions of Jews held in concentration camps during World War II.
The things I saw beggar description... The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were...overpowering... I made the visit deliberately in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’
–General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s letter to General George C. Marshall dated April 15, 1945.
As the Allies advanced across Europe, they encountered and then liberated Nazi concentration camps and the inmates they found there. Despite the efforts by the Germans to hide or destroy evidence of mass murder, many camps remained intact and still held significant prisoner populations. After Soviet troops liberated Majdanek in July 1944, they proceeded to liberate camps throughout Eastern Europe, including Auschwitz in January 1945. Coming from the west, United States forces liberated Buchenwald and Dachau in April 1945 and the British liberated Bergen-Belsen that same month.
The liberating units encountered deplorable conditions in the camps, where malnutrition and disease were rampant, and corpses lay unburied. The soldiers reacted in shock and disbelief to the evidence of Nazi atrocities. In addition to burying the dead, the Allied forces attempted to help and comfort the survivors with food, clothing and medical assistance. Though official reports were prepared at the time of liberation, individual soldiers often did not record their impressions of the camps until many years later. These accounts, recorded in the form of official unit histories, personal statements, and oral testimonies, provide an important resource in the study and understanding of the