Follow the breadcrumbs: Lessons from a forgotten Nazi concentration camp, liberated 81 years ago

Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower addresses American paratroopers on D-Day, June 6, 1944. He insisted on visiting German concentration camps firsthand. (U.S. Army/Library of Congress)

The soldiers didn’t need directions. They followed the bodies.

In late April 1945, as troops from the 358th Infantry Regiment of the U.S. Army’s 90th Division pushed into the wooded hills of far eastern Bavaria, they came upon a grim trail leading away from a place few Americans had heard of then or since: Flossenbürg, a Nazi concentration camp near the Czech border.

What they found would stay with them for the rest of their lives.

When American forces reached the camp on April 23, 1945, roughly 2,000 prisoners remained — starving, diseased and dying. Shortly before, SS guards had forced as many as 15,000 others onto a death march toward Dachau, 135 miles away, under orders to kill anyone who could not keep up.

Many did not.

Only about a third were still alive when U.S. troops caught up with the column.

Decades later, a medic, Sgt. Eugene Kliendl, described it simply: “All we had to do was follow the bodies like breadcrumbs.”

 

Inside the camp

Three officers were among the first Americans through the gates that day: an intelligence officer, an interpreter and a regimental surgeon — Maj. James Campbell.

He was 27 years old.

The war was still underway. Shelling and gunfire could be heard in the distance. But what confronted Campbell inside Flossenbürg was something else entirely: a humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in real time.

Naked men crammed together on wooden bunks, too weak to lift their heads. Lice all over them and the soiled straw beneath them. Disease — typhus, tuberculosis, dysentery — spreading unchecked. Bodies reduced by starvation to a state that diagnosis itself became nearly impossible.

In a written report, Campbell described prisoners in “extremis from privation and starvation,” beyond the reach of ordinary medicine.

Near the crematorium, still smoking, he counted 46 corpses “stacked like cordwood.” More lay scattered across the camp. The chief attendant, a Czech prisoner, said through a Polish interpreter that he had been tasked with burning up to 50 bodies a day for nearly six years.

Inside the camp’s so-called hospital, an emaciated inmate — a former nurse from France — showed him a heavy sack filled with human teeth containing gold and silver fillings. Many, the man said, had been pulled from living prisoners, whether necessary or not.

Another inmate, a young Belgian resistance fighter, had risked his life to keep a secret ledger. Inside were the names of 73,246 people he believed had died at Flossenbürg since 1939.

“No exact diagnosis was even possible,” Campbell wrote.

 

System Built for Suffering

Flossenbürg was not an extermination camp like Auschwitz or Treblinka. It was one of nearly 1,000 concentration camps established across Nazi-controlled Europe between 1933 and 1945 — part of a vast system designed to detain, exploit and ultimately destroy those deemed undesirable.

Its prisoners came from across the world, 47 countries in all. Jews were among them, but so were other minorities, political dissidents, clergy, academics, disabled and homeless people, prisoners of war and others swept into the expanding definition of “enemy.”

They were used as forced labor. They were beaten, starved and worked to death. They died by the tens of thousands.

Among them was the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, executed at Flossenbürg on April 9, 1945, just two weeks before liberation.

 

Justice, imperfect and incomplete

After the war, U.S. military tribunals at Dachau prosecuted members of the camp’s staff. In one major case, U.S. v. Joseph Becker et al., 46 officials were charged with murder, torture and abuse.

Most were convicted. Fifteen were sentenced to death and executed in 1947. Others received life sentences or long prison terms.

But many perpetrators disappeared into the chaos of postwar Europe, their crimes unpunished.

Even Allied leaders struggled to comprehend what had been uncovered. After visiting Buchenwald, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote to Army Chief of Staff Gen. George C. Marshall: “The things I saw beggar description.” He insisted on seeing such camps firsthand, fearing that one day the truth might be dismissed as propaganda.

 

A Personal Reckoning

For one Kansas family, Flossenbürg is not abstract history. It is a lasting memory.

Campbell, the surgeon who documented conditions inside the camp, was my father.

A graduate of the University of Kansas School of Medicine, he enlisted in 1942 and served on the front lines across Europe with Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army. He landed in Normandy on D-Day and spent nearly 11 months in almost continuous combat, suffering two wounds, before arriving at Flossenbürg less than two weeks before the war in Europe ended.

Then he came home.

He settled in Lawrence, where he built a life as a family physician — raising a family, caring for patients and contributing quietly to his community. Like many veterans who experienced the horrors of war, he rarely spoke about it. There were only small signs: a flag always displayed on Memorial Day and the Fourth of July, but otherwise a reserved silence whenever the subject arose.

It was not until 1992, eight years after his death and nearly half a century after the war, that his family began to understand.

A group of elderly Flossenbürg survivors organized a ceremony in his honor at the local Veterans of Foreign Wars post in Lawrence. Former soldiers from his unit attended, along with a couple of men who had once been prisoners. They spoke of the day the Americans came — and of the surgeon who tried to save them.

 

Why it still matters

Today, few who witnessed these events firsthand are still alive.

This reality underscores the importance of remembrance, not only of well-known sites like Auschwitz, but also places like Flossenbürg, where suffering was no less real simply because history has paid them less attention.

History does not disappear. It fades, quietly, when it is no longer told.

On the University of Kansas campus stands the Campanile, built in 1951 as a memorial to nearly 300 students who died in World War II. Visitors pass every day, many unaware of its purpose and meaning.

Inscribed in stone above the names is a declaration that still resonates: “Free government does not bestow repose upon its citizens but sets them in the vanguard of battle to defend the liberty of every man.”

Eighty-one years after Flossenbürg’s liberation, the witnesses are nearly gone. The responsibility to remember is not.

Neither is the warning.

Scott Campbell is a retired administrator and researcher at the KU Center for Ecological Research/Kansas Biological Survey. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.