NARRATOR Soviet armies advanced from the East as the American and British closed in from the West. The Nazi cause was lost… But what the Allied forces discovered in the wake of Germany’s retreat was staggering to even the most war-hardened imaginations. Liberator Ed Zebrowski: "…We suddenly entered this area of very dense pine forest…After we penetrated a little more deeply, this horrible stench came to us and we recognized that immediately, it was the stench of death mixed with human excrement, rotting bodies, and we went up the road a little further, and we saw what looked like piles of discarded clothes scattered throughout the pines, until we were shocked to see that the clothes suddenly began to move, and we saw people lifting themselves off of the ground, just as if they were vaporous apparitions, lifting themselves off their own dead bodies…they were speaking to us, with sort of an incoherent babble…we just couldn't believe that anybody could cause human beings to come to this point in their lives…" NARRATOR General Eisenhower wrote: MALE VOICE "… The things I saw beggar description. […] The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where they [there] were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, […] I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in 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'." NARRATOR The liberators struggled to describe it. Liberator Ben Love: “There were human skeletons holding on to the wire fence...men, women, and children, some too weak to stand.... You can’t imagine how civilized man could inflict that cruelty on people who never harmed them.” NARRATOR General Eisenhower demanded that local residents, soldiers, photographers, and journalists tour the camps to witness and record the cruelty that had been visited on the prisoners. Liberator Robert Pearson: “As I walked in ... the first thing you could see was the large number of bodies in a group, all dead obviously, some dressed in civilian clothes...many dressed in the striped uniform.” NARRATOR The prisoners who greeted the liberators were barely alive. Survivor Roger Margosh: “It was hard to believe that we were liberated.... At the time we didn’t have much strength to be joyous.” NARRATOR In the months following their discovery and liberation, nearly a quarter million camp prisoners died from sickness and malnutrition.