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.
