"There were a number of large German concentration camps near here. We have seen many of the persons liberated by the British from these camps. You remember, I used to put quotes around the word 'liberated.' It was something of a joke before. We used to speak of 'liberating' a fat chicken or a dozen eggs. It is not a joke any more.

"We have seen truckload after truckload of freed Belgian, Dutch, and French prisoners go by on the road. The strongest of them wave weakly or smile at us. I am sure that some of them will die from the exertions they made to show their joy. We threw what cigarettes we could get to them, without regret, though we have no prospect of getting American cigarettes for a good while.

"One truck stopped by our leaguer [in Sulingen]; it was the sick truck, carrying men who had not even the reserve of nervous energy to stand or sit in a truck. The first food they had been given had caused diarrhea, and the men had to be carried to the roadside. They smelled, not from filth or diarrhea, but with the smell of death. Prisoners had died at such a rate that they could not be buried, and those who lived had to lie among the rotting bodies. . . .

"Those were all political prisoners. Yesterday [at Diepholz] we saw military prisoners in as bad shape. There were several Americans among them, one of whom after four months had shriveled to little but a skeleton and was incapable of moving or speaking. He had shriveled till he looked like a man of 90, or an exhumed corpse. Those who were capable of talking spoke of forced marches, nude, in the dead of winter, of being bayonetted by guards, of having vicious dogs loosed on them, of stragglers being beaten or shot. . . .

George Rock. Chapter 13. History of the American Field Service, 1920-1955. New York 1956

"It is really too much to take in," L. M. Allen wrote. "The camp is set off in the middle of some woods . . . completely cut off from the outside world. It is surrounded by barbed wire, set out a mile or two from the actual borders of the camp, with signs warning that any trespassers would be shot without hesitation. The camp itself consists of many, many one-room, one-storey, wooden buildings, in which the inmates stayed. These were individually barbed-wired off, while large stockades were built all around the buildings for extra guard protection.

"When we took the place there were approximately 65,000 people in it of all nationalities---Poles, Russians, Czechs, French, Greeks, Belgians, etc., and all these people were practically dead as the result of systematic starvation. All looked like living skeletons and were generally suffering from tuberculosis and typhus plus any number of other diseases and complications. But worse than this were the dead lying around. Approximately 30,000 dead were lying around the camp, still unburied, if you can imagine that. No care whatsoever was taken of the inmates. As people died they were merely shoved out of the windows by the others, if they were strong enough. In many of the buildings, however, the people were too weak even to do that, and the bodies remained in the crowded rooms to rot. These rooms were in many cases so crowded that there was not even room for them to lie down without lying on top of one another. In these rooms many of the dead were stuck to, or had grown to, the bodies of those still alive, and they had to be pulled apart. Now I know this sounds absolutely incredible---I am not trying to impress you by all these things. . . .

"I went all through this camp, through many of the various buildings, and please bear in mind that what I saw was all almost two weeks after this camp had been liberated and that during those two weeks the entire camp had been cleaned out as much as possible. There is still a lot to do. People are still dying . . . but nothing can be done for them. These bodies are merely dragged outside the doors and left lying on the ground, nude or seminude, and are then collected by Germans, who drag them along the ground by hands or feet and toss them on a truck. They are then dumped in . . . mass graves. . . . I looked in one of those mass graves, and I must say it isn't a pretty sight. Hundreds of bodies, all skin and bones, lying bent and tangled in all kinds of weird and horrible positions, and all piled on top of one another. It is really impossible to describe a scene like that.

George Rock. Chapter 13. History of the American Field Service, 1920-1955. New York 1956

"Our work there," J. M. Evans wrote, "was almost entirely ambulance work, although we did some of the stretcher-bearing too. This consisted of going into the huts, removing the people's clothes, putting them on stretchers, and carrying them to our cars. There were crews who had special suits for the work, but sometimes we had to help out. Many of those fellows caught typhus, so toward the end they ran short of help. Our job was to evacuate the people from the camp and take them to the 'human laundry.' In the human laundry there were about 20 tables, two German nurses to a table. The people were offloaded from our ambulances by German orderlies---that is, captured German soldiers. The people were carried to the tables and given a complete bath, a haircut if necessary, and then dusted thoroughly with antilouse powder. They were then wrapped in clean blankets and taken in decontaminated ambulances to the former German barracks. . . . There they were cared for by the British nursing sisters whom we had transported to Belsen before we started to work there. The people had to be fed; special diets for each disease and condition were called for. There were special buildings allotted to special diseases. As you can imagine, caring for these people was a pretty grim job, and the sisters deserve a tremendous amount of credit. It was a thankless job, for once the people were well enough to walk many left the buildings and immediately hunted up the garbage pits. Their animal instincts still predominated, and they took that much longer to cure."

George Rock. Chapter 13. History of the American Field Service, 1920-1955. New York 1956