DACHAU CONCENTRATION CAMP
Nazi racial policies scapegoated many groups in European society, including gypsies and homosexuals, but especially Jews. The result for the Jews was the Holocaust in which nearly six million men, women and children were herded into concentration camps. Most of these people were put to work for the Nazi war machine, producing supplies for German armies. Many of these people literally worked to death. Many others, however, were sent directly to death camps like Auschwitz where they were systematically exterminated.
When the war finally ended in 1945, liberating armies opened the concentration camps and freed their inmates. The Soviet and American military commanders who first saw the effects of these camps were shocked and sickened by the treatment of people in these hellish places. They found common graves stuffed with the dead; among the living, they found breathing skeletons like this man below.
Source: Bison Collection