I wonder which camp Ike visited? By that time four of the five main extermination camps had been closed and major efforts made to expunge the evidence and attempts were made to do the same at Auschwitz which was liberated by the Soviets. Horrific though the camp that Ike is referring to may have been it would not be the worst and matters would have been even worse than he believed. Or did the Soviets invite him over to Auschwitz?
Thanks Pretty bad but there was worse to come. The Soviets must have known from the camps they had already liberated. Did they not tell the Western Allies or did they tell and not be believed?
However despite this traces were left and there was evidence that killings had taken place on a massive scale even if the exact numbers could not be determined and because Auschwitz was a combined labour and extermination complex it was impossible to disguise what had been going on there and the Soviets took it in Jan 1945 so the Western Allies could have been prepared well before April
Could imagine in January 1945 the STAVKA had it´s main focus on the Weichsel-Oder Operation and it´s operational expansion towards Berlin. Furthermore there was the Yalta-Conference who surely enjoyed Stalins utmost attention. And IMHO there was even in soviet circles a certain inability to imagine the full extent of Nazi atrocities...
Accounts at the early Russian liberated camps were not believed to be true by the Western Allies. They understood the camps existed and had been liberated but refused to believe the full extent of horrors that were there, blaming Russian anti-german propaganda.
