As US forces approached, Buchenwald's underground resistance organization overpowered the remaining guards and raised a white flag. Soldiers of the 6th Armored Division, Third Army, entered the camp on April 11, 1945, discovering scenes of mass starvation and death that shocked even hardened combat veterans and provided searing evidence of Nazi atrocities.
By the time American tanks rolled up to Buchenwald's gates on April 11, 1945, the camp's own prisoners had already taken matters into their own hands. As SS guards began fleeing the advancing US Third Army, an underground resistance network of communists, socialists, and other political prisoners who had organized in secret for years seized weapons, overpowered remaining guards, and raised a white flag over the camp before soldiers arrived.
What American troops found inside defied description. Roughly 21,000 prisoners remained, many reduced to skeletal figures too weak to stand, amid piles of corpses awaiting cremation. General Dwight Eisenhower, who visited nearby Ohrdruf days later, ordered journalists and members of Congress to see the camps firsthand, insisting the world witness the evidence before it could be denied.
Among the survivors was a teenage Elie Wiesel, who later wrote 'Night' about his experience. Buchenwald had held over 250,000 people since 1937, and tens of thousands died there from starvation, disease, forced labor, and execution. The liberation became one of the starkest documented confrontations between Allied soldiers and the machinery of the Holocaust.