What was the one thing German soldiers were forced to do after the war ended in 1945?


 The most terrifying aspect of the end of WW2, is not the battle, but what the Allied forces made the German soldiers to do when the fighting was over. I was doing some research for a history project when I came across the fact that when General Eisenhower found the concentration camps in 1945 he was so outraged and angry that he decided to teach the surrendered Germans a lesson they would never forget.

Many German soldiers and local residents claimed they had no idea of millions and millions of people being killed close by. To silence these excuses, the Allies came up with what they christened as forced confrontation. In towns like Gardelegen, the Nazis had attempted to hide their crimes by either dumping thousands of their victims into shallow pits or by burning them in barns just before the beginning of the arrival of Allied troops. The Americans and British assembled the German soldiers and forced them to dig up the dead with only shovels or occasionally bare hands.


This is the really haunting part. Records show that the Allies frequently forbade the soldiers to wear gloves or masks while working. They wanted the men to sense, feel, smell on their skin the grim reality of the regime they had gone to war against. After digging up the bodies, the soldiers had to transport the bodies to new burial places and administer each victim a proper burial. Eisenhower wanted to make sure that no one will later claim the reports were created or propaganda material.


By forcing the soldiers into contact with the victims and to see their faces, the Allies left no space for denial of the war crimes. It's amazing how, instead of just handing over the perpetrators to the law to be imprisoned, they made the soldiers actually dig up the truth and see what they had actually let happen.

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