The Personal Diary of Leonard K. Nicholson – “Covering the 10,000-mile journey with American editors to witness and attest to Nazi atrocities – Report from the journey of Leonard Nicholson and senior American newspaper editors to the death camps of Dachau and Buchenwald. [New Orleans], 1945 – first edition. Harsh photos. Rare.
A rare booklet documenting the personal journey of Leonard Nicholson with a delegation of American journalists who visited the concentration camps of Buchenwald and Dachau, recently liberated by the Allied forces, to witness firsthand the atrocities of the Nazis. Nicholson, along with senior editors from leading American newspapers, including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, WEEK, American Magazine, and many others, departed from the United States on April 23, 1945, to trace the horrors that had taken place inside the death camps. Nicholson recorded each day of the harrowing journey in this booklet. The purpose of the journey was to present irrefutable evidence to the American and international public about the crimes of the Nazis, through direct reporting by journalists, in order to counter Holocaust denial and convey the facts as witnessed through Western eyes. Upon arriving at the camps, Nicholson writes that even after liberation, sick prisoners were still dying at a rate of 30 per day. He provides detailed descriptions of the crematorium structure and the execution process: “In the same building where the crematorium is located, there is a room for executions and punishments. From the walls of this room protrude iron hooks, similar to those in a meat market…”. At Dachau, corpses still lay on the ground. The group observed bodies that, according to Allied medical officers, had been injected with malaria pathogens as part of Nazi experiments conducted in the camp. Nicholson writes that at Dachau there were still living prisoners suffering from extreme malnutrition, and that nothing could be done to save them—their digestive systems were already irreparably destroyed. He further describes horrific scenes involving starving children: “Some of the effects of starvation we saw were horrifying. There was a Jewish boy who said he was 17. He looked no older than 12. He was the sole survivor of a family of eight…”. Near the camp stood the last train car that had transported the final victims: “The sight that stunned me most was that of long freight trains on side tracks, filled with human corpses in every stage of decomposition. Apparently, the Germans had planned to move the cars before the Americans captured the camp, but they ran out of time. The cars were so full that hundreds of bodies had fallen off the roofs and lay scattered along the tracks.” In light of the horrific sights, one of the editors commented: “I think everyone in America should be obligated to see these pictures of horror. They’ll just have to look at them. We had to smell them.”
He also documents the vast rescue operation underway in Buchenwald and Dachau, and expresses his deep emotional distress during a visit with the delegation to a hospital in Dachau, where the liberated prisoners could barely lift their arms to wave in greeting: “In summing up the inhuman cruelty carried out in these camps against helpless prisoners by Hitler, his men, and the SS guards, I can only say that it is beyond my comprehension how any group of people could harden themselves to such a degree that this brutality became mere daily routine.”
The booklet includes shocking photographs from the concentration and extermination camps – corpses of victims, cells, medical instruments, and torture equipment. In the final pages, under the heading: “Master Plan in Nazi Brutality – Convincing Proof Found, Group Reports”, the report concludes:
“Actual Nazi methods ranged from deliberate starvation and routine beatings to sadistic tortures so horrifying and grotesque they cannot be described publicly. Murder was commonplace… In these tortures, most of the Jews in the concentration camps had already been exterminated. After the Jews, the victims who suffered the most brutal treatment were the Russians and the Poles…”. On the last page appear the printed signatures of the senior editors who participated in the journey.
Rare. Only four copies are recorded in the WorldCat global library catalog, three of which are held in libraries in New Orleans itself.
[24] pages. Very good condition.
