Inside the Vicious Heart: Americans and the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps [Paperback]

Forty years ago Allied soldiers liberated Buchenwald, Dachau, Belsen, and other concentration camps, and came face to face with the human ruins of Nazi slave labor and genocide. What they saw transformed the definition of evil in the Western mind.Inside the Vicious Heartcaptures the shock of that discovery, telling the story of the camp liberations in the words of Eisenhower, Patton, and Bradley, Joseph Pulitzer, Margaret Bourke-White, and numerous American GIs who were there to bear witness.Forty years ago Allied soldiers liberated Buchenwald, Dachau, Belsen, and other concentration camps, and came face to face with the human ruins of the Nazi system of slave labor and genocide. What they saw transformed the definition of evil in the Western mind.Inside the Vicious Heartcaptures the shock of that discovery by telling the story of the camp liberations as experienced by American GIs and other eyewitnesses, including Eisenhower, Patton, Joseph Pulitzer, and Margaret Bourke-White. Through their diaries, letters, and photographs we see how those Americans finally made the world believe what until then had only been rumored.Robert H. Abzugis Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas, Austin, and the author ofPassionate Liberator: Theodore Dwight Weld and the Dilemma of Reform. This book helps to keep live that which must not be forgotten. --David B. Chesebrough,Illinois State University

This sensitive book chronicles the liberators' psychological and emotional reactions to the concentration camps...An important contribution. --Religious Studies Review

Abzug tells a true and terrifying story of what the American troops found when they entered Germany in 1945. Included are the accounts of Generals Eisenhower, Patton and Bradley, Editor Joseph Pulitzer, novelist Meyer Levin, Photographer Margaret Bourke-White, and American GIs, who desperately tried to save the few remaining survivors. -lS&