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The installation was reported to be somewhere near the town of Ohrdruf, which lay roughly ten miles to the south. Sears’s instructions were simple: “Go to Ohrdruf and look for this complex.”
    Today, that’s an eighteen-minute drive. In 1945, in Sherman tanks with bad guys shooting at you, it took a little longer. Irzyk’s memory of the day is remarkably clear, and his recitation of the story comes to life when he spreads out his wartime-era map on the dining room table of his historic Palm Beach, Florida, home. The route his tank battalion and accompanying armored infantry followed six decades ago is easy to see. “The minute we left Gotha, we started hitting resistance.” Initially, they were attacked by Panzerfausts—the German antitank bazooka-type weapon that resembles the rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) so common today. Those were followed by mortar and small-arms fire, as well as occasional artillery rounds. Nevertheless, “This is April, the ground is dry. I had my tanks spread out, and we advanced.”

    Brigadier General (Ret.) Albin F. Irzyk looks over the map he used to move his 4th Armored Division tank battalion into the area of Ohrdruf, the first concentration camp discovered by American forces .
    At the time, he was confident. “If there was a complex, one of my tanks would have found it. You can’t hide a complex, [or] so we thought as we moved. But we got to Ohrdruf, and it was getting dark. I outposted two towns beyond Ohrdruf,” he recalls, pointing at the map. “And then we dug in for the night.”

    Joe Vanacore used the bulldozer blade on his Sherman tank to push through the gates at Ohrdruf .
    Irzyk had been too busy positioning his troops to focus on chatter that had begun late in the day on one of the tank-commander-to-tank-commander radio channels. They were talking about a lot of bodies being found in the woods.
    It was either late in the afternoon of that same day or first thing the next morning—the surviving GIs don’t agree—when a barbed-wire enclosure was discovered by a platoon of tanks from Company A that had been sent to observe the area to the front of the 8th Battalion. Twenty-one-year-old Joe Vanacore, from Queens, New York, was driving the only tank in the battalion with a bulldozer blade. He calls it the dirtiest job in an armored unit. Whichever of the three companies was in the lead, Joe’s tank was in second position. His job was to clear the roads so the unit’s trucks could get through. If, for example, aircraft knocked out a Tiger or Supertiger tank and it blocked the road, Joe had to use his thirty-ton Sherman to move it—a tricky task considering that the German tanks weighed sixty to sixty-five tons.
    As their tanks approached the barbed-wire enclosure that afternoon, Joe’s view was limited. His world was confined to what he could see through the tank driver’s periscope. He’d been across Europe and into Germany buttoned up. “Half the towns I went through, I couldn’t tell you what they were.” His tank commander, Bill Jenkins, lined him up on the ten-foot-high wooden gates and told him to go, and he pushed them in with the bulldozer blade.
    The gates marked the entrance to Ohrdruf Nord, a subcamp of Buchenwald, also known as North Stalag III. Ohrdruf was a small camp but significant because it was the first one discovered by American forces that contained the bodies of hundreds of dead prisoners as well as starved, frail concentration camp inmates who had managed to survive until the liberators arrived. Even though the American high command knew about the death camps in Poland that had been liberated by the advancing Russian army, they had done nothing to prepare their troops for the possibility that they’d be confronted by the unspeakable evil of the Nazis’ slave-labor death machine.
    A few words about the Nazi camp system. Between 1933, when Dachau accepted its first prisoners, and the end of the war, the Nazis established approximately