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20,000 camps, including concentration camps, forced-labor camps, prisoner-of-war camps, and ghettos, among other types. Of the main concentration camps whose names people generally know, nearly every one was responsible for more than a hundred subcamps in its geographical area. Prisoners were often shifted from one subcamp to another as the need for slave labor arose. When they were worn out, they were shipped to a main camp, where they were allowed to starve or sicken and die, or to extermination camps such as Auschwitz, which were equipped for efficient mass murder on a scale heretofore unimaginable.
    Beginning after the invasion of Poland in 1939, the Nazis established thousands of forced-labor camps—some very small, some holding thousands of prisoners—where inmates were housed while being used by the SS, private firms, or government organizations manufacturing war materiel and other goods for the Reich. Prisoners in these camps were not gassed and conditions were better than in the concentration camps, but some prisoners died nonetheless, from exhaustion, exposure, and starvation.
    Prisoner-of-war camps were distinct from the concentration camps. They were harsh but were not part of the SS killing machine. Conditions varied: British and American prisoners fared the best, while 60 percent of Soviet POWs died of maltreatment, exposure, starvation, disease, or outright murder.
    The 4th Armored’s Joe Vanacore recalls no shooting going on as the Americans entered Ohrdruf because the Germans who had been there had fled. Another 8th Battalion tanker, New Yorker Paul Glaz, who was living on Long Island when he was drafted in 1941, confirms that the SS guards had left the camp undefended and believes he knows why. “When they heard the 4th Armored was coming, they took off. We had a thing between the SS and the 4th Armored: one or the other had to go. When you fought them, you didn’t take them prisoner, you killed them. If they got us, they did the same with us.”
    As Vanacore drove his tank inside the camp, he remembers the view through the periscope. “The first thing I saw was this big pile of bodies, about five, six foot high, like a haystack. I didn’t realize they were bodies—my mind didn’t tell me they were bodies until I got a little closer.”
    The men dismounted from the tanks and began to wander, looking around in disbelief at what they saw. Vanacore says, “The smell got me so bad I couldn’t eat for a week.” It’s what stays in his mind, what he thinks of now when he hears people say “the Holocaust was a fake. I really couldn’t stand people to say things like that. We were right there; we saw things with our own eyes.”
    Glaz recalls seeing stacks of bodies. “They laid them up like cords of wood, one on top of the other. They were naked, and they’d laid them up about four foot high, lime in between. It was a terrible-looking thing. I remember it smelled like hell. God only knows how long they laid there.”
    Several GIs who were at Ohrdruf tell of being offered a guided tour of the camp by a healthy-looking, English-speaking man dressed in prisoner garb. But before the tour could begin, a Polish prisoner ran up and clobbered the man in the head with a piece of lumber, following up that attack by stabbing him to death with a bayonet. The attacker explained that his victim had been one of the German camp guards, who, for some inexplicable reason, had not escaped prior to the arrival of the 4th Armored. The episode was recounted in several interviews conducted for this book and can be found in so many oral history archives and military documents that it has begun to sound apocryphal. What militates against dismissing it as such is that it is a scene described by GIs interviewed for this book at camp after camp: inmates discovering former torturers among them after liberation and brutally killing them as the Americans stood by watching.
    Vanacore stayed in the camp for about three or four