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hours, doing some bulldozing to fill in holes in order to make it more accessible for the Army vehicles that would soon be pouring in to help the survivors and deal with the remains of those who had been killed by the Nazis. At one point he saw a German three-yard dump truck loaded with what he initially thought was sand. “It was ashes from the bodies that they burnt.”
    On the morning of April 5, Lieutenant Colonel Irzyk had his jeep brought up and drove to the area where elements of the 8th Battalion’s D Company had discovered bodies in a wooded area. “I got out of the jeep and walked through the woods, and the first thing I saw was this clearing. And I just couldn’t believe what I saw. I could see an elliptical circle of bodies, with the feet in and the heads out. I was absolutely stunned. I’d never seen anything like this before—never expected to see anything like it.” He recalls gasping audibly; his feet seemed leaden as he forced them to move closer. And he gasped again. “Each man had a little red spot here”—he gestured to his forehead—“shot in the head or in the throat, one shot. And these were thin, emaciated, ragged people in this elliptical circle.” The ground around the bodies was blood-soaked.
    To the battle-hardened Irzyk, the scene was incomprehensible. He kept asking himself, “What is this?” And that morphed into “How did this happen? But that’s step one. And as you get to this building, this horrible smell, you open the door, and there—again—another unbelievable shock. You’ve got these bodies, probably thirty of them—they’re like skeletons without clothing, but all sorts of marks and bruises, covered with lime, like cordwood, from the floor to the ceiling. Just stacked there. So you open the door and you look at—this is unbelievable! You’ve never seen anything like it. You can’t comprehend it. And that was step two.”

    These forty-two emaciated, nude corpses, some showing evidence of having been shot or beaten, were found by the American soldiers in a storage shed at Ohrdruf. This was likely the first instance in the war where GIs saw and described bodies of concentration camp inmates as “stacked like cordwood.” The soldiers were ordered to leave the lime-sprinkled bodies where they lay, so that commanders all the way up to Eisenhower would be able to see them when they came to inspect Ohrdruf .
    Lieutenant Colonel Irzyk, deeply affected by what he was seeing at Ohrdruf, was keenly aware that his men were watching for his reaction to the horror, and he managed to keep himself from vomiting. “Then, as we roam around, the third step was the disposal pits. And by that time, the pattern emerges. You know now what this is. This is totally unexpected, you never heard anything about it, and then suddenly you’re confronted with it. This is unbelievable. It makes an impact that is unforgettable.”
    While the horror of a pit filled with the decomposing bodies of slave laborers is incomprehensible, Irzyk saw something worse as he continued to explore Ohrdruf. “The cadavers were stacked on a grill of logs and rails, and firemen with their spruce and pine kept the fires hot and blazing.” Later, he learned that captured SS guards had told interrogators that between December and April, perhaps two or three thousand corpses had been burned in the woods near the camp. The evidence was all around. “The ash was shin high, and the skulls were all over the place. We saw fragments of skin that had not burned.”
    As a career soldier, Irzyk had not only seen combat in all its ugliness—he’d been trained to expect it, to control his reactions. But nothing he’d ever seen or expected to see matched up to Ohrdruf. “The first two dead Germans I ever saw were in Normandy, when we were waiting to break out, and I was roving, trying to learn lessons. I came across a German tank—it was a light tank, yeah—it’d been knocked out. This is where the 4th Infantry had