Did American soldiers kill German guards when they arrived at the concentration camps in World War II?

 You couldn’t miss the tanks, they rolled in. It smelled grotesque, sweet, and thick and a smell that wouldn't ever really leave. We could hear wind clouds churning, making only noise to cover their gusting dust over this horror we were about to break open.

Bodies. Piles of them. Discarded like trash, dead, scattered across the landscape in grotesque heaps. Everywhere skeletal remains, some barely recognizable as human, were stacked like cordwood. A wall of shoes, now piles of shoes, stripped away of any life, left to rot. They had wide eyes and trembled as the townspeople swore they didn’t know. Anyone who claimed they didn't know, had their head in the sand for far too long. For years the skies had been painted by the smoke from the crematoriums, a reminder of the destruction below.

We made them face it. So we showed them what they’d let happened. The bodies were dragged away, by the each a forgotten life, to be chucked into mass graves, and we watched. And what about the guards who did these unspeakable things? And there were no second chances; they met their end quickly.

But the images stick around. The eyes of those who’d turned a blind eye, the horror, the faces of the dead. They promised we would liberate, but what we found was not liberation at all, but hell. We did things in that hell. Things we’d never live down. Sometimes you don't have a choice against evil that deep—but it still didn't make it easier to swallow. Not then, not now.