A subsequent report from the National WWI Museum describes columns of liberated prisoners marching in formation and notes that many were eager to find Germans and kill them.

This description reflects that the impulse for revenge was neither individual nor irrational.

It was collective and organized.

The difference between the violence in Bkenvald and the violence in Dhau or Guzen was the degree of institutionalization.

In Bkenvald, the prior clandestine organization allowed revenge to operate with some selectivity.

Specific accused were identified.

Concrete accusations were made and decisions were executed within an alternative framework of authority.

In Dhau and Gusen, the violence was more diffuse.

multiple simultaneous episodes, spontaneous assaults, and lynchings without formal accusations.

This difference does not imply that one form of violence was more legitimate than the other.

It implies that the collapse of the SS system generated different dynamics of immediate justice depending on the internal structures of each camp.

The operational problem for the Allied forces was that no protocols existed for managing this transition.

Military manuals included procedures for the surrender of enemy forces, the custody of prisoners of war, and the administration of civilian populations in occupied territory.

They did not include procedures for facilities where three groups with completely reversed power relations coexisted, unarmed SS guards who had been executioners, liberated prisoners who had been victims, and allied troops who had to simultaneously rescue, punish, and document.

The real capacity to impose order in this context depended on contingent factors.

The number of troops available, the physical condition of the prisoners, the presence or absence of internal leaders with recognized authority, and individual decisions of officers without clear guidance from higher commands.

The documentation of this violence is structurally uneven.

Dao generated an investigative report because the executions occurred in the presence of US personnel and because the episode threatened to become a public scandal if leaked without institutional control.

Ordruff generated photographic evidence because Eisenhower ordered the entire site to be documented.

Bookenval generated later testimonies because the internal clandestine organization survived as a structure and was able to articulate its own narrative.

Gusen and other subcamps generated fragmentaryary evidence because the executions occurred on the margins without institutional witnesses and because survivors who participated had incentives not to leave a record.

This documentary inequality does not mean that the violence was lesser in less documented places.

It means that what is preserved in archives reflects both the occurrence of events and the institutional conditions that allowed their recording.

The British forces faced similar dynamics with different institutional responses.

Bergen Bellson, liberated on April 15th, became the emblematic case of British management of a humanitarian disaster.

The British negotiated a 48-hour truce with the local German command to transfer authority without combat, specifically to contain the outbreak of typhus, affecting 70% of the 60,000 living prisoners.

Commander Ysef Kramer and 48 SS members remained in the camp until April 17th, assisting in the transition.

This controlled presence prevented episodes of immediate violence comparable to Dhaka, not because the prisoners in Bergen Bellson lacked a desire for revenge, but because 70% were physically unable to move and because the British forces prioritized sanitary control over any other consideration.

The result was different in terms of subsequent justice.

Bergen Bellson generated the first major trial of camp crimes before a British military tribunal in September 1945 known as the Bellson trial.

45 accused, including Kramer and SS personnel, were formally tried.

11 were sentenced to death and executed in December 1945.

This judicial framework was possible because the British forces had secured custody of the SS personnel from day one and because the institutional priority was to document, preserve evidence and build a judicial case that could stand internationally.

The difference between the British response in Bergen Bellson and the American response in Dhau was not moral.

It was institutional and operational.

How did the Allied armies react to the Nazi executioners in the West? The liberation of the camps left the Allied armies facing an immediate dilemma.

They had come to defeat an armed enemy and suddenly they were managing the collapse of a criminal system with thousands of living victims and perpetrators mixed in the same space.

The initial US reaction in places like Dhau showed this transition in a raw way.

There were episodes of SS guard deaths on the very day of the liberation in an atmosphere of rage and chaos and the very fact that the seventh army ordered an internal investigation weeks later indicates that for the institution it could not be dismissed as just fog of war.

Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Whitaker’s report, Assistant to the Inspector General, existed precisely to reconstruct complaints of mistreatment and deaths of German guards, and it established that shootings and summary executions had occurred in the area related to the train and the coalard.

But that same case shows the second part of the pattern.

After the initial outburst, the US Army returned to its logic of control, perimeter, custody, interrogation, and evidence preservation.

In other words, the brief impulse for punishment tended to be followed by a pragmatic decision.

The camp could no longer be a scene of vengeance.

It had to become a managed place with protected prisoners and detained suspects.

This shift was not only driven by ethics or abstract discipline.

It was driven by operational necessity.

Epidemics had to be prevented.

Internal lynchings had to be stopped.

Weapons had to be secured.

SS had to be separated from the vermach.

Names had to be taken.

and what had just been discovered had to be documented.

The very existence of US military reports about Dhau and what was found in the camp reflects that urgency to register and frame the horror as evidence, not just as an impression.

And in parallel, the narrative of many liberating units reveals something important.

Improvised justice was a risk not only morally but politically.

As soon as the world knew what was in the camps, it would also look at how the liberators behaved.

Dao therefore remained as a double wound, a symbol of the Nazi crime, and at the same time a reminder that even a disciplined army could break down for moments in the face of evidence.

The British, while sharing the shock and the impulse for punishment, had a different situation in Bergen Bellson from the very first minute.

It was not just a camp.

It was a sanitary catastrophe with typhus, dissentry, thousands of unburied corpses, and tens of thousands of people on the brink of death.

The British authorities arrived in Bellson on April 15th, 1945 and found themselves in a scenario where order meant above all hygiene, burial, disinfection, and isolation.

Within this framework, a form of punishment emerged that had both a practical and symbolic objective, forcing the available perpetrators, namely SS officers and also German prisoners of war employed as labor, to collect bodies, dig graves, and bury the dead.

Whether or not it was forced labor in the strict legal sense, it was a coercive imposition of tasks associated with the crime applied in a context where the main immediate enemy was disease and decomposition.

The museum and journalistic documentation of the liberation of Bellson records both the magnitude of the disaster and the fact that British forces forced German personnel in custody to participate in the burial and cleanup of the camp in Bellson.

Moreover, this behavior had a messageddriven logic.

The liberation was widely reported and became a turning point in British public consciousness.

Mass burial not only prevented an outofcrol epidemic, but also served as a way to deny any excuse of we didn’t know.

The Imperial War Museum itself highlights the discovery of thousands of bodies and around 60,000 survivors in extreme conditions.

And this framework explains why the British prioritized visible and urgent actions.

mass graves, bulldozers, doctors, quarantines, and immediate disaster management.

The punishment here, blended with logistics, forcing the perpetrators to bury the dead, was a public health measure and a brutal way of confronting them with the material result of their system.

If, in the west, improvised justice was a brief outburst followed by institutional control.

In the east, the immediate postwar period moved across even rougher terrain.

First, because the Eastern Front had been a war of annihilation since 1941, with levels of mass violence, reprisals, and destruction that surpassed any comparison with the West.

Second, because the Soviet advance not only liberated but occupied, reorganized, and consolidated a new apparatus of power.

And third, because the Soviet relationship with justice was intertwined with security structures like the NKVD and purging mechanisms that mixed the capture of Nazi criminals with political persecution in the liberated territories in Poland and other areas of Eastern Europe.

The presence of the Red Army and the NKVD was experienced by large sectors as the shift from one form of domination to another rather than a return to sovereignty.

Polish sources explicitly described that between 1944 and 1945 practices of cleansing and coercion were deployed which included detentions, terror and political control within a framework where Soviet force acted more as a conquering power than as an ally.

This is important for the topic of the camps for a simple reason.

In that context, the fate of many suspects, including members of German structures, did not depend on transparent procedures in the western style, but rather on security decisions, interrogations, and internment mechanisms.

It was not always spontaneous revenge.

Many times it was a system.

A clear window into this approach appears in what happened later, already in the German territory under Soviet occupation.

There the Soviet administration created special camps to intern tens of thousands of people as part of the denazification and security of the new order.

The Saxonhausen memorial, for example, documents that the Soviets established 10 special camps in their occupied zone and that Zaxonhausen hosted one of the largest around 60,000 detainees with thousands dying from hunger and disease between 1945 and 1950.

This is not an emotional response from soldiers to a liberated camp.

It is a state policy that used mass detention under harsh conditions as an instrument of control in the postwar period.

Therefore, when talking about Soviet justice versus American justice, the central difference is not in the existence of punishment, but in the type of machine that administers it.

In the American case, even with episodes of reprisal, the movement tends toward formal procedures, military investigation, reports, prisoner classification, evidence preservation, and later tribunals.

In the British case at Bellson, punishment was immediately expressed as forced labor, and as public confrontation with the bodies while simultaneously organizing a massive sanitary response.

In the Soviet case, the dominant logic was embedded in security and occupation structures, arrest, internment, purging, and control that did not only target the obvious culprits, but also extended to broad categories of dangerous individuals for the new order.

In Dhao, for example, research and historical work on the last days of the camp show that once the SS control was broken, there were attempts at retribution by liberated prisoners against former captives, something that the Allied troops later tried to contain, operating under a logic of order and custody.

The idea of handing over can exist as a punctual gesture or as an omission, not intervening in time, looking away for a few seconds, or not having enough men to prevent a crowd from rushing in.

And in a place where the evidence of the crime was mere meters away, where the wagons with dead bodies, the barracks of the sick, and the unburied corpses were visible at a glance, those seconds could be decisive.

In the east, however, the issue is not understood solely by what happened inside a particular camp, but by the wartime culture with which the Red Army arrived.

The Eastern Front was not a tougher campaign than others.

It was a war of annihilation with brutal occupation, mass killings, and systematic destruction that affected millions of civilians.

Works of historical dissemination based on academic research highlight this combination of combat and occupation violence as the core of the German Soviet conflict.

It was not only about defeating the enemy, but about a confrontation shaped by criminal policies and constant brutalization.

This left a psychological and cultural mark on the soldiers and the liberated populations.

Liberation was not only about rescue but also about reclaiming territories where the trauma was both total and recent.

That is why when the Red Army entered Awitz on January 27th, 1945 and found thousands of abandoned prisoners and traces of extermination, they did so as a force that had just crossed a continent of human ruins.

In this context, the Soviet logic tended to prioritize two things at once, advancing and securing.

Documenting the Nazi crime was important, but the focus on security and political control also weighed heavily, often overriding any western idea of a preserved scene or custody for tribunal in the classical sense.

When discussing the direct handover of guards to survivors in Soviet occupied areas, the problem is that often the boundary between permission, tolerance, or the inability to prevent it is poorly documented.

Much of the postwar violence in Eastern Europe occurred outside formal records, local revenge, settling scores with collaborators, attacks on fallen authorities, and episodes on the margins of the new power.

Recent studies on violence in the 1944 to 1945 period in Eastern and central eastern European regions often describe this period as a transformation of wartime brutality into postwar political and social violence rather than a clean slate.

This helps explain why certain episodes of reprisal may have occurred without being documented in as much detail as a US military report like the one on Dhaka.

Not because they were necessarily more or less significant, but because the ecosystem of documentation, censorship, state priorities, and local chaos was different.

The previous experience of total war also affects how the perpetrator is perceived.

For an American soldier coming from the Western Front, an SS guard might be a prisoner of war who should be separated, guarded, and interrogated, even if the emotional impulse was overwhelming.

In Dhao, the very existence of investigated accounts and the later effort to frame what happened shows the tension between visceral reaction and a return to institutional discipline.

For a Soviet soldier or for liberated populations in the east, the figure of the SS could embody years of occupation, hunger, deportations, and murders on a scale that had redefined the word enemy.

One does not need to romanticize or justify anything to notice the effect.

The more absolute the war, the thinner the line between justice and vengeance becomes.

This is compounded by a key factor.

Command and discipline do not operate the same when the objective changes in minutes.

The liberation of a camp was not a city taken or a hill conquered.

It was a humanitarian emergency with an epidemic threat with thousands of people outside any normal social structure and with perpetrators trying to blend into the general collapse.

The chain of command could be intact, but the type of situation exceeded standard instruction, and here emotional reaction filtered even into professional armies.

In the west, this is seen in the before and after outbursts or isolated abuses followed by the swift attempt to impose control, record, separate, and maintain an institutional narrative.

In the east, control could arrive with another priority.

politically securing the territory, classifying populations, purging, detaining, and framing the future under the logic of occupation, where justice was also a tool of consolidation.

From immediate punishment to Nuremberg, the problem of law.

In the days following the liberation, the Allied front advanced so quickly that at times the war seemed to be disassembling piece by piece.

A road taken, a village surrendered, a German column broken, and suddenly behind a barbed wire fence, a world that didn’t fit into any previous idea of camp or prison.

In this brutal clash between what should have happened, according to formal justice, namely the capture, custody, and interrogation of the suspects, and what actually happened, popular justice, and lynchings, an uncomfortable question arose for the victors themselves.

What happened when the law tried to enter a place where for years the law had been a mockery? The official response, at least on paper, was clear even before stepping foot in a camp.

The 1929 Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War established a basic principle.

The prisoner was in the power of the enemy state, not the individuals who captured him.

He was to be treated humanely and protected from acts of violence, and explicitly reprisals against him were prohibited.

This logic was not meant for peace of mind, but precisely for the worst days, to prevent combat from turning into organized revenge.

But the problem in April and May of 1945 was that the theater of operations was no longer just a battlefield.

It was a succession of discoveries that pulled soldiers out of the mental framework of conventional warfare and pushed them into a moral terrain where the lines became blurred.

In theory, an unarmed and surrendered SS guard would enter the same legal circuit as any prisoner of war.

Identification, custody, transfer, interrogation, and eventually trial if charges existed.

In practice, the very condition of SS carried a different weight.

Not because international law ignored it, as the convention applied to the prisoner as a person under custody, but because the symbol was inseparable from the visible crime around.

The uniform was not just any uniform.

It was the immediate face of a system that had just left behind piled up corpses, sick people without care, crerematoriums, and open pits.

This disconnect between norm and reality exploded in the first moments of control.

In Dhau, for example, the sequence that later generated more controversy showed the exact point where the law broke.

Guards separated from the rest, prisoners lined up, close-range shootings, and episodes where violence became procedure for a while, even if it was improvised.

The legal question was simple and harsh.

When someone surrendered, did they remain enemy or did they become a prisoner under protection? The 1929 text left no room for doubt about treatment.

Custody was the responsibility of the detaining power and reprisals were prohibited.

The real question, the one felt on the ground, was different.

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