Concentration Camp liberation

Ski8799

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Band of Brothers episode; Why We Fight.
The episode starts out as a continuation from episode five as members of the US Army from the 101st Airborne make their way across Southern Europe and enter Bavaria.
It picks up near the end of a long journey for the 101st as they have had a rough couple of years, but are nearing the end of their journey. The German Army has suffered major defeats and allied forces have actually entered Germany with Berlin as a final destination. After a little down time, the boys get orders to proceed on a foot patrol through an area of the Black Forest. The patrol starts out as any ordinary patrol would but an eerie peacefulness had descended on the first elements of the patrol as they approach a clearing.
Upon entering the clearing, the soldiers of the 101st are dumbfounded as they
encounter a horrific site. A heavily fortified encampment with hundreds upon hundreds of emaciated uniformed prisoners. Pale and dangerously thin, the prisoners appear too weak to cry out to the startled American soldiers. Once the soldiers break open the gate and enter the encampment, what they find is beyond imagination. Dead bodies strewn about the courtyard and the countless barracks entrances, grown men sobbing like young girls and more and more prisoners emerge from the hastily constructed billets.
The soldiers of the 101st do everything in their power to immediately care for the severely malnourished prisoners; a trip to the nearby German village secures quick rations for them but they are ordered to stop their distribution of food by the Brigade surgeon. He informs the soldiers that the newly liberated prisoners are in such a severe form of malnutrition that their nourishment must be supervised or they could literally eat themselves to death. This comes as difficult news to the prisoners as well as the soldiers as they want so desperately to immediately ease the suffering of the prisoners.
This heart wrenching experience has changed this band of brothers from the 101st as they now seem to understand what it was all for; the hell that they had experienced over the last two years was now suddenly worth going through as they liberated these
fortunate survivors of the Holocaust.
 
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