However, up to 10,000 Nazi war criminals eventually fled Europe using ratlines such as ODESSA.
Some Nazi guards and personnel were murdered outright upon the discovery of their crimes. Captured SS guards were subsequently tried at Allied war crimes tribunals where many were sentenced to death. Due to the prisoners' poor physical condition, thousands continued to die after liberation. Allied troops forced the remaining SS guards to gather up the corpses and place them in mass graves. Four days later troops from the American 42nd Infantry Division found Dachau. Up to 60,000 prisoners were at Bergen-Belsen when it was liberated on 15 April 1945, by the British 11th Armoured Division. The advance into Germany uncovered numerous Nazi concentration camps and forced labour facilities. Liberation of Nazi concentration camps and refugees: Allied forces began to discover the scale of the Holocaust, confirming the findings of 1943 Pilecki's Report. The Dachau death train consisted of nearly forty railcars containing the bodies of between 2,000 and 3,000 prisoners who were evacuated from Buchenwald on 7 April 1945. By October, thousands had died in the camps from starvation, exposure and disease. The legal fiction circumvented provisions under the Geneva Convention of 1929 on the treatment of former combatants. Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) reclassified all prisoners as Disarmed Enemy Forces, not POWs (prisoners of war). In early April, the first Allied-governed Rheinwiesenlagers were established in western Germany to hold hundreds of thousands of captured or surrendered Axis Forces personnel.
In the three to four months up to the end of April, over 800,000 German soldiers surrendered on the Eastern Front. April also witnessed the capture of at least 120,000 German troops by the Western Allies in the last campaign of the war in Italy. Main article: Timeline of Axis surrenders in World War IIĪllied forces begin to take large numbers of Axis prisoners: The total number of prisoners taken on the Western Front in April 1945 by the Western Allies was 1,500,000.