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Gunskirchen is a town in the state of Upper Austria.
On May 4, 1945, troops of 71st Infantry Division and segregated 761st Tank Battalion liberated Gunskirchen. When troops entered the camp, they learned that the Schutzstaffel guards had fled the corpse-littered camp days before. Some 15,000 prisoners were still in the camp. In the months following the liberation, some 1,500 former prisoners died as a consequence of their mistreatment by the Nazism. They were buried in the cemetery in nearby Wels.
One member of the 71st Infantry recounted his first impressions of Gunskirchen:
As we entered the camp, the living skeletons still able to walk crowded around us and, though we wanted to drive farther into the place, the milling, pressing crowd wouldn't let us. It is not an exaggeration to say that almost every inmate was insane with hunger. Just the sight of an American brought cheers, groans and shrieks. People crowded around to touch an American, to touch the jeep, to kiss our arms—perhaps just to make sure that it was true. The people who couldn't walk crawled out toward our jeep. Those who couldn't even crawl propped themselves up on an elbow, and somehow, through all their pain and suffering, revealed through their eyes the gratitude, the joy they felt at the arrival of Americans.--Capt. J. D. PletcherU.S. Army 1945. " The Seventy-first Came…to Gunskirchen Lager". Augsburg.
The American soldiers immediately began requisitioning supplies and transportation from the local town to provide the prisoners with food and water.
The 71st Infantry Division was recognized as a liberating unit by the United States Army Center of Military History and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1988.
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