In April of 1945, Van Loon helped liberate three concentration camps. One was Mauthausen in Austria and another was near St. Georgian, Gusen. He described this as a very “grisly” situation, accurately depicted in the movie The Holocaust. He knew the situation was big but did not know so many had died. Cremation made counting hard, and the numbers were released years after the war. Many German civilians claimed they knew nothing of the camps. The present day neo-nazi that claims the deaths never occurred bothered him, and he feared history will repeat itself if we are not careful. The Poles formed a camp government and used captured German guards as horses before they killed them. The Americans looked the other way. The men, women, and children were skin and bones; some were naked. They fed them soup several times a day. Stacks of naked bodies littered the camps. He wrote, “Man’s inhumanity to man – it’s unbelievable,” (Van Loon 10). A man who spoke seven languages came to the camp to act as an interpreter in exchange for food.