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“The same day [April 12, 1945] I saw my first horror camp. It was near the town of Gotha. I have never felt able to describe my emotional reactions when I first came face to face with indisputable evidence of Nazi brutality and ruthless disregard of every shred of decency. Up to that time I had known about it only generally or through secondary sources. I am certain, however that I have never at any other time experienced an equal sense of shock.
“I visited every nook and cranny of the camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that `the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda.’ Some members of the visiting party were unable to through the ordeal. I not only did so but as soon as I returned to Patton’s headquarters that evening I sent communications to both Washington and London, urging the two governments to send instantly to Germany a random group of newspaper editors and representative groups from the national legislatures. I felt that the evidence should be immediately placed before the American and British publics in a fashion that would leave no room for cynical doubt.”
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe: A Personal Account of World War II, pp. 488-489 (in the edition Google Books can search, anyway)
No, he didn't use the word "holocaust" or "final solution". But he sure mentioned it.
He didn't use "Holocaust" or "Final Solution" or describe gas chambers, and the camp he visited is acknowledged as a "normal" concentration camp by historians, which did not have a homicidal gas chamber. So the brutality he mentioned is simply the terrible conditions in the concentration camps as Germany was being bombed at all sides at the end of the war.
There is no mention of gas chambers or an extermination plan in any of those works. A passing reference to "Nazi brutality" at a concentration camp which nobody claims had gas chambers is the closest thing there is, and it's not even close.
If millions of people were exterminated within gas chambers disguised as shower rooms, this would without a doubt be the most unusual event to happen in WWII. It wouldn't escape mention in any of these memoirs unless they privately dismissed those claims as propaganda which would fall by the wayside like WWI propaganda about "corpse factories."
The word holocaust was not in use yet at the time he wrote that book.
While Eisenhower did not talk about it specifically in that book, he was aware of gas chambers and crematoria. In 1944 he received a report from Captain Yurka Galitzine on the Natzweiler concentration camp that specifically mentions mass executions (by firearm), experimental gas chambers, and crematoria.
Colonel William Quinn wrote a detailed report on Dachau that Eisenhower received in 1945 that described the gas chambers and crematoria in detail, with photographic evidence. The report also references a contemporaneous account, a diary of an internee who recorded his experiences.
The contemporaneous documented testimony and photographic evidence seems pretty overwhelming.
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Eisenhower didn’t capture any concentration camps with gas chambers, though.
It’s worth noting that the Auschwitz commander admitted to running a death camp before his execution, the Soviet didn’t make a particularly big deal out of it(after all, they did worse things), but they said it was a death camp, and the committee at Nuremberg said it was a death camp.
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