What is buchenwald

Doctors say this one will die to-day, that one to-morrow, and others may have a month to live-no more. Such is Nazism. As I accompanied one group of Germans through the hut another victim died and his wasted white frame was lifted easily from the bunk where six other men still lay to the centre of the hut. It is to the everlasting credit of the men at the camp that despite the dire continuous hunger, the children were not in too bad shape, though looking like little old men with yellow faces and sunken cheeks.

Milk was brought in to children immediately. Also brought in in abundance were meat and vegetables from captured German stocks and 20, kilos of bread from German bakeries.

But the feeding had to be tackled carefully. Even so, after long malnutrition a number of inmates experienced stomach aches for the first day or two. They were fed mostly by the Germans with thin barley soup, and so the Americans have started with soup containing meat and vegetables which are gradually being increased.

A start was made with grammes of bread a day, but already it is up to The Nazis destroyed the camp water supply, but the Army has installed a water point and rationed supplies are available. Everyone in the camp is being dusted with D. Among the inmates are 70 doctors of different nationalities.

Not all are fit to work, but those able to are helping. Walter Hummelshein, secretary in to Von Papen when he was Chancellor, who has been a prisoner of the Nazis for four years, told me that four or five days after the bombing of the factory area of the camp last August, Thuelmann was brought to the camp as far as the riding stables where he and nine other Communist leaders were shot.

He was never an inmate and was not killed in a raid. In the riding hall, said Hummelshein, thousands of people had been killed who never came into the camp and never went through its registers. Last July 37 British, American and French officers were brought here and kept separate behind barbed wire. D espite the abominable living conditions and the SS terror, a powerful underground organization was created in the last years of the activity of the camp.

Numerous prisoners sentenced to death by the SS were hidden in the camp. This was made possible by the overcrowding of Buchenwald. Extract from the Nuremberg Trial. Dubost French prosecutor : Could you please tell us about the tattooed skin? Witness Bachalowsky : Yes. Dubost : Please tell us what you know. Witness Bachalowsky : In Buchenwald, human tattooed skin was placed in Block 2.

This block was called the "pathological block". Dubost : Could you tell us if there was much tattooed skin in this block? Witness Bachalowsky : There was always human skin there. I can't tell you exactly how much there was because there was a lot of traffic in this block. There was not only tattooed skin but also tanned human skin without tattoos. After the war begins, people are deported to Buchenwald from all over Europe. Altogether almost , persons are ultimately imprisoned in the concentration camp on the Ettersberg and its subcamps.

The SS forces them to perform labour for the German armament industry. By the end of the war, Buchenwald is the largest concentration camp in the German Reich. Inside the main camp, there was a notorious punishment block, known as the Bunker.

It was located at the entrance to the main camp. This is where prisoners who violated camp regulations were punished and often tortured to death. It also eventually had a railway station, brothel, and crematorium.

SS guard barracks and the camp administration compound were located in the southern part of the camp. Women were not part of the Buchenwald camp system until The presence of female prisoners significantly increased in Political Prisoners: Most of the early inmates at Buchenwald were political prisoners, people who had been arrested for some form of political opposition to the Nazi regime. Given their long-term presence at the site, these "politicals" played an important role in the camp's prisoner infrastructure.

In , camp officials established a "special compound" for prominent German political prisoners near the camp administration building in Buchenwald. In , he was arrested by the Nazi regime.

There, camp authorities subjected them to extraordinarily cruel treatment upon arrival. Over of these prisoners died as a result of injuries incurred during their arrest or from their initial mistreatment at the camp. Other Prisoner Groups: In addition to political prisoners and Jews, the SS also interned the following groups of people at Buchenwald:.

In the camp's later stages, the SS also incarcerated. Starting in late summer until , a special guard unit named "SS Kommando 99" shot 8, Soviet prisoners-of-war at an SS stable adjacent to the camp.

The SS often shot prisoners in the stables and hanged other prisoners in the crematorium area. Beginning in , a number of physicians and scientists carried out a program of medical experimentation on prisoners at Buchenwald. These experiments took place in special barracks in the northern part of the main camp. Medical experiments aimed at testing the efficacy of vaccines and treatments against contagious diseases, such as typhus, typhoid, cholera, and diphtheria.

They resulted in hundreds of deaths. In , Danish physician Dr.