World War II Day by Day

Mt. Ettersberg near Weimar, Thueringen, Germany • July 15, 1937

On this date in 1937 Adolf Hitler’s Germany established a con­cent­ra­tion camp named Buchen­wald (“beech forest”), one of the worst mani­fes­ta­tions of Nazi sadism and bar­bar­ism in all of World War II. Kon­zen­tra­tion Lager (KL for short) Buchen­wald was located in a hea­vily wooded area on the north­ern slopes of the Etters­berg, a hill about 5 miles/­7 kilo­meter north­west of the city of Wei­mar, the one-time cul­tural capi­tal of Germany in Thurin­gia (East-Central Germany), a rabidly pro-Nazi state. Weimar was not­able for being the birth­place of German con­sti­tu­tional demo­cracy, the Weimar Repub­lic, around the time Kaiser Wil­helm II abdi­cated in Novem­ber 1918 and before Janu­ary 30, 1933, when Hitler became German chan­cel­lor and dicta­tor and ended Germany’s short-lived democracy.

Over the years Buchenwald’s 280,000 inmates would be involved in grading camp streets; laying water and sewage lines; and con­struc­ting in­mate and guard bar­racks, latrines and wash­rooms, admin­is­tra­tive offi­ces, guard towers, elec­tri­fied barbed wire fences, store­houses, com­fort­able homes for offi­cers and admin­is­tra­tors, an in­door riding arena, theater, troop casino, dog ken­nels, a zoo for families of prison ser­vice person­nel (Schutz­staffel, or SS), an in­mate infir­mary and library, troop hos­pit­al, a cre­ma­to­rium for the mass burning of bodies, shooting ranges, a brothel for ser­vice person­nel and select in­mates, and, most chillingly, a gate­house with a sinis­ter wing known as the Zeller­bau, or “bunker,” a pri­son con­taining tiny cells where in­mates awaiting exe­cu­tion would be tortured before their deaths.

Men and boys constituted the great majority of Buchenwald’s popu­la­tion. The top camp admin­is­tra­tors were two: Karl-Otto Koch (1937–1941), a corrupt sadist who part­nered with his vain, cruel, and sadis­tic wife Ilse Koch, variously nick­named “Comman­deuse of Buchen­wald,” “Witch of Buchen­wald,” and “Bitch of Buchen­wald.” (Ilse was incar­cerated after the war and died in 1967, a sui­cide; her hus­band Karl-Otto was executed by the SS at Buchen­wald in 1945.) The other com­man­dant was Her­mann Pister (1942–1945). Designed to hold 8,000 pri­soners, Buchen­wald became the largest of the hun­dreds of con­cen­tra­tion camps with­in Germany’s 1937 borders. (The largest Nazi con­cen­tra­tion/­exter­mi­na­tion camp was the Auschwitz com­plex in today’s Poland.) At its intake peak in 1944, Buchen­wald admitted 97,867 pri­soners and recorded a net loss in the form of 8,644 hos­pital deaths, to be exceeded by 13,056 hos­pital deaths in the first 3 months of 1945. (The death tolls do not include pri­soners who were exe­cuted at the camp or died in transit or on brutal forced marches to Buchen­wald or from Buchenwald to other camps.)

The Nazi concentration and death camp system drew little protest from the German public apart from people living down­wind of cre­ma­toria smoke­stacks and foul-smelling mass burial sites and from coura­geous clergy. The dehu­ma­nizing camp rou­tine enabled SS offi­cers, guards, and their assis­tant Kapos (depu­tized pri­soners, mostly hardened crim­i­nals, exer­cising limited author­ity over camp in­mates) to regard their charges as less than human and thus bru­ta­lize them even to the point of death with­out feeling guilt or com­pas­sion. Germans living in the vicin­ity of camps captured by the Allies claimed igno­rance as to what went on in the camps. Allied brass orga­nized man­da­tory tours for German locals and GIs with­in 50 miles/­80 kilo­meter of a camp (see photo essay below). Some Germans com­pelled to tra­verse the camp from one end to the other regis­tered shock at seeing gas ovens with human remains inside, giant out­door roasting pits with blackened bones, limed cada­vers stacked meters high in sheds awaiting mass burial or incin­er­a­tion, and the skeletal sur­vi­vors as if on full dis­play as visitors cautiously walked past them. There is one report of a set of Germans snickering after leaving a camp; it did not end well for them. Other visitors truly shuttered at the sights they took in, speechless.

Buchenwald Main Camp and Ohrdruf Subcamp, the Latter Visited by U.S. Generals and Nearby Townspeople

Left: Buchenwald survivors stare thorough barbed wire fencing, April 24, 1945, after liber­a­tion by Third U.S. Army sol­diers 13 days earlier. Buchen­wald prisoners came from all over Europe and the Soviet Union (suc­cessor state Russian Feder­a­tion)—Jews, Poles and other Slavs, the men­tally ill and physi­cally dis­abled, polit­ical pri­soners (“ene­mies” of the Nazi state such as actual or sus­pected com­mu­nists, Social Demo­crats, dis­si­dents, out­spoken clergy, and the like), Romani (variously known as Roma, Sinti, and “Gypsies”), Free­masons, Jehovah’s Wit­nesses, and pri­soners of war. Ordi­nary crim­inals and sexual devi­ants were also incar­cer­ated there. All pri­soners worked as slave laborers, the major­ity spending 12 back­breaking, deadly hours a day in local arma­ments fac­tories, rock quarries, or on con­struc­tion pro­jects. Insuf­fi­cient and nearly ined­ible soup made from grass, turnip greens, and decaying veg­e­ta­bles along­side sawdust-laced bread, aggra­vated by inade­quate shelter and squalid living con­di­tions on top of delib­er­ate camp exe­cu­tions, con­trib­uted to the 56,545 deaths at Buchen­wald and its 139 or 174 subcamps, or satellite camps (num­ber varies between sources), most of them after 1942.

Right: This interior view of a barracks at Buchenwald, April 16, 1945, reveals the stifling con­fines of the sleeping area. Some of the prisoners used their food bowls as pillows. Dis­ease spread rapidly in such close quar­ters and accounted for many deaths. In the second tier of bunks, seventh from left, is Eliezer “Elie” Wie­sel, Romanian-born Amer­i­can writer, profes­sor, polit­ical acti­vist, Nobel lau­reate, and author of 57 books, including Night, a work based on his exper­i­ences as a Jewish prisoner in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps.

Left: Corpses near the gate of Ohrdruf forced labor camp, one of dozens of Buchen­wald’s sub­camps, still lay un­buried, lice crawling over their yellow skin. The smell of death, urine, and feces hung every­where in the air. Sur­vi­vors testi­fied that the dead had been shot at close range by SS guards on April 2 because the Germans had run out of trucks for evacu­ating sick or dis­abled pri­soners as the Ameri­cans closed in on the prison camp. Many of the dead had been so emaci­ated and mal­nourished that the bullet wounds in their skulls had not even bled.

Right: Twenty-one U.S. generals and their staffs toured Ohr­druf on April 12, 1945. Some mem­bers of the entourage were unable to go through with the ordeal. On April 19, 1945, Supreme Comman­der of the Allied Expedi­tion­ary Force (SHAEF) Gen. Dwight D. Eisen­hower wired both Washing­ton and London to quickly dis­patch jour­nalists, mem­bers of Con­gress, and British parlia­men­tarians to Ohr­druf to dispel any alle­ga­tions that the stories of Nazi brutal­ity were merely propa­ganda. Amer­i­can newsreels of Ohr­druf called the camp a “murder mill.” (See YouTube video below.)

Left: Generals Eisenhower, Omar Brad­ley, George S. Patton Jr., and Manton Eddy, among others, view the charred remains of pri­soners who had been doused with pitch and burned on “a mam­moth griddle” (Patton’s words) fashioned from criss­crossed rail­road track laid over coal and pine­wood logs. Long poles with steel hooks on them were used for turning the bodies over. The bodies were still there, some only charred, some half burnt. Below the bodies was a pit in which lay a pile of bones, skulls, and charred torsos. The oper­a­tion had been done during the evac­u­a­tion of Ohr­druf by retreating camp officers, guards, and staff. The scene before Patton reminded him of “some giant canni­balistic bar­be­cue.” Remembering their walk through the camp, Bradley remarked how “the smell of death over­whelmed us.” When a camp guard showed Eisen­hower how some starved pri­soners had torn out the entrails of the dead for food, the general’s face, Bradley wrote, “whitened into a mask.” Bradley was struck dumb, “too revolted to speak.” The camp guard also showed the generals a gallows where men were hanged for attempting to escape. “The hanging was done by a bit of piano wire,” Patton dictated in a memo, “and the man being hanged was not dropped far enough to break his neck but simply strangled.”

Right: Nude bodies of 40 starved prisoners in a shed at Ohr­druf were layered with lime to miti­gate the smell. Patton described the shed as “the most appalling sight imag­i­nable.” When the shed was packed full (about 200 bodies), its con­tents would be taken to a pit a mile/­1.6 kilo­meter from the camp and buried. Sur­viving pri­soners told Patton that 3,000 of their number had died in the camp since January 1, 1945.

Left: Soon after visiting Ohrdruf, Gen. Eisenhower ordered every nearby unit not on the front lines to tour Ohr­druf so that the average GI would under­stand not just what he was fighting for but “he will know who he is fighting against.” To drive the point home and to “brief” GIs on what they might run into in the weeks ahead, photo­graphs from con­cen­tra­tion camps like Ohr­druf were dis­trib­uted to sol­diers. On the orders of Eisen­hower him­self, the mayor of the German town of Gotha, located next to the Ohr­druf com­plex, toured the camp to see the dis­play of corpses. After seeing the horror, the mayor, profes­sing no know­ledge of the affairs of the camp, went home and he and his wife slashed their wrists before hanging them­selves. (With­out knowing the couple’s moti­va­tion, Eisen­hower inter­preted their sui­cides as remorse or repug­nance for Germany’s past crimi­nal acts and a posi­tive omen for moving Germany forward.) As a rule camp lib­er­ators recoiled in dis­belief when they heard the per­pet­ual lament of visiting towns­people, who gaped in horror at the piles of decaying bodies and breathed in their putrid stench: “Wir wussten nicht.” (We didn’t know.) “Niemand sagte uns.” (No one told us.) The object of what Germans didn’t know or weren’t told (the missing “it” in sen­tences like these) was belied most often by the one-way traffic of tens of thou­sands of locked cattle cars leaving from or passing through German cities, towns, and villages to desti­na­tions in the East and the sooty smoke rising from cre­ma­toria chim­neys everywhere in the Reich. Con­ceiv­ably some of the towns­people and others like them in this pic­ture who solemnly swore they didn’t know or were never told were the same people who years or months or weeks ear­lier had jeered, hurled insults, and spat on people taken into Nazi cus­tody—people who trag­ically ended up dead on a crematorium floor like this in the photo.

Right: American soldiers forcibly trucked 100 or so Ohrdruf towns­people each day to the “pest­hole,” as Patton called the camp, to exhume the bodies in the mass grave and bury them again in indi­vid­ual graves in a public place. A policy Eisen­hower man­dated required that a stone monu­ment be erected near­by to com­mem­o­rate the “atroc­ity victims.” At another reinter­ment site at Orh­druf’s main camp, Buchen­wald, an Amer­i­can officer took no pity on 200 Germans com­plaining of the stench of decom­posed corpses and the day’s heat. “Dig, you sons of bitches,” was all he could bring him­self to say. At some loca­tions German civili­ans were ordered to feed, clothe, and house liberated prisoners at their own expense.

“Liberators and Survivors: The First Moments,” Produced by The International School for Holocaust Studies

Continue Reading