LIBERATION OF BUCHENWALD

Chapter 12

in Buchenwald and its 139 subcamps. After the influx of prisoners, Buchenwald became infamous for torture and death. Regardless of the type of prisoners, the Jews were always treated the worst.

Buchenwald had various locations within the camp that were designated for various types of horror.

Buchenwald survivors told of the German SS murdering inmates by beating them to death, hanging, shooting, by injecting poisons into their hearts, medical experimentation, drowning prisoners in open latrines, working them to death at the nearby stone quarry, and much more. Beginning in 1941, a varied program of involuntary medical experiments on prisoners took place at Buchenwald in special barracks in the northern part of the Main Camp. Medical experiments involving viruses and contagious diseases such as typhus resulted in thousands of deaths. German SS and physicians were testing new serums and viruses on prisoners. Prisoners also reported of other prisoners being dissected, harvested of their organs, and put on display to be utilized for medical research. There were also reports of various prisoners being executed and having their heads “shrunk” like the method the Jivaro Indians used. All of these reports were verified by evidence found by the Americans who liberated Buchenwald, even the shrunken head of a Soviet POW officer. transported to the oven room with the aid of a lift. After the liberation by the Americans, it was discovered in the basement of the Crematorium that there was another execution room where the German SS had some 1,100 men, women, and adolescents hung on hooks on the walls.

Buchenwald also had a location called the “Stable” where the German SS soldiers carried out mass shootings. In the Stable, the prisoners had to enter a fake infirmary room and place themselves under a height gauge. At this time, a German SS soldier, disguised as a physician, would walk behind them to a height board to record their height. The German SS killed them with a revolver by shooting them through a small hole in the board placed at the height of the prisoner’s neck. The noise of those executions was masked by a radio at maximum volume so the prisoners in the next room did not know that the same fate awaited them merely a few minutes later.

The Jail, also known as the “Bunker”, was located at the entrance to the Main Camp. This was always full to capacity and prisoners were always tortured. In the detention cells they were forced to stand from 3 to 42 days straight in the cell or within groups, standing all day without any room or opportunity to lie or sit, confined in complete darkness, and rarely fed. Almost every prisoner who went to the Bunker left only when they died. Others were hung from the bars, injected with phenol or air, or sent to the Crematorium to be murdered.

Downhill from the Crematorium near Roll Call Square were replicas of the “Singing Horses” carts and a hanging post where inmates were bound by their wrists behind their back and hung from the posts by their wrists almost like a human totem pole. Roll Call Square is where day in and day out, as many as 20,000 prisoners would line up for roll call at dawn, then shipped off for forced labor. After ten or more hours of hard labor, the procedure was repeated in the evening. They were known to have roll calls that lasted as long as 72 hours straight with no other aim but to terrorize the prisoners. Refusal to participate was punishable by death. The prisoners were forced to remain standing and face the windows of the Bunker, through which they could hear the screams of the tortured victims inside. On Roll Call Square, half-naked prisoners were flogged and fellow prisoners were hung on the gallows for all to see.

The Crematorium area was the location for incinerating prisoners in large ovens, murders by hanging or shooting, and housed the dissection rooms where various other medical experiments took place. The dead were collected in the mortuary cellar and

The camp gate was made of wrought iron and on the inside of the gate facing the camp it bears the inscription “Jedem das Seine”, based on an old Roman philosophy of “To live honorably, not to injure another, to give each his due”. The German SS interpreted this as “to give each his due” as in the right of the members of the “superior race” to humiliate and destroy others. They made sure that it was