Buchenwald concentration camp

Based on Wikipedia: Buchenwald concentration camp

A Forest Named for Death

In the summer of 1937, Nazi officials faced an unexpected problem. They had built a concentration camp on a hill in Thuringia, in the heart of Germany, and they needed to name it. The obvious choice was Ettersberg, after the hill itself. But Ettersberg carried a complication: the great German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had loved that hill. He had walked its beech forests, drawn inspiration from its views of Weimar below. Naming a place of systematic cruelty after a symbol of German Enlightenment culture seemed, even to the Nazis, unseemly.

So they called it Buchenwald instead. "Beech forest."

The irony runs deeper than the name change suggests. Holocaust researcher James E. Young argues that SS leaders chose this location precisely because of its cultural legacy—not despite it. They wanted to erase what Goethe represented. When prisoners cleared the trees to build the camp, only one large oak remained standing. Legend held it was one of Goethe's Oaks, a tree the writer had supposedly admired. The Nazis left it there, a silent witness to what the Enlightenment had failed to prevent.

The Logic of the Camp

Buchenwald was designed to hold eight thousand prisoners. It would eventually process two hundred and eighty thousand.

The camp replaced several smaller facilities nearby, but its location wasn't chosen for convenience. Beneath the beech forest lay deposits of clay. Clay could be made into bricks. Bricks required labor. Labor meant prisoners. The arithmetic of the Nazi system was brutally simple: human beings as raw material, converted through suffering into profit.

The first prisoners arrived on July 15, 1937. Their initial task was to build their own prison—clearing trees, constructing barracks, erecting the fences that would contain them. By September, the population had swelled to twenty-four hundred, as inmates transferred from the camps Buchenwald was meant to replace.

Above the main gate, the SS inscribed a motto: Jedem das Seine. In English, this means "To each what he deserves." The phrase has roots in ancient philosophy—the Latin suum cuique, a principle of justice going back to Plato and Cicero. The Nazis twisted it into something obscene: the "master race" deserved to rule, and their victims deserved annihilation.

Here's an astonishing detail. The lettering on that gate was designed by Franz Ehrlich, himself a Buchenwald prisoner. Ehrlich was a Bauhaus-trained architect, and he rendered the motto in a Bauhaus typeface. The Nazis had banned Bauhaus as "degenerate art." Yet the SS guards, apparently, couldn't tell the difference between approved and forbidden design. Ehrlich's small act of defiance went unnoticed by his captors.

Who Were the Prisoners?

The Nazi concentration camp system targeted a sprawling catalog of humanity. At Buchenwald, the first inmates were largely political prisoners—communists, social democrats, anyone deemed an enemy of the Reich. But the categories multiplied relentlessly.

Jews. Poles. Soviet prisoners of war. Roma, whom the Nazis called Gypsies. Jehovah's Witnesses. Freemasons. The mentally ill. The physically disabled. Gay men, whom the regime classified as "sexual deviants." Ordinary criminals, mixed in with the political prisoners in a deliberate strategy to create conflict and informants.

They came from across Europe. From occupied France and the Netherlands. From Poland, which the Nazis had invaded in 1939. From the Soviet Union, after Germany's catastrophic invasion in 1941. Buchenwald became a cross-section of everyone the Nazi regime wished to destroy.

The camp also held groups you might not expect. One hundred and sixty-eight Allied aviators—Americans, British, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, and Jamaicans—arrived in August 1944. Their planes had crashed over occupied France. Some had made contact with the French Resistance. Some wore civilian clothes. Some carried forged papers. The Germans classified them as spies or "terror aviators," stripping them of Geneva Convention protections.

These airmen spent five days in covered goods wagons with almost no food or water. They remained at Buchenwald for two months before being transferred. Most survived. Many of their fellow prisoners did not.

The Witch of Buchenwald

The camp's first commandant was Karl-Otto Koch, who ran Buchenwald from its founding until 1941. His second wife, Ilse Koch, would become one of the most notorious figures of the Holocaust, earning the nickname "Die Hexe von Buchenwald"—the Witch of Buchenwald.

Ilse Koch's reputation for cruelty preceded and outlasted her husband's tenure. In February 1940, Karl Koch ordered prisoners to build an indoor riding hall. The construction site was brutal, and prisoners died by the dozen. The hall was built inside the camp, near the canteen, positioned so that Ilse could be seen riding each morning while a prisoner orchestra played.

The Kochs' story took a strange turn. Karl Koch was eventually imprisoned at his own camp—not for murder, but for corruption. The charges, brought by an SS judge named Konrad Morgen, included embezzlement, black market dealings, and exploitation of camp workers for personal gain. The SS executed its own commandant by firing squad on April 5, 1945, one week before American troops arrived. His crime, in the eyes of the Nazi system, wasn't mass murder. It was embarrassing the organization.

Ilse Koch was acquitted by the SS court. But the Americans rearrested her in June 1945, and she stood trial at Dachau. Her life sentence was reduced to four years on review—a decision that caused public outrage in the United States. Upon her release in 1949, West German authorities arrested her again. She was tried at Augsburg, sentenced to life imprisonment a second time, and committed suicide in prison in 1967.

Contrary to popular belief, Ilse Koch never served in any official capacity at Buchenwald. She was there as the commandant's wife, not as a guard. The camp employed very few women—only twenty-two served or trained there, compared to over fifteen thousand five hundred men. But Buchenwald's vast network of subcamps and external work details employed more than five hundred thirty female guards across Germany.

The Economics of Suffering

In 1942, the SS began renting its prisoners to private industry.

This requires a moment to absorb. The concentration camp system had evolved beyond simple imprisonment into a commercial enterprise. Private German firms paid the SS between four and six Reichsmarks per day for each prisoner's labor. Between June 1943 and February 1945, this generated an estimated ninety-five million seven hundred fifty-eight thousand eight hundred forty-three Reichsmarks in revenue for the SS. Buchenwald grew to encompass one hundred thirty-six subcamps and satellite facilities, scattered near factories hungry for workers who couldn't refuse.

Conditions in these subcamps were often worse than at the main camp. Prisoners received insufficient food. Their shelter was inadequate. They were worked to exhaustion and replaced when they died. The Nazi term for this system was Vernichtung durch Arbeit—extermination through labor. You worked until you couldn't work anymore. Then you were killed.

The main camp kept meticulous records. Prisoners arriving. Prisoners leaving—by release, transfer, or death. The SS documented thirty-three thousand four hundred sixty-two deaths. But this number was a lie of omission. Many executed prisoners were listed as "transferred to the Gestapo." Soviet prisoners of war selected for immediate execution were never entered into the camp register at all.

A prisoner named Armin Walter found another way to count. His job was maintaining the radio equipment at the facility where executions took place. He received the numbers by telex and secretly recorded them. By his count, eight thousand four hundred eighty-three Soviet prisoners were killed by a single shot to the base of the skull—the infamous Genickschuss.

The best estimates suggest fifty-six thousand five hundred forty-five people died at Buchenwald. That's roughly one in four of everyone who passed through the camp.

The Singing Forest

Some deaths were not simply murders. They were spectacles of cruelty.

Walter Gerhard Martin Sommer was an SS sergeant who served at both Dachau and Buchenwald. History remembers him as the "Hangman of Buchenwald." He reportedly ordered two Austrian Catholic priests, Otto Neururer and Mathias Spanlang, crucified upside-down.

Sommer was especially fond of a torture technique called strappado. Prisoners' wrists were tied behind their backs, and they were hung from trees by their bound arms. The pain is almost impossible to imagine—shoulders dislocating, breathing compromised, consciousness fading and returning in waves of agony. Sommer did this in a wooded area of the camp that came to be called "the singing forest."

It was named for the screams.

The Doctors

Buchenwald was also a laboratory.

In 1942 and 1943, German researchers conducted large-scale trials for vaccines against epidemic typhus. Seven hundred twenty-nine prisoners served as test subjects. One hundred fifty-four died. The experiments followed a grim logic: to test whether a vaccine worked, you needed to infect people with the disease and see who survived.

Other experiments were smaller and stranger. In one, researchers sought to determine the precise lethal dose of certain alkaloid poisons. Four Soviet prisoners of war were administered the poison. When they didn't die quickly enough, they were "strangled in the crematorium" and then dissected.

Another experiment tested a balm for treating burns from incendiary bombs. To create the burns, researchers applied white phosphorus directly to prisoners' skin. When challenged at postwar trials about the nature of these tests—particularly the fact that some were designed to cause death and merely measure how long it took—one Nazi doctor offered a defense: although he was a physician, he was also "a legally appointed executioner."

This was the moral universe of the camps. Doctors who had sworn to do no harm became technicians of death, their medical training repurposed to inflict suffering with scientific precision.

Liberation

In early April 1945, the war was ending. American forces were advancing through Germany. On April 4th, the U.S. 89th Infantry Division overran Ohrdruf, one of Buchenwald's subcamps. What they found there shocked even combat-hardened soldiers.

Around the same time, an unexpected discovery occurred. A four-man Alsos Mission team—tasked with locating German nuclear scientists—was driving near Weimar. To avoid German forces, they took a side road through the woods. A ghastly smell hit them from a clearing ahead. Through the trees, they saw barbed wire, a few emaciated figures still moving, and piles of corpses.

The team broke their strict secrecy protocol to radio for medical help. They found that a group of surviving prisoners had just taken control of the camp from the remaining guards. The survivors made one request: Give the guards to us, and we'll take care of them.

The team's linguist, Hugh Montgomery, later recalled: "And I'm sure they did."

Montgomery would go on to join the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA, and participate in Cold War operations. But that moment in the woods stayed with him.

The Radio Message

The full liberation of Buchenwald involved one of the war's more remarkable acts of resistance.

Gwidon Damazyn was a Polish electrical engineer and amateur radio operator who had been imprisoned at Buchenwald since March 1941. Before the war, his callsign was SP2BD. Inside the camp, he and other prisoners secretly built a short-wave radio transmitter and a small generator. They hid the equipment in the prisoners' movie room.

From April 6th to 11th, the SS was evacuating Buchenwald, forcing thousands of prisoners on foot marches that would kill many of them. On April 8th, at noon, Damazyn and a Russian prisoner named Konstantin Ivanovich Leonov sent a Morse code message that had been prepared by the underground resistance:

To the Allies. To the army of General Patton. This is the Buchenwald concentration camp. SOS. We request help. They want to evacuate us. The SS wants to destroy us.

They transmitted the message repeatedly in English, German, and Russian. Damazyn sent the English and German versions; Leonov sent the Russian.

Three minutes after the final transmission, the headquarters of the U.S. Third Army responded:

KZ Bu. Hold out. Rushing to your aid. Staff of Third Army.

According to Teofil Witek, a fellow Polish prisoner who witnessed the exchange, Damazyn fainted when he received the reply.

After the War

Liberation did not end Buchenwald's history as a place of imprisonment.

From August 1945 to March 1950, the Soviet occupation authorities used the camp as an internment facility, designated NKVD Special Camp Number 2. The NKVD was the Soviet secret police, predecessor to the KGB. During those years, the Soviets held twenty-eight thousand four hundred fifty-five prisoners at Buchenwald. Seven thousand one hundred twenty-seven of them died.

When the Soviets closed the camp, they razed much of it—an attempt to erase this uncomfortable coda to the Nazi horrors. But traces remained. Today, Buchenwald serves as a memorial, a permanent exhibition, and a museum.

The beech forest has grown back. Goethe's Oak is gone, destroyed in an Allied bombing raid in 1944. The clay deposits that made the site attractive to the SS still lie beneath the soil. Somewhere in those woods, the singing forest has fallen silent.

What Remains

Fifty-six thousand five hundred forty-five deaths. The number is both overwhelming and insufficient. It doesn't capture the individual terrors: the separated families, the experiments, the starvation, the casual brutality of guards who had been trained to see their prisoners as less than human.

Buchenwald was not an extermination camp like Auschwitz or Treblinka. It had no gas chambers designed for mass murder. Its primary purpose was labor exploitation. But the distinction matters less than you might think. Whether killed by gas, by bullet, by hanging, by deliberate starvation, by medical experiment, or by exhaustion from forced labor, the prisoners were equally dead. The Nazi system had many mechanisms for producing corpses.

The camp gate still stands. The motto is still legible: Jedem das Seine. To each what he deserves. Franz Ehrlich's Bauhaus letters, that small defiance against an ideology that destroyed him and so many others, remain visible for visitors who know to look.

The beech trees sway in the wind. The hill overlooks Weimar, where Goethe once wrote about human dignity and the possibility of moral improvement. The Enlightenment and the Holocaust, side by side, both part of what humanity has proven capable of creating.

Buchenwald asks a question it cannot answer: How did we get from there to here? The camp stands as a memorial not just to the dead, but to the failure of everything we thought would protect us from becoming monsters.