The liberation of Buchenwald

On Wednesday 11 April 1945, at around half past two in the afternoon, the spearhead of the US 6th Armored Division of General George Patton’s Third Army, advancing through Thuringia, reached the Ettersberg hill outside Weimar – the site of one of the largest concentration camps of the Third Reich, Buchenwald. Most of the SS guards had already fled. Armed members of the camp underground seized the gatehouse and the watchtowers, disarmed and detained more than a hundred SS men who had not managed to escape, and hoisted a white flag. The clock on the gatehouse was stopped at 3.15 p.m. – and it still shows that time today. By about 4 p.m. the camp was free. Some 21,000 prisoners were still inside, among them more than 900 children and adolescents.

Many chronologies date the liberation of Buchenwald to 10 April. American combat records and the sources of the Buchenwald Memorial agree, however, that the Americans reached the camp on 11 April, and that 10 April was the last day of the evacuation in which the SS drove tens of thousands of people out of Buchenwald.

The camp on the Ettersberg

Buchenwald was established in July 1937 on a wooded hill a few kilometres from Weimar – the city of Goethe and Schiller and, from 1919 to 1933, the symbol of the first German republic. The first to be sent there were German political opponents of the regime, Jehovah’s Witnesses, “criminals”, “asocials” and homosexuals; after Kristallnacht in November 1938 almost 10,000 Jews were brought in. From September 1939 Poles arrived, followed later by Czechs, Dutch, Soviet citizens, French and people from all over occupied Europe. The gate bore the inscription Jedem das Seine – “To each his own”.

The camp was run first by Karl Otto Koch, whose wife Ilse became after the war a symbol of the cruelty of the camp staff, and from the turn of 1941 and 1942 by Hermann Pister. The prisoners worked in the quarry, in the armaments factories next to the camp, including the Gustloff works, and in nearly a hundred subcamps. Pseudo-medical experiments were carried out on them, and Soviet prisoners of war were murdered with a shot in the back of the neck in a fake medical examination room set up in a stable. In August 1944 the German Communist leader Ernst Thälmann was shot at Buchenwald, and the same month 168 downed Allied airmen were brought to the camp, where the SS treated them not as prisoners of war but as camp inmates.

From 7 February to 3 April 1945 Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was also held in the cellar of a building outside the camp fence; taken south, he was hanged at Flossenbürg on 9 April, two days before Buchenwald was liberated. Koch himself, arrested by the SS for corruption and the murder of witnesses, was shot on 5 April 1945 in the camp he had once commanded.

From January 1945 Buchenwald became one of the destinations of the death marches from camps evacuated ahead of the Red Army, above all from Auschwitz and Gross-Rosen. The camp was desperately overcrowded. The new arrivals, thousands of Jews among them, were packed into the so-called Little Camp – a quarantine area made up of former horse stables, where people lay several to a bunk. According to Memorial figures, about 18,000 people were there at the beginning of April, and the death rate reached hundreds a day.

The evacuation

When the Americans entered the Ohrdruf subcamp on 4 April, less than 50 kilometres south-west of Weimar, it was clear that Buchenwald was next. According to Memorial figures, on 6 April some 47,500 people were in the main camp and its immediate surroundings – some of them only just driven there from Ohrdruf. On the orders of Heinrich Himmler the camp headquarters began the evacuation. First, on 5–6 April, several thousand Jews, earmarked to be removed first, were assembled in the armaments works beside the camp.

From 7 to 10 April some 28,000 prisoners of the main camp – and at least 10,000 more from the subcamps – were driven out on foot or sent off by train towards Dachau, Flossenbürg and Theresienstadt. The columns covered dozens of kilometres a day without food; the guards killed those who could no longer walk. Trains of open wagons wandered around the country for days on end. Historians estimate that between 12,000 and 15,000 people died on these death marches and transports – more than died in many a camp over the entire war.

The underground

The prisoners’ underground tried to delay the evacuation. For years an International Camp Committee had been active in Buchenwald, in which the leading role was played by German Communists who held many posts in the prisoners’ self-administration. This allowed them to save some, but after the war it provoked controversy, since deciding who would be put on the transport lists also meant choosing who would be sent on the road. The underground had gathered a few dozen weapons – some stolen, some made in the camp workshops.

When the Weimar Gestapo sent a list of 46 prisoners marked for execution on 5 April, almost all of them hid in the camp and lived to see the liberation. Prisoners failed to turn up at roll calls, moved between blocks and did what they could to delay the forming of columns. Children were particularly protected: in Block 8 and in Block 66 in the Little Camp, set up by the underground and looked after by the Czech Communist Antonín Kalina, hundreds of boys, mostly Jewish, were hidden.

On 8 April Gwidon Damazyn (PL), a Polish engineer and radio amateur from Bydgoszcz who had been a prisoner since 1941, together with the Russian prisoner Konstantin Leonov, used a home-made transmitter hidden in the camp cinema to broadcast an appeal to the approaching troops: “To the Allies. To the army of General Patton. This is Buchenwald concentration camp. SOS. We ask for help. They want to evacuate us. The SS wants to destroy us.” The message was repeated in English, German and Russian. According to witnesses, a reply came a few minutes later: “KZ Bu. Hold out. We are hurrying to your aid. Staff of the Third Army.”

11 April

By the morning of 11 April fighting was already going on near the camp. At about 11 a.m. the underground began handing out weapons to selected prisoners. At noon the sirens sounded the alarm, and the remaining guards withdrew from the fence to the SS barracks and into the surrounding woods. At around 2.30 p.m. a reconnaissance unit of the 6th Armored Division reached the SS area. The armed prisoners then attacked the gatehouse and the towers, disarmed those SS men who had not managed to flee – 125 of them, according to an American intelligence report of 13 April – and opened the camp.

The first Americans to enter – a group from the 9th Armored Infantry Battalion under Captain Frederic Keffer – were, according to accounts, lifted up by the prisoners and tossed into the air. The armoured spearhead could not stay, however; the division pressed on eastwards, and the next day, 12 April, the camp was taken over by units of the 80th Infantry Division. On 13 April an American camp commandant was appointed.

What the Americans found

The soldiers, and after them the doctors, chaplains and journalists, found a camp in a state of decay: piles of bodies by the crematorium, whose ovens had been unable to keep up in the final weeks, carts laden with corpses, and the barracks of the Little Camp where the living lay beside the dead. Many survivors were so emaciated that they could not get up from their bunks. Despite medical aid, several hundred of the liberated prisoners died in the weeks that followed.

The survivors came from more than thirty countries. Poles formed a large group – prisoners deported in 1939, including activists of the Union of Poles in Germany, people caught in street round-ups and transports from the occupied country, and Varsovians deported after the fall of the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. The Memorial estimates that some 7,000 Poles, not counting Polish Jews, died in Buchenwald and its subcamps.

Among the children saved was sixteen-year-old Elie Wiesel, born in Sighet (Sighetu Marmației), deported with his family to Auschwitz in 1944 and driven on a death march to Buchenwald in January 1945, where his father died at the end of that month. Years later he described this in his book Night, and in 1986 he received the Nobel Peace Prize. Others who regained their freedom there included seven-year-old Yisrael Meir Lau from Piotrków Trybunalski, later Chief Rabbi of Israel; fifteen-year-old Hungarian Jew Imre Kertész, the 2002 Nobel laureate; and the Spanish Communist Jorge Semprún, imprisoned for his part in the French Resistance. Hidden in the camp, too, was four-year-old Stefan Jerzy Zweig from Kraków, whose story became the basis of the novel Naked Among Wolves by the former prisoner Bruno Apitz. According to lists drawn up after the liberation, about 900 children and adolescents survived.

Testimonies

On 12 April the CBS correspondent Edward R. Murrow came to the camp. His report, broadcast on Sunday 15 April, was heard by millions of Americans. He described a barracks where 1,200 men lay in a space meant for 80 horses, five to a bunk, and a doctor’s notebook in which crosses stood beside the names of the dead – 242 out of 1,200 in a single month. “I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald,” he said. The photographs taken in the camp in those days by the Life photographer Margaret Bourke-White went round the world; on 16 April a Signal Corps soldier photographed prisoners on their bunks in one of the barracks – Wiesel was later identified in the picture.

Patton, who had seen Ohrdruf a few days earlier, ordered the mayor of Weimar to bring a thousand of the town’s inhabitants to the camp. On 16 April about a thousand people from Weimar – most of them men – were escorted by soldiers through the camp and made to look at the crematorium, the heaps of bodies and the barracks. Most insisted that they had known nothing of what had been happening a few kilometres from their homes. In the second half of April, at the invitation of Dwight Eisenhower, Buchenwald was visited by the editors of the leading American newspapers and by a congressional delegation led by the Senate Majority Leader, Alben Barkley.

On 19 April some 21,000 survivors took part in a memorial ceremony on the roll-call square. There the so-called Buchenwald Oath was read out in several languages, in which the prisoners pledged to fight for the punishment of the guilty and for a world free of fascism and war.

Reckoning and the special camp

Some 250,000–280,000 people passed through Buchenwald and its subcamps between 1937 and 1945. The Memorial puts the number of victims at around 56,000, including nearly 12,000 Jews and about 15,000 Soviet citizens; to these must be added thousands of murdered Soviet prisoners of war who were never registered, and the victims of the April death marches.

In 1947 the trial of 31 members of the Buchenwald staff took place before an American military tribunal at Dachau. The defendants included the commandant, Pister, and Ilse Koch. Pister, sentenced to death, died in Landsberg prison in 1948; Ilse Koch, sentenced to life imprisonment, had her sentence reduced by the Americans, was tried again by a West German court in 1951 and once more sentenced to life; she took her own life in prison in 1967.

The history of the site did not end in April 1945. In July Thuringia passed to the Soviet occupation zone, and from August 1945 until early 1950 the grounds of the former camp housed the Soviet NKVD’s Special Camp No. 2. It held former NSDAP functionaries and officials, but also people detained on the strength of denunciations, young people suspected of involvement in the “Werwolf” and opponents of the new authorities. According to Soviet documents, more than 28,000 people passed through it, of whom more than 7,000 died – mainly of hunger and disease – and were buried in mass graves in the forest. In the GDR this chapter was passed over in silence; for decades East German remembrance of Buchenwald emphasised above all the camp’s “self-liberation” by the Communist underground, playing down the role of the American troops.

Place in the war

The liberation of Buchenwald came in the last month of the war in Europe, as the armies of the Western Allies, having closed the ring around the Ruhr, pushed deep into Germany towards the Elbe. Buchenwald was not the first camp the Americans entered – they had discovered Ohrdruf a week earlier – but it was the first large main camp in which they found more than 20,000 living prisoners. Murrow’s broadcast, Bourke-White’s photographs and the crowds of Weimar citizens led through the camp meant that Buchenwald, alongside the images from the other camps liberated that April, became for the West a byword for the crimes of the system the Third Reich had built.

The camp on the Ettersberg, a few kilometres from the city where Goethe wrote Faust, became one of the most frequently invoked symbols of where twelve years of National Socialist rule had led. The Buchenwald Memorial, established in 1958, today commemorates both the victims of the concentration camp and those of the Soviet special camp.