Buchenwald sits high up on a hill overlooking a wide, beautiful valley filled with fertile farms and dotted with small villages. The town of Weimar is just a few kilometers down around the base of the hill. This summer has been a difficult one for much of Europe for the lack of rain and this part of Germany is no exception. Even so, the dense forests are pure vibrant green and the quilted wheat and corn fields are a blindingly bright golden yellow that along with the perfect blue skies makes it all look like an illustration in a children’s book.
After the German surrendered on May 8, 1945, Dad’s division was pulled back from where they had ended up further north in Germany into the town of Saalfeld which these days is an hour’s drive away from the camp. He was there for about a month helping to finish up before he and most of the rest of the army were finally sent home. Michael and I spent the night there last night. This morning we went to Buchenwald.
The Buchenwald that we saw this morning was different from the one that my father saw that spring. These days the grass has grown back and is being carefully tended. A section of the electrified barbed wire fencing has been preserved along one side, but much of the rest of it has been allowed to rust and fall apart. The wooden barracks have all been torn down and in their places are stone outlines showing where they were. A million years ago during my junior year in London, a group of us visited the Dachau camp north of Munich and the same was true there. When my father visited Buchenwald, however, most of the prisoners had been liberated less than a month before. Everything was much as it had been when the camp was in full operation.
Since he was there, I’ll let him talk about what he saw. As a fair warning, I will say that it is not an easy read.
“We were all offered a trip to Buchenwald concentration camp, which was near Weimar, not far from Saalfeld. I did not want to see any horrible scenes but thought that if I did not have a look I would never know for sure about the camps. We were all taken in trucks to Weimar. I saw no bomb damage to the city in the area where we were assigned a billet. It was on a beautiful, cobbled street with big shade trees planted down each side. We had a luxury apartment. Looking through the books on the shelf I could see that they had apparently belonged to a professor. With my smattering of German, I could not read them, but I could get the general tenor of them. He must have been an ardent Nazi. The only thing I remember in one of the books was a photograph of a black French colonial soldier. I could make out that the German caption translated “Black man on the Rhine.” This must have referred to the French and other Allied occupation troops in the Rhineland immediately after World War I.
The next day we were taken out to Buchenwald. Near the camp, we saw several men wearing the jackets and trousers with wide black and white vertical stripes that concentration camp prisoners wore. Buchenwald was not designed as an extermination camp, like Auschwitz and some others were, but as a work camp. Nevertheless, many inmates had been worked to death. The bodies were cleared away by this time. The camp consisted of long, flimsy, one-story wooden barracks. They were surrounded by a high wire fence with guard towers and a gatehouse. The ground within the barbed wire was totally denuded of all vegetation and you could see that it had been trampled by thousands of feet. Inside the buildings was a row of wooden bunks. These were double-decker affairs into which about a dozen prisoners were squeezed into each level. A long board nailed at an angle of about thirty degrees was designed for them to lay their heads on. I forget the number of prisoners we were told was housed in each building, but it was in the hundreds.
In the middle of all these filthy buildings was a small, very clean white building. This was the crematorium for the bodies of the prisoners that had died. The basement had a clean concrete floor and walls painted white. A long row of substantial hooks was placed high around the walls. Dead or dying prisoners were dumped through an outside door to the cellar and fell directly on the floor beneath. They were hung from the hooks while awaiting cremation in the four furnaces along a section of one wall. These were large enough for a single body and were heated by a coal fire underneath. The bodies burned quickly, with the smoke going up the chimney. After incineration, the ashes were collected and placed on piles, which were still standing outside.
Our guides were newly liberated inmates. Strangely a few of them were extremely fat. I could not figure this out at the time but later realized that they must have been “capos”, privileged prisoners who helped the German guards keep the prisoners in line and who did much of the dirty work in the crematorium.
One of the former prisoners gave me a souvenir, which I still have. It is a paper coupon worth three marks in the canteen for the SS guards. The man who gave it to me wrote his name and address in Budapest so I could look him up. I never made it to Budapest.
Many years later I read that after the Russians took over Buchenwald, which was in Thuringia, they or the Communist East German government reopened Buchenwald and used it for Nazis and other people who opposed their regime.”
I will have to dig through everything I have to see if I can find that paper coupon. Dad sent it home to his parents in a letter and they kept it and gave it back to him. It may be in one of the many stacks of papers that I still need to work through.
Somehow, my father got his hands on a camera after the surrender, so here are the two pictures that he took in Buchenwald. You can see by comparing his black and white picture with mine, that the cremation ovens looked the same then and now. The other picture he took was from inside one of the barracks. There is a very famous picture of Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, as a prisoner, lying with other inmates in just such a bunk. Mr. Wiesel spent some time in Auschwitz, which is in Poland, before being moved to Buchenwald where he was liberated. The rest of the pictures are mine from this morning. Thankfully, it already seems much longer ago than that.
My father was in the 71st Division and was involved in the liberation of some of the camps. He did not speak about his experiences very much. The one story that sticks out is reiterated in a piece "Liberators: Liberation of Gunskirchen Lager"
"Though our troops got food to them as soon as possible, many could not wait. Of course, we quickly gave away all the rations and cigarettes we had. It was strange to see them eat the cigarettes instead of smoking them. Not one cigarette did I see smoked. They were all swallowed in a hurry."
To think of these young American soldiers exposed to battle and then the horrors of the camps at such a tender age is astounding by today's standards.
He was in the 87th Infantry. They became part of Patton's 3rd when they arrived in Europe on about Thanksgiving of '44 just before the Bulge started. Thanks for the link. We were in Nuremburg today and went to the Palace of Justice. They showed a lot of the filmed evidence that was used in the trials. I will never be able to unsee some of that. I cannot begin to imagine what it was like for the people there.
I thank you for bringing to life the horror of this time.
May I ask what division your father was in?
My father was in the 71st Division and was involved in the liberation of some of the camps. He did not speak about his experiences very much. The one story that sticks out is reiterated in a piece "Liberators: Liberation of Gunskirchen Lager"
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/liberation-of-gunskirchen-lager
"Though our troops got food to them as soon as possible, many could not wait. Of course, we quickly gave away all the rations and cigarettes we had. It was strange to see them eat the cigarettes instead of smoking them. Not one cigarette did I see smoked. They were all swallowed in a hurry."
To think of these young American soldiers exposed to battle and then the horrors of the camps at such a tender age is astounding by today's standards.
He was in the 87th Infantry. They became part of Patton's 3rd when they arrived in Europe on about Thanksgiving of '44 just before the Bulge started. Thanks for the link. We were in Nuremburg today and went to the Palace of Justice. They showed a lot of the filmed evidence that was used in the trials. I will never be able to unsee some of that. I cannot begin to imagine what it was like for the people there.
Thank you, Richard.