Buchenwald Essay Example

structure of the prisoner system.

The SS also housed criminals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Gypsies, and military deserters at Buchenwald. Buchenwald was one of the only concentration camps that held “work-shy” individuals, people who the regime identified as not being able too, or wouldn’t, find work. In the later in the camp's stages, the SS also held POWs of many nations (not exempting the United States), early hippies, popular former government leaders of German-occupied countries, and foreign slaves. Starting in 1941, a team of doctors and scientists started a chedule of medical tests on prisoners at Buchenwald in special buildings in the northern-most section of the camp.

Medical experimentation worked at testing how well vaccines and treatments work against contagious diseases. This resulted in hundreds of deaths. In 1944, Dr. Carl Vaernet began a series of experiments that he said would "fix" homosexual inmates through hormonal transplants. It didn’t work. Also in 1944, camp officials established a "special compound" for prominent German political prisoners near the camp administration building in Buchenwald.

In August 1944, the SS murdered Ernst Thalmann, chairman of the Communist Party of Germany before Hitler's rise to power in 1933, after holding him in Buchenwald for several years. During World War II, Buchenwald became an important source of forced labor. The prisoner population rose quickly, reaching 112,000 by February 1945. The camp authorities sent Buchenwald prisoners to the German Equipment Works, a business owned and operated by the SS; in camp workshops, and in the camp's stone quarry.

In February 1942, the Gustloff firm established a subcamp of Buchenwald to support its armaments works, and in March 1943 opened a

large munitions plant beside to the camp. A rail siding completed in 1943 connected the camp with the freight yards in Weimar, starting the shipment of armaments. Buchenwald had at least 88 subcamps located across Germany, from Dusseldorf in the Rhineland to the border with the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. SS authorities and firm executives deployed in-mates in the outer camps, mostly in weapondry factories, in large quarries, and on construction jobs.

Periodically, the SS officers conducted selections regularly through the Buchenwald camps and got rid of those who were disabled or too weak to work to euthanization clinics such as Bernburg, where the workers gassed them. SS doctors or orderlies killed other prisoners unable to work by lethal injection. As Soviet forces swept through Poland, the Germans evacuated thousands of concentration camp prisoners from German-occupied areas under threat. After long, brutal marches, more than 10,000 in-mates from Auschwitz and Gross-Rosen, the majority of them Jews, came to Buchenwald in early 1945.

In April 1945, a United States military force approached the camp, the Germans began to extrecate about 28,000 in-mates from the main camp and an additional couple thousand prisoners from the outer camps. About a third of these prisoners perished from exhaustion on the way or shortly after, or were killed by the SS on the way. The secret resistance organization in Buchenwald, whose members held key leading posts in the camp, saved several lives. They messed with Nazi orders and slowed down the evacuation.

On April 11, 1945, in expectation of freedom, several starved and unbelievably skinny prisoners rushed the watchtowers, gaining control of the camp. Later that

day, U. S. military forces entered Buchenwald. Soldiers from the 6th Armored Division found more than 21,000 people in the camp. Between July 1937 and April 1945, the SS imprisoned some 250,000 people from all countries of Europe in Buchenwald. Exact death counts for Buchenwald can only be estimated, as camp authorities never registered a large number of the prisoners. The SS murdered at least 56,000 male prisoners in the Buchenwald camp system, about 11,000 of them Jews.