Remembering the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp – The National

It was 75 years ago today that the US forces liberated Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany. The 6th US Armoured Division reached the main camp, which was at the centre of a maze of sub-camps, making up the largest concentration camp on German soil.

What they found was a staggering array of utter evil, with scenes so shocking they made battle-hardened soldiers physically sick. Corpses were strewn everywhere and many of the inmates were so starving and emaciated that they died of the food given to them by the Americans.

Later estimates gained from the Nazis obsession with keeping records showed that more than 250,000 people were imprisoned at Buchenwald over an eight-year period, starting with political prisoners communists, mostly who were jailed by the Nazis before the war even started.

Dachau was the first such camp, opening in 1933, but Buchenwald was the largest in area, with some 56,000 people dying there.

WAS IT THE FIRST CONCENTRATION CAMP TO BE LIBERATED?

Holocaust historians now accept that there was a difference between concentration camps, where prisoners carried out forced labour, and extermination camps such as Auschwitz which existed mostly to carry out Adolf Hitlers Aryan racist mass murders, particularly the Nazis Final Solution which brought about the murder of six million Jews.

Another 11 million people are estimated to have died in Nazi extermination and concentration camps, including Soviet prisoners of war, Roma, Poles, Serbs and all those deemed to be non-Aryan such as homosexuals, people with disabilities Hitler was a strong believer in eugenics clergy and criminals. Jehovahs Witnesses were also put into the camps while some other prisoners of war, including captured British commandos, were also murdered.

The Soviet Red Army over-ran Majdanek camp in German-occupied Poland on July 22, 1944, and that provided the first evidence of mass extermination. The Soviets liberated Auschwitz in January, 1945 and found evidence a million people had died in its gas chambers. It was one of Buchenwalds sub-camps, Ohrdruf, which was the first to be liberated by the Allies coming from the west.

WHAT HAPPENED AT OHRDRUF?

Situated near the town of Gotha, Orhdruf was a forced labour camp built as late as November, 1944. The inmates were supposed to work on a railway, but it was never built due to the rapid advance of the Allies in early 1945.

At the start of April the SS forced most of the camps 12,000 inmates to march to Buchenwald 50 miles away, resulting in the deaths of many prisoners. The SS guards shot the remaining inmates and the American troops discovered piles of bodies, some covered with lime to accelerate putrefaction, and others partially incinerated on wooden pyres.

WHAT DID EISENHOWER DO?

Allied Supreme Commander, and later US President, General Dwight D Eisenhower insisted on seeing the camp for himself. He interviewed three inmates that had managed to escape, and wrote to General George C Marshall, head of the joint chiefs of staff in Washington: The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to propaganda.

Buchenwald was much bigger and Eisenhower made it his duty to get the press there. He also forced 1,000 German citizens to visit the camp and its mass graves. Four days later, the British liberated Bergen-Belsen, accompanied by newsreel cameras. The truth was out.

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Remembering the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp - The National