German Nazi's Buchenwald Concentration camp

Buchenwald concentration camp was one of the largest and first Nazi concentration camp instituted near Weimar, Thuringia, Germany in July 1937.

Camp prisoners such as Jews, Poles, political prisoners, Roma and Sinti, Jehovah’s Witnesses and etc worked primarily as forced labour in local armament factories. The Nazis used Buchenwald until the camp got liberated in 1945. From then on until 1950, the Soviet Union used the camp as an NKVD special camp for Germans. Then on 6 January 1950, t he camp was handed over to the East German Ministry of Internal Affairs. Between July 1938 and April 1945 more than 250,000 people were imprisoned in Buchenwald by the Nazi regime.

The Buchenwald camp was a site of an extraordinary number of deaths, although it was not technically an extermination camp. The causes of the deaths were illness that led to death mostly due to the harsh camp conditions, with starvation and infectious diseases. Many were worked to death. If they weren’t working they were inevitably executed. Most of the prisoners died in violence from the SS guards. Others were simply murdered by execution of hanging and shooting. The camp was also a site of “large-scale trials for vaccines against epidemic typhus in 1942 and 1943.” Total of 729 of prisoners were used as test subjects, with 280 of them dying as a result.

The SS left behind huge number of prisoners and people coming to and leaving the camp, categorizing those leaving them by release, transfer, or death. These accounts are one of the sources of estimates for the number of deaths in Buchenwald. According to SS documents, 33,462 died in Buchenwald. These documents were not, however, necessarily accurate: Among those executed before 1944 many were listed as "transferred to the Gestapo". Furthermore, from 1941 forward Soviet POWs were executed in mass killings. Arriving prisoners selected for execution were not entered into the camp register and therefore were not among the 33,462 dead listed in SS documents.

The total number of deaths at Buchenwald is estimated at 56,545. This number is the sum of:

§ Deaths according to material left behind by SS: 33,462

§ Executions by shooting: 8,483

§ Executions by hanging (estimate): 1,100

§ Deaths during evacuation transports: 13,500

On April 4, 1945, “the U.S. 89^th Infantry Division overran Ohrdruf, a subcamp of the Buchenwald.” It was the first Nazi camp to be liberated by the U.S troops After that the Buchenwald camp was partially evacuated by the Germans on April 8, 1945.

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