Buchenwald concentration camp was a Nazi concentration camp established on the Ettersberg (Etter Mountain) near Weimar, Thuringia, Germany (at the time, Nazi Germany), in July 1937, and one of the largest such camps on German soil.
Camp prisoners worked primarily as forced labour in local armament factories. Inmates were Jews, political prisoners, homosexuals, Roma people, Jehovah's Witnesses, Sinti, religious prisoners, criminals, and prisoners of war (POWs) <1>. Up to 1942 the majority of the political prisoners consisted of communists, later the proportion of other political prisoners increased considerably. Among the prisoners were also writers, doctors, artists, former nobility, and an Italian Princess. They came from countries as varied as Russia, Poland, France, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Denmark, Spanish Republic, Latvia and Italy. Most of the political prisoners from the occupied countries were people of the resistance.
The SS left behind accounts of the 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.<4>
One former Buchenwald prisoner, Armin Walter, calculated the number of executions by shooting in the back of the head. His job at Buchenwald was to set up and care for a radio installation at the facility where people were executed and counted the numbers, which arrived by telex, and hid the information. He says that 8,483 Soviet prisoners of war were shot in this manner.<5>
According to the same source, the total number of deaths at Buchenwald is estimated at 56,545.<6> This number is the sum of:
* Deaths according to material left behind by SS: 33,462<7>.
* Executions by shooting: 8,483.
* Executions by hanging (estimate): 1,100.
* Deaths during evacuation transports: 13,500<8>.
This total (56,545) corresponds to a death rate of 24 percent assuming that the number of persons passing through the camp according to documents left by the SS, 238,380 prisoners, is accurate.<9>
The camp was partially evacuated by the Nazis on 8 April 1945. In the days before the arrival of the American army, thousands of the prisoners were forced to join the evacuation marches. After that, Communist inmates stormed the watchtowers, killed the remaining guards, and took control using arms they had collected since 1942 (one machine gun and 91 rifles).
A detachment of troops belonging to the US 9th Armored Infantry Battalion, US 6th Armored Division, US Third Army arrived at Buchenwald on 13 April 1945 under the leadership of Captain Frederic Keffer. The squad entered the outer perimeter of the camp and reported its location to its higher ups, but did not investigate in great detail, moving on to complete other missions. On the same day, elements of the US 83rd Infantry Division overran Langenstein, one of a number of smaller camps comprising the Buchenwald complex. There the division liberated over 1,000 prisoners, compelled the mayor of Langenstein to send food and water to the camp, and sped medical supplies forward from the 20th Field Hospital.<10>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buchenwald_concentration_camp
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