Buchenwald

Concentration Camp

This power point is made with pictures that I took when I chaperoned a group of students to Apolda, Germany in 2007. I was also able to visit Buchenwald when it was a part of East Germany, and I have to say that there were many changes from 1987 to 2007.Of the three concentration camps that I have visited, Buchenwald had the most artifacts. I didn’t take as many pictures as I would have liked to, but I hope this power point gives you some idea of what the camps were like.

• The picture you just looked at is the clock tower at the entrance to Buchenwald. It is permanently set at 3:15, which is the time that the American troops came in and liberated the camp on April 11, 1945

• The building under the tower housed a lock-up for prisoners. The other side has been converted to classrooms where you can see how large the actual camp really was.

• Not only was this a concentration camp, it also housed all of the soldier guards, officers of the camps, and their families! Of course, the guards, officers and families lived outside the fenced areas.

• There were many of these types of pictures on the walls in the various cells. This particular picture is of a man by the name of Ernst Heilmann. He was a political prisoner with a Jewish background, which set him up for terrible torture. He was finally murdered on April 3d, 1940.

• This is the view of a typical jail cell. Notice the “bed”; no mattress or blankets, just a board. This bed could be folded up during the day. The prisoners were expected to stand at attention from 5:00 am until 10:00 pm. If they were caught moving, they would be given 25 strokes with a stick.

• This sign says that in the summer, prisoners were manacled, then hung by their hands or feet from the barred windows until they died.

• This is a view of the fence line, standing inside the actual concentration camp. I should have taken a picture looking the other way, because there is the remains of a bear enclosure. Apparently, the Commandant's wife really enjoyed making the prisoners suffer. She had a zoo built right outside of the big camp, so the prisoners could watch the animals being fed and taken care of as they starved and suffered. She was known as the “Beast of Buchenwald”.

• The picture in this photo is to show how the area looked when the camp was active. It gives one a good idea of how close together the barracks were. Unfortunately, all of the barrack had to be destroyed after the liberation due to the amount of disease in the camp.

• I like to show this picture, because it let’s us know that there were many other people in the concentration camps besides the Jews. This particular memorial says that 2098 Polish patriots were brought to this camp in October of 1939. 1,650 of them died in 5 months. 123 of them were locked into a steel cage where they froze and starved to death. It continues to say that they suffered and died for the freedom of Poland.

• This is a picture of the pathological facilities as they looked at the end of the war. In reading the caption under the picture, it says that this facility was used to try and “find” a cause of death when the camps first opened. It was soon used to extract gold teeth. Then, the facility was used to shrink heads and take off skin to be saved or made into things like lamp shades. The “Beast of Buchenwald” liked tattoos and collected them. Many of the other things (shrunken heads, etc) were used as gifts!

• These are some of the “tools” used in this facility. Unfortunately, there wasn’t any type of placard to say what the tools were, or what they were used for.

• This is the crematorium. It is a bit dark, but you can see the ovens on the left. There is one cart on wheels (notice the tracks in the floor) that was used to place the bodies in the ovens. One of my students is in the back, standing in front of the elevator. Dead bodies were brought to the back of the building and dumped down into the cellar using a chute. In the cellar, workers loaded the bodies on a cart and put them on the elevator so they could be brought up for burning.

• This is the back of the ovens, where the fire was stoked, and I believe the ashes were cleaned out.

• These are the hooks mentioned in the last slide. According to one of my books, prisoners of war were not shot to death starting around February of 1943. They were instead hung on these hooks. Today, there is a memorial area in the cellar in honor of many of the people who were murdered there.

• This is an outside view of the back of the crematorium. Notice the person in the picture. This gives you a perspective of how large the chimney was.

• This is another memorial. Notice the little rocks on it. This is a Jewish custom to show a sign of respect for the dead.

• It says: No one said good-bye, no one raised a cross or even a stone, but you still live, as long as people remember you. To the more than 27,000 women and girls from over 30 countries who were brought as prisoners in 1944 and 1945 to over 27 satellite camps of Buchenwald, slave workers forced sacrifice of the Nazi power and death march.

• These silhouettes were at the beginning of the indoor museum. Notice that the pictures are of people who actually were there, and they took 3 pictures of each person. Inside this museum, I found many artifacts. One of the most startling was that they had saved all of the spoons, cups and bowls that the prisoners used, and they were displayed at the base of each display case.

• This was the railhead where the prisoners arrived at Buchenwald. It was at the opposite end of the camp from the front gate.

• This is a memorial that was put up by the East Germans at the end of the war. We are just walking up to the entrance in this photo.

• All along the walkway there were these huge stones that had been carved with various scenes depicting the Holocaust. This first one shows a variety of scenes, to include torture, hard labor and oppression.

• This scene shows one of the favorite forms of torture, placing one’s arms behind one’s back, then tying them up high. You also see prisoners gathered together, and some being moved.

• This stone shows prisoners working in a quarry, pulling a cart filled with rock. These prisoners were worked literally to death.

• If you look to the right side of this stone, you can see dead bodies in the foreground, and what looks to be naked prisoners being taken into a shower or gas chamber.

• This scene shows how close the quarters were for prisoners in the barracks. You can also see a prisoner being hung by his ankles.

• This scene is from the East German explanation of how the prisoners were liberated. A communist is in the center with his fist raised, urging his fellow prisoners to rise up against the guards. In the right background, you can see prisoners retrieving hidden weapons.

• It is true that there was an uprising, but by that point, most of the guards were gone.

• This shows the success of the uprising with the prisoners holding the weapons and the guards under arrest.

• After we walked past the stones, we went down a lot of stairs to reach this bowl. There were three of them all together.

• This sign tells what the bowls are. It says that in this depression fascists burned over 10,000 murdered anti-fascists, resistance fighters and patriots from over 18 nations.

• Once you went past the last bowl, you had to go back up the stairs – there is a huge bell tower at the top, which rings a couple of times daily, and a huge statue to the survivors.