Gedenkstätte Buchenwald

Cemetery description

The Buchenwald concentration camp was established in 1937, on the slopes of the Ettersberg hill, which is located not far from Weimar. Initially, the camp was meant for outcasts from the ‘German national community’, i.e. political opponents, so-called ‘anti-social elements’, Jews, Roma, Jehovah Witnesses and homosexuals. With the outbreak of World War II, prisoners from all over Europe began to arrive at the camp. The first Polish transport came as early as in September 1939.
Buchenwald had 136 sub-camps in which even women and little girls were forced to labour in both the wartime’s heavy and armament industries.
Between 1937 and 1945, approximately 250,000 prisoners from all over Europe passed through the Buchenwald concentration camp. In total, the number of the camp’s victims is estimated at 56,000 persons who died as a result of persecution, hard labour, pseudo-medical experiments, or in the systematic liquidation action of 8,000 Soviet Prisoners of War. As for Poland, one sixth of all the inmates were Polish citizens. From among 42,000 Polish citizens who found themselves in Buchenwald, (including 13,500 Polish Jews), 6,500 did not live until the liberation (including 1,600 Polish Jews).
The evacuation of the camp and the death marches gathered a bloody harvest shortly before the end of the war. On 11 April 1945, the camp was liberated by the American troops, who were welcome by prisoner-representatives of the camp’s resistance movement. The Americans left Thuringia in July 1945, and the area found itself under the government of the Red Army. A Special Camp was established in the area of the former concentration camp in which approximately 28,500 persons were interned, mainly men at the age between 40-60. Most of these were members of the NSDAP or other persons who had been involved in the Nazi system (administration, jurisdiction or police force). After the dissolution of the Special Camp, many of the buildings were dismantled.
When the Buchenwald camp was operational, prisoners were killed by hanging, by lethal injection of phenol in the heart or were shot dead or gassed in nearby Bernburg. Many still died of exhaustion after the Americans liberated the camp. These victims were first buried in individual graves near Bismarck’s Tower. After the demolishing of the Tower and the building of a monument, the authorities of the Democratic Republic of Germany exhumed the victims’ remains and moved them to the mass graves located around the monument. The grave of 8 Polish prisoners who died after the camp’s liberation can be found on the edge of the cemetery and to the right of the monument.
In front of the monument are mass graves that contain the urns with prisoners’ ashes (among them, a great number of Polish, German and Austrian Jews) whose bodies had been burnt in the camp’s crematoria. The SS had stored the urns instead of sending them away to the victims’ families.
In 1958, the National Buchenwald Memorial was erected on the southern hillside of the Ettersberg hill. At present, the museum of the Buchenwald concentration camp is governed by the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Site Foundation sponsored by the Federal Republic of Germany and by the Free State of Thuringia.

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