Buchenwald concentration camp (
German:
Konzentrationslager (
KZ) Buchenwald) was a
German Nazi concentration camp established on the Ettersberg (Etter
Mountain) near
Weimar, Germany, in July
1937, one of the first and the largest of the concentration camps on German soil, following
Dachau's opening just over four years earlier.
Prisoners from all over
Europe and the
Soviet Union—
Jews, non-Jewish
Poles and other
Slavs, the mentally ill and physically-disabled from birth defects, religious and political prisoners,
Roma and Sinti,
Freemasons,
Jehovah's Witnesses, criminals, homosexuals, and prisoners of war — worked primarily as forced labor in local armaments factories. From
1945 to
1950, the camp was used by the
Soviet occupation authorities as an internment camp, known as
NKVD special camp number 2.
Today the remains of the camp serve as a memorial and permanent exhibition and museum administered by the
Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials
Foundation, which also oversees the camp's memorial at Mittelbau-Dora.
Camp commandants:
SS-Standartenführer:
Hermann Pister
SS-Sturmbannführer:
Jacob Weiseborn (1937-1939)
SS-Obersturmbannführer:
Karl Otto Koch (1939--1942)
SS-Standartenführer: Hermann Pister (1942--1945)
Buchenwald's second commandant was Karl Otto Koch, who ran the camp from 1937 to
1941. His second wife,
Ilse Koch, became notorious as
Die Hexe von Buchenwald ("the witch of Buchenwald") for her cruelty and brutality.
Koch had a zoo built by the prisoners in the camp, with a bear pit (Bärenzwinger) facing the Appellplatz, the assembly square where prisoner "roll-calls" were conducted.
Koch himself was eventually imprisoned at Buchenwald by the
Nazi authorities for incitement to murder. The charges were lodged by
Prince Waldeck and Dr.
Morgen, to which were later added charges of corruption, embezzlement, black market dealings, and exploitation of the camp workers for personal gain. Other camp officials were charged, including Ilse Koch. The trial resulted in
Karl Koch being sentenced to death for disgracing both himself and the SS; he was executed by firing squad on April 5, 1945, one week before
American troops arrived. Ilse Koch was sentenced to a term of four years' imprisonment after the war. Her sentence was reduced to two years and she was set free. She was subsequently arrested again and sentenced to life imprisonment by the post-war German authorities; she committed suicide in a Bavarian prison cell in
September 1967.
The third and last commandant of the camp was Hermann Pister (1942--1945). He was tried in
1947 (
Dachau Trials) and sentenced to death, but died in
September 1948 of a heart condition before the sentence could be carried out.
Female prisoners and overseers
The number of women held in Buchenwald was somewhere between
500 and 1,
000. The first female inmates were twenty political prisoners who were accompanied by a female SS guard (Aufseherin); these women were brought to Buchenwald from
Ravensbrück in 1941 and forced into prostitution at the camp's brothel. The SS later fired the SS woman on duty in the brothel for corruption, her position was taken over by "brothel mothers" as ordered by SS chief
Heinrich Himmler.
The majority of women prisoners, however, arrived in
1944 and 1945 from other camps, mainly
Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, and
Bergen Belsen. Only one barrack was set aside for them; this was overseen by the female block leader (Blockführerin)
Franziska Hoengesberg, who came from
Essen when it was evacuated. All the women prisoners were later shipped out to one of Buchenwald's many female satellite camps in
Sömmerda,
Buttelstedt,
Mühlhausen,
Gotha, Gelsenkirchen, Essen, Lippstadt, Weimar,
Magdeburg, and Penig, to name a few. No female guards were permanently stationed at Buchenwald.
When the Buchenwald camp was evacuated, the SS sent the male prisoners to other camps, and the five-hundred remaining women (including one of the secret annexe members who lived with
Anne Frank, "
Mrs. van
Daan", real name
Auguste van Pels), were taken by train and on foot to the
Theresienstadt concentration camp and ghetto in the protectorate of
Bohemia and Moravia. Many, including van Pels, died sometime between April and May 1945. Because the female prisoner population at Buchenwald was comparatively small, the SS only trained female overseers at the camp and "assigned" them to one of the female subcamps. Twenty-two known female guards had personnel files at the camp, but it is unlikely that any of them stayed at Buchenwald for longer than a few days.
Text Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buchenwald_concentration_camp
מחנות ריכוז, אנטישמיות, רדיפות של היהודים, סוציאליזם לאומי, שואה, חוקי נירנברג; concentratiekampen, jodenvervolging, het nationaal-socialisme, Neurenberger wetten, campi di concentramento, l'antisemitismo, la persecuzione degli ebrei, il nazionalsocialismo,
Olocausto, leggi di Norimberga
- published: 01 Nov 2013
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