Buchenwald Victims Slowly Recovering under U.S. Care

By Helen Kirkpatrick

Via press release to the News Leader May 1945

Buchenwald, Germany. --- Nearly 3000 “skeletons” of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp are coming slowly back to life under the expert care of the United States Army’s 120^th Evacuation Hospital, commanded by Colonel William E. Williams, of Austin, Texas,

Former SS Barracks have been turned into a hospital where 20 American doctors, assisted by 60 doctors of all nationalities---former inmates—are slowly restoring life to Buchenwald’s worst cases. The death rate has gone down in the week since the 120^th took over from 100 daily to under 30.

Most of the inmates are suffering from starvation and resultant dehydration, but there are also cases of advanced tuberculosis and 53 cases of typhus.

Buchenwald was, according to its inmates, the best camp of its kind in Germany. It was the rest camp of camps, with organized recreation. The worst camps were those at Auschwitz, in Silesia, and Lublin, in Poland, where many of Buchenwald’s present residents had been at one time or another.

51,000 Dead!

Yet Buchenwald’s new memorial monument is erected to 51,000 Europeans, Britishers, Canadians, and Americans who died or were killed there. This does not include the 15,000 who died during the month before we arrived there, nor the several thousands who will die in the coming weeks as a result of the life they led there.

Colonel Williams and his deputy, Major Joseph C. Andriola, of New York City,

Immediately evacuated to the SS barracks 2976 of the worst cases out of a total of 5000

who needed medical attention. The other 16,000 inmates are not healthy, but they are less serious.

None of these patients could take food, so they had to be given blood transfusions---a pint daily, followed by injections of glucose and saline solution. They had been days not only without food but also without water. Now they are getting vitamins found in a German army warehouse in Weimar.

The supply is not great enough for them and for the camp’s 800 children. Nor is the blood supply really sufficient, but for some unexplained reason, no effort has been made to get the Weimar civilians to donate whole blood.

We wandered through the hospital today, talking to Poles, Russians, and Germans, all of whom looked like more or less animated mummies. When they were found a week ago, they were listless, and unable even by a flicker of the eye to indicate any reaction. Children, 90% of whom are orphans, are said to be in good condition.

Stunted growth

Yet, 16 year old boys are about the size of the average 7 year old American. Five years of this life, working 12 hours a day in the near-by V-2 factory, has irretrievably stunted their growth.

Three Polish brothers, aged 15, 16, and 18, were not strong enough to get out of bed. But two young brothers from Pitokow were running about and asked if they could get word to their uncle, Engineer Bruno Schonthal in Havana, Cuba Their father is here, and their mother in Ravensbreuk, a women’s concentration camp.

Colonel Williams showed us pictures taken under his supervision when his evacuation unit, minus the nurses, arrived, and showed us human skin used for decorative purposes. He told us of an experimental unit of the camp where inmates were

Injected with typhus, then killed for further study where experiments in castration took place.

Williams and other doctors only shook their heads when we asked if they could explain the mentality of men who slowly starved thousands or beat them to death while giving tender care to the camp’s many flower beds.

For the first time in six years there are smiling faces and hope in Buchenwald.

Congressmen on hand

American Congressmen and GI’s from nearby combat units wandered through Buchenwald’s horrors Sunday with dazed but unbelieving looks on their faces.

“We always thought ther stuff we read about these German camps was prop-

aganda,” more than one of them said. “We know now it wasn’t”.

As they walked in the neat, flower trimmed gatehouse, they had a slightly incredulous air, which slowly gave way to a mixture of surprise and disgust. When they stepped through the door of the neat crematorium, whose ovens were fed from an elevator which raised the bodies from the death room below, their wonderment increased.

But every man blanched as he stepped out into the courtyard where a truck and piles of desiccated bodies lay, the remnants of the thousands of people who had died here. These had been abandoned as the Germans in haste fled before our advance.

Members of the British Parliament had visited the Camp on Saturday. Yesterday, Major General G.P. Vanier, Canadian ambassador arrived to investigate the number of Canadians who had been done to death in this camp.

Soldiers visit camp.

Long processions of GI’s and Officers filed through the camp on Sunday, following an order that all soldiers who could should visit Buchenwald to see with their own eyes one of Germany’s better camps!

All, the eight congressmen and soldiers alike---seemed skeptical when told that this was one of Germany’s best.

Here, starved, overworked prisoners of all nationalities were shown movies every night, provided with women and surrounded in their cramped, jammed hovels with thyme-filled flower beds.

Here the death quota was 80 daily. If only 60 died, 20 others were picked and given the choice of hanging themselves, or dying through formalin injections. Fellow prisoners then chucked them into the crematorium ovens.

Here some of Europe’s finest brains and outstanding cultural leaders were privileged to taste German culture

Copywright 1945 by the News Leader and the Chicago Times

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