Buchenwald

Ralph Wolpaw, M.D.

Major, Medical Corps, 120th Evacuation Hospital, United States Army

1945

We arrived in the Buchenwald area on Sunday 15 April late in the

evening.  Our bivouac area was about one mile from the concentration

camp on a dirt road leading to the camp.  We immediately noted a number

of ex-prisoners wandering through the section in which we were camped,

many of markedly emaciated and showing evidences of ill treatment over a

long period of time.  The camp had been liberated the previous day in

the morning.  The following day, we visited the camp to survey the work

which had to be done.  We were accompanied or rather, we were there at

the same time as 1000 citizens from the nearby city of Weimar.  These

people were being taken on a personally conducted tour of the camp at

the express invitation of General Patton.  They were thoroughly

frightened and reacted by weeping, moaning, and protesting innocence and

lack of knowledge of everything that had transpired at the camp.  The

prisoners did not bear out these protestations, it appeared that the

good citizens of Weimar had been quite delighted to heap abuse, both

material and verbal on the prisoners as they arrived in crowded box cars

just prior to entering the camp.

The sights that met our eyes and the stories were heard, borne out by

graphic evidence on every side, made us sick and ashamed to be members

of the so called enlightened human race which could perpetrate such

atrocities.  There were 25,000 persons living in the utmost filth and

squalor in the camp.  The German "supermen", with wanton brutality, had

chosen the easiest and most efficient method of creating the greatest

misery in the camp after their departure.  They had blown up the water

main so that there was no water at all in the camp except the amounts

that could be brought in by truck and so forth.  The devilish cruelty of

this action can be more readily understood when one realizes that a

large number of the inmates were seriously sick, many at the point of

death,  and the lack of water if only for sanitary facilities was

equivalent to a death sentence.  The stench of the place is [sic]

indescribable, it combined every foul odor ever known and then added

some.  In some areas, men were packed into barn-like barracks on wooden

shelves, so close together that they could not turn over or even move

because of the bodies on either side and in some cases, they had so

little space that it was necessary for them to lie on their sides.  Most

of these individuals were so thin it was almost difficult to conceive of

them as having once been healthy, robust, perhaps even happy human

beings.  Some of them were weeping and crying for joy, other were too

weak to do that but just looked their happiness while many were only

able to stare vacantly, liberation had arrived too late for them.  There

were many dead mixed with the living, sometimes it was difficult to

differentiate the quick from the cold.  Everywhere on the ground in the

compound and around it, there were dead people lying around, some

pitifully clothed, evidently dying in the last struggle to get a breath

of free air, others stark naked, lying in all varieties of grotesque

positions and even in death, not achieving the certain dignity that

should have been theirs.  Outside many of the charnel houses which were

called barracks, in little alcoves surrounded by low walls, there were

piles of bodies, so wasted that they gave the impression of being groups

of arms, legs, and heads without bodies.  These were the dead of the

previous day, waiting to be carted away on the death wagon to the

crematorium.

The crematorium was the acme of horror, to such an extent that many men

actually became sick on seeing it.  It was a building off to one of side

of the great open compound before the barracks and on entering, there

were steps leading down.  A large number of bodies were piled outside,

waiting for final disposition.  Inside, there was a hall like room with

hooks along the wall, we were told that at times, men were hung from

these hooks while the S.S. guards practiced little refinements of

torture on them. The furnace was a large one and there was an opening

into it just large enough to admit one body at a time.  In one place,

there was a pile of ashes including some partially burned and charred

bones.  There were even some partially burned bodies.  Hanging about on

the walls were wicked whips and bludgeons, some still caked with blood,

these had been used to hasten the demise of stubborn prisoners who

persisted in clinging to life in a way which was obnoxious to the

kind-hearted guards.  In some cases, to be sure, the guards had not been

quite efficient so that prisoners who were still at least partially

alive were fed into the flames but these minor details did not interfere

seriously with the progress of the murder factory.  The crowning glory

of the place was the sign over the entrance which said something on the

order of "You who enter here are lucky because you will leave through

the chimney."

Elsewhere in the great compound, there were two whipping stocks in

which a man was placed bent over in an extremely uncomfortable position

after which the skin was neatly stripped from his back of his buttocks

of his thighs [sic] by means of whips well designed for this purpose.

Sometimes, the men were left in these stocks for long periods after the

whipping and some even died there.

At the entrance to the camp, there were a group of cells in which

prisoners were interrogated, in most cases not verbally but by means of

persuasion involving the mashing of some fingers or the stripping of

portions of skin or even the loss of certain parts of the anatomy.

These cells were well constructed and soundproof so that the prisoner

being interrogated would not be disturbed by the others and of course,

that he would not disturb them.  Usually, also, at the time of entrance

into the camp, the prisoners were taken before the wife of the

commandant for purely cultural and artistic purposes.  She was an art

lover and was particularly fond of good tattooing.  Each prisoner was

stripped to the waist and was carefully examined by the lady in

question.  If he had any skin tattooing which appealed to her, she

obtained the drawing for her collection.  The skin was removed from the

prisoner, tanned, and then mounted on a plaque or made into a lamp shade

for her use.  Whether the prisoners so honored were alive or dead at the

time of removal could not be determined but it is known that most of

them were never seen again.

There was a beautiful scientific laboratory at Buchenwald.  It had fine

appointments and facilities for the most painstaking and minute work in

bacteriology.  Research work was done there, research on typhus fever,

ranging from the symptoms of the disease, the period of incubation, to

the pathological changes produced in a human being.  Four footed guinea

pigs were not used for this purpose, what was the need when there were

so many perfectly good two footed ones available?  Many men died to no

end for the cold blooded amusement of several power mad so called

scientists.  The man in charge of the experimentation admitted later on

that it was purely for his own gratification that it was carried on

rather than for any far reaching or helpful results that might have been

obtained.  But the prisoners had a little revenge.  All the typhus

vaccine for the German army was made in this laboratory and the work was

done by skilled prisoners, leaders in the particular field.  The

supervision of this particular activity was placed in the hands of a

group of S.S. doctors, diploma-mill specialists who had a complete lack

of knowledge of the procedures involved and the product produced.  The

prisoners were able to sabotage every bit of the vaccine, not only

making it useless for the original purpose but even adding disease

producing organisms to it so that it created rather than prevented

disease.  The S.S. doctors, unwilling to admit their ignorance (they had

to save face just like their Japanese allies) approved the vaccine and

it was sent to the army for use.  The regular German army doctors knew

it was not good but could not protest against it because they would then

be questioning the S.S. which was something that was just not done!  The

fact that the incidence of typhus fever in the German army was not

greater was because they took other precautions against lice and

prevented the disease in that way.

Buchenwald had a quota, a death quota.  Eighty people had to die daily

in order to meet this quota.  The exact reasons for this are obscure but

the guards accepted the cross they had to bear without complaining and

saw to it that they never went under the quota.  If 80 people did not

die of normal causes (starvation, maltreatment, or disease) they could

be disposed of by other means and  at the same time, the S.S. troops,

many of them receiving their initial training there, could be properly

indoctrinated in brutality and savagery.  Of course, toward the end, the

death rate from disease far surpassed the quota but no one was ever

censured for this.  Among the methods of increasing the death rate was

the practice of beating a man to death for the failure to perform some

slight task in the barracks such as dusting a high ledge.  The S.S.

guards did not mind the dust, the filth, or anything else, they searched

for reasons to liquidate the prisoners for their own amusement.

The S.S. men were sadistic children in mental age with the physiques of

adults.  They had to be amused constantly, had to be played up to or

they made life more of a living hell for the prisoners that it already

was.  The prisoners would take turns keeping the guards amused or

occupied so that the remainder of a group could be undisturbed for a

period.  However, when the prisoners were brought in initially and run

through the processing which included a delousing shower using very

coarse soap and extremely hot water, they could not take time for this

and they were painfully aware of the presence of the S.S. men who jabbed

them, mashed their toes, forced them to submerge in strong cresol

solution, or used other little tricks of a playful nature to make them

miserable.

Prisoners were occasionally sent out in large numbers on work details,

some of these included working on the tunnels used to house the large

underground factories.  The men were worked hard and long hours with

little rest, improper housing, and very inadequate food so that most of

them gradually wasted away and finally fell by the wayside.  They were

literally worked to death.  The food was not only poor there, it was

very inadequate in the camp proper.  The amount of food necessary to

keep an adult man alive at absolute rest is well known, it varies from

1200 to 1500 calories per day.  Yet these prisoners were given 400 to

800 calories a day and made to work hard on that.  It was planned,

scientific, starvation, in most cases, brazenly admitted by the men in

charge.  The reason - pure madness because a healthy strong prisoner

obviously will work better and last longer than the opposite.

One last thing, perhaps the most degrading of all.  Large numbers of

the prisoners were emasculated, coldbloodedly, ruthlessly, and with

malice aforethought.  Many times it was done brutally also, the ultimate

in savagery.

Buchenwald was a hell hole.  After our initial reaction we went to work

and bringing to bear all the equipment we could get, using everything in

our power to help the prisoner doctors who had been working so

valiantly, including blood, plasma, glucose and saline solution, drugs,

and good nursing care by our ward men, managed to cut down the terrific

death rate which prevailed when we arrived.  The prisoners were all

deloused with DDT powder, transferred to other quarters where they had

blankets, cots, sanitary facilities, and were given increasing amounts

of food as it became available.  The degeneration of years could not be

undone in a few days but an effort was made and the improvement in the

short time we were there was very gratifying to all of us who worked

there and helped a little.

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