Buchenwald - death camp

Buchenwald - a concentration camp, which due to a well-established system of massacres has become one of the most famous evidence of crimes of the Nazi regime in Europe. He was not the first either in the world or in Germany, but it was the local leadership that became the pioneers in the conveyor killing business. Another famous camp in Auschwitz was fully operational only in January 1942, when the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) took a course toward total physical extermination of the Jews. But much earlier this practice came to Buchenwald.

The concentration camp marked its first victims in the summer of 1937. In early 1938, a torture chamber for prisoners was created here for the first time, and in 1940 - a crematorium that proved its effectiveness as a means of mass extermination. Prisoners in the bulk were political opponents of Hitler (in particular, the leader of the German Communists - Ernst Telman), dissidents who dared to disagree with the course of the Nazi Party in the late thirties, all sorts of inferior, in the opinion of the Reich Chancellor, and, of course, the Jews. In the summer of 1937 the first settling in Buchenwald took place. The Concentration Camp was located in the land of Thuringia, near Weimar. During its entire existence, for eight years, until April 1945, about a quarter of a million people passed through its huts, of which 55,000 were destroyed or maimed by physical work. This was Buchenwald - a concentration camp, a photo of which shocked the whole world.

Experiences

Among other things, as noted Buchenwald, the concentration camp was also famous for experiments on people. With the fullest approval of the supreme Nazi leadership, in particular Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmer, they deliberately infected people with dangerous viruses for experimental testing of vaccines. Prisoners of Buchenwald were infected with tuberculosis, typhus and a number of other diseases. Very often this resulted not only in the death of the experimental subjects, but also in the contamination of their neighbors in barracks and, as a result, in severe epidemics that carried thousands of prisoners' lives. In addition, in the camp, experiments were actively conducted on the pain threshold of a person, his extreme degree of endurance, the possibility of survival under extreme conditions, when local doctors simply watched
Dying in artificially created conditions by people: in water, cold and so on.

Release

Buchenwald (concentration camp) was released in April 1945. On April 4, one of the concentration camps-Ordruf was liberated by American troops. The long preparation of prisoners enabled the formation of armed resistance forces right on camp territory. The uprising began on April 11, 1945. In his course, the prisoners managed to break the resistance and take the territory under their control. Several dozen Nazi guards and SS men were taken prisoner. On the same day, American forces approached the camp, and two days later the Red Army.

Postwar use

After the Allied forces captured Buchenwald, the concentration camp was used for several years by the Soviet People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) as a camp for interned Nazis.