BUCHENWALD CONCENTRATION CAMP Holocaust letter judaica

Buchenwald Concentration Camp

   One of the major Nazi concentration camps was set up in 1937 at Buchenwald, on the Ettersberg Hill near Weimar in Thringen. Buchenwald remained one of the major camps throughout the history of the Third Reich, with numerous subcamps under its administration. Buchenwald was not, per se, an extermination camp (such as Auschwitz), but prisoners were starved, maltreated, and worked to death in the camp quarry and adjacent armaments factories. Russian POWs and others were executed and cremated. Buchenwald was also made infamous by Ilse Koch, wife of camp commandant Karl Koch. Frau Koch had a fancy for prisoners' tattoos, and would often have these flayed from the victims and preserved, sometimes as lampshades. Jews and Gypsies were transported from Buchenwald to extermination camps further east, for annihilation. Later, as these camps were overrun by the Soviet Army, prisoners were crammed into Buchenwald, some 13,000 of whom died during three months in 1945 alone. The total death toll at Buchenwald may never be known, but it was at least 51,000.