The Liberation and American Administration of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp

Henry Staruk

Study of the Holocaust is an integral and unavoidable component of twentieth-century European history. However, one crucial aspect of this important story that is largely missing from the historiography is the issue of Allied administration of concentration camps immediately after liberation. Discussion of what is often considered modernity’s greatest manifestation of evil, inhumanity, and brutality, especially coming as it did from the respected cultural heritage of the German nation, seems to provoke our need for a “happy ending,” a reassurance that this tale is an aberration, not in line with our expectations of human nature. As a means to fulfilling that need, concentration camp histories generally end soon after liberation, with the oppressors vanquished and goodness and compassion victorious. The story of the camps, however, simply does not end there. This paper seeks to address this important aspect of history through an exploration of the challenges facing the American administrators responsible for the camp at Buchenwald, as well as those continuing to plague the camp’s survivors.

After the turbulence of emotion that erupted so exuberantly once the prisoners realized their liberation, the hardships of reality returned to the fore. The end of the Nazi rule of the camp did not end the effects of that rule. When the Americans first discovered the camp of Buchenwald, they were not, and could not have been, prepared to deal with the situation awaiting them inside the camp. Even when more specialized and better equipped administrators arrived and began their task of aiding the camp’s population, the effects of the torturous Nazi system lingered on. Weakened physically and spiritually by life in the camp, inmates continued to die under American care.

For reasons of pragmatism, the newly freed prisoners would have to remain in the same camp for an unknown measure of time. The return home would be delayed until epidemics could be controlled, inmates could be rehabilitated, and the war-ravaged landscape of Europe would even allow the simple transportation of survivors to their homes. So it went in Konzentrationslager Buchenwald, the first of the major camps to be occupied by the Allies, on 11 April 1945. None of this, of course, is meant to blame the American administration, for it clearly acted from the best of humanitarian interests. The simple fact was that the concentration camp system was so cruel and so horrible that it continued to claim victims despite the excellent care provided by the Americans.

By early 1945, the camp inmates knew that the war had turned against Germany. As the SS evacuated camps near the closing fronts, the populations of the interior camps like Dachau, Belsen, and Buchenwald swelled. The newly arrived prisoners put a terrible strain on an already fragile camp environment. Some arrived by train, others as part of the infamous “death marches.” They brought diseases and compounded the food and housing problems, but they also brought information. Much of it was rumor and conjecture, but the new information, supplemented by hidden short-wave radio receivers gathering news from Allied countries, moved the prisoners of Buchenwald to action.

They knew from the recent arrivals that Auschwitz had been evacuated of all prisoners able to walk, and rumor held that the Nazis had killed the remaining prisoners and destroyed the camp in order to hide the evidence of the atrocities committed there.[1] They knew that camps were being evacuated as the Allied armies pushed the front lines closer to them, and the inmates of Buchenwald began to fear that they would soon be evacuated or perhaps killed. The camp leadership began to prepare for this eventuality.

In mid-1943, certain prisoners created the underground International Committee, a necessarily clandestine organization that took it upon itself to be the organ of government to be responsible for the safety of the inmates in the days leading up to and following liberation. Following an August 1944 Allied air raid of the nearby Gustloff Works, where Buchenwald inmates were contracted out as slave laborers to the German war industry, prisoners began to smuggle weapons into the camp.[2] Leaders created and trained an underground prisoner military unit, which met and trained in the open under the disguises of a prisoner fire brigade and a camp policing force, but they realized that if they revolted in response to the evacuation and destruction of the camp, the SS would still have supremacy of arms.[3] The prisoners would have to delay or prevent the evacuation until Allied forces could overtake the camp. The news that on 1 April 1945, American tanks had taken Eisenach, forty miles west of Weimar, gave organizers of the resistance great hope for the success of their plan.

This resistance involved two important components, both of which required the participation and solidarity of the prisoner population. Individuals could “submerge,” or assume new identities, alter the numbers on their uniforms, and move to a different Block.[4] Doing this successfully required the cooperation of one’s fellow inmates, especially when the SS sought a particular individual. The other form of resistance that began in April 1945 was a massive passive resistance. On 4 April, the SS ordered all Jewish prisoners to report to the roll call square. None did. Jewish prisoners instead submerged to avoid being rounded up one at a time. The next day, the SS planned to arrest forty-six of the camp’s leaders, but an inmate privy to the order warned the leadership in advance, and none of the forty-six were found.

The evening of 5 April saw the last SS-ordered roll call attended by the prisoner population of Buchenwald. After that day, the inmates simply refused to turn out, their resolve strengthened for the moment by the fact that they possessed weapons with which to defend themselves at least to some degree. Surprisingly, there was no mass reprisal on the part of the SS, who may have felt by this point incapable of controlling the prisoners in light of their failure to arrest or even find the forty-six named leaders of the resistance. The SS began to fear the mass of prisoners, a mass that had grown to over 80,000 at the end of the previous month, with transports from evacuated camps.[5] Still, the camp’s authorities initiated the evacuation of the camp as the American Third Army approached. Guards moved into the barracks and work details, forcibly rounding up around 3,000 Jewish prisoners for evacuation by foot for the Dachau concentration camp near Munich. Evacuation plans called for a further 14,000 to be removed the next day, but the guards could only collect around 6,000. Identifying the Jewish prisoners was extremely difficult owing to the loss of records in the August 1944 air raid and the practice of “submerging.”

Facilitated by the fact that roll calls were now especially problematic and could not guarantee anything resembling an accurate count of prisoners, the inmates executed a daring and still risky plan to further delay or halt evacuations. They smuggled out a representative, Eugen Kogon, to deliver a letter from nearby Weimar to the camp commandant. This letter, written by Kogon and signed by a fictional British major John McLeod, supposedly airdropped into Weimar, was a warning against evacuation:

TO THE COMMANDANT!

Transports are leaving Buchenwald. They are death transports – like those from Ohrdruf!

The horrible tragedy of Ohrdruf must not be repeated. We have seen for ourselves the victims of the guard troops and the frenzied population.

Woe to those responsible, woe to Thuringia if it is repeated! We understand that you – like the entire land – are in a dilemma that you believe you can overcome by sending thousands away. It must cease! Stop immediately!

Our tank commanders are on their way to settle your account. You still have a chance![6]

SS plans, originating from authorities beyond the camp level, had ordered the complete emptying of Buchenwald by 8 April, but the McLeod note prevented Camp Commandant Hermann Pister from undertaking major transfers of prisoners. Instead, he removed small numbers of prisoners (in relation to the amount demanded by his superiors), hoping to satisfy SS officials by evacuating some prisoners, but not enough to bring the wrath of the fictional McLeod. Around 15,000 prisoners were transferred over the next two days, some assembling voluntarily, but the camp still held tens of thousands. On 10 April, Pister’s commander, Waffen-SS General Prince Josias zu Waldeck-Pyrmont came to Buchenwald, ordered the complete evacuation of the installation. The urgency of the evacuation left with Waldeck, as the Deputy Commandant revealed to Hans Eiden, the prisoner representative, at 10:30 on 11 April that the SS guards intended to surrender the camp to the Americans.[7] At noon, the guards assembled outside of the camp, signifying the arrival of the Americans, the SS slipped into the forest, leaving only the sentries in the guard towers. At this point, the prisoner military units, now longer needing to hide in the guise of firefighters, armed themselves, stormed the towers and took control of the camp. Today, all clocks inside the camp of Buchenwald display 3:15, a tribute to the exact time at which the prisoners liberated themselves from the Nazis.

The SS had evacuated so quickly and so abruptly that German authorities in Weimar had no idea what had been occurring in the concentration camp. At around 4:00, a telephone call came in to the Camp Commandant’s office. A German inmate answered it. Calling was the Weimar chief of police, asking to speak to the Commandant. The inmate told him to try again in thirty minutes. Punctually, the chief called back, again asking for the Commandant. When the inmate offered to take a message, the chief of police asked if the prisoners had been killed yet, warning that they should be killed before the Americans arrived.[8] In fact, the former prisoners were by this time already hunting down the intended recipients of the chief’s message.

Mounting a white flag on a guard tower, the prisoner militia turned their attention to the surrounding forest, searching for the escaped SS guards. Former prisoners captured seventy-six former guards throughout the day. Retribution often came swiftly. Survivor Benjamin Bender remembered inmates exacting revenge on their former tormentors: “I saw SS caught and thrown alive into the excrement pits, their SS hats with the [Death’s Head] emblem floating on the surface.”[9] On the other hand, some groups of SS men were brought back into the camp unmolested by the general population of former prisoners. Perhaps they felt justice would best be served by legal means, or perhaps the SS still demanded fear and “slavish submission” that protected them from lynching.[10]

In the meantime, the inmate leadership implemented the post-liberation organizational system they had planned. This was headed by an International Committee and oversaw separate committees representing each of the nationalities that comprised the former prisoner population. The organization also included commissions for camp administration, sanitation, clothing, and supply. The first American tanks from the U.S., Sixth Armored Division arrived at 4:00. At 5:30, Lt. Edward Tennenbaum and Egon Fleck (a civilian), intelligence officers from the U.S. Twelfth Army, entered the camp. After a few hours of celebration, the Camp Elder, the prisoner population’s head, ordered the liberated prisoners back to their barracks to await instruction from their new administration. Leaving the roll call square, the inmates saw hundreds of their fellows lying on the ground, some sleeping, some sick or exhausted, and some dead.[11]

It would not be until 13 April that American troops arrived at the camp in great numbers, bringing with them food and medical supplies. At this point, the Americans faced a truly daunting task: administering care to the over 20,000 former prisoners still in the camp. What they found was a mass of starved and abused “walking skeletons,” many of them too weak to even leave their bunks, and a death rate of 150 per day.[12] The most urgent task ahead would be to feed and rehabilitate these people, to undo the physical and emotional devastation that the Nazi regime had systematically heaped upon them. New housing would have to be found or erected to alleviate the cramped and overcrowded conditions. Epidemic diseases would have to be controlled. With the influx of prisoners from the evacuated eastern camps, typhus and dysentery were a constant threat. To compound matters, the sewage system and water supply had to be restored, as the SS had destroyed the camp’s water pumps as a last act of violence against the state’s prisoners.

The very aura of the camp, not the least of which included the stacks of corpses and the horribly emaciated bodies of the survivors, severely affected the American soldiers. The surreal atmosphere of the moment of encounter reached both sides: “The soldiers were shocked, crying like babies,” recalls Bender. “Some inmates were just sitting, stupefied.”[13] Hardened battle veterans broke down and cried. Some became physically ill as a result of what they saw upon their arrival in Buchenwald.[14] Even General George Patton could not finish a tour of the camp on 15 April after viewing the crematory building.[15] The question of how these people would be able to receive the food and medical care they so badly needed troubled Harry Abrams, a combat correspondent who arrived with First Army, who noted that when they walked into the camp, the Americans “really weren’t equipped to handle them in the beginning.”[16]

The 120^th Evacuation Hospital, with a medical staff of 268 officers, enlisted men, and nurses, arrived on 15 April, assuming the tasks of rehabilitating the 20,000 former prisoners. Captain Robert Dinolt estimated that half of the inmates were in need of medical attention, and of that group, the absence of immediate attention would prove fatal. The U.S. Army Medical Corps ordered the use of massive quantities of DDT powder to combat the possibility of a typhus epidemic, and as a result, only sixty-two cases were identified in the camp, and those inmates were quarantined in a sanitarium in a former Nazi hospital thirty miles away to prevent an outbreak in the camp.[17] On 20 April, Army engineers repaired the water pumps, restoring the much-needed water supply and sewage system. That same day, the American Rabbi Herschel Schachter led the first Jewish service in the camp, distributing matzos to Jewish survivors.[18]

The Americans converted the SS barracks into hospital wards. Occupying fifteen dormitory buildings, the hospitals treated over 12,000 patients.[19] Inside, the former prisoners could shower themselves and, for the first time since incarceration, lie in a bed with a mattress and sheets, and each could have the whole bed to himself.[20] Once admitted to the hospital, patients enjoyed “days of great care, devotion and dedication on the part of the American military personnel.”[21]

Nutritional rehabilitation would have to be undertaken gradually, as the inmates’ digestive systems had been damaged by the years of inadequate diet. In the worst cases, intravenous feeding was necessary, until the patient’s system could handle a mixture of cereal, milk, and sugar in amounts that the medical staff increased gradually. Gradual increase was the standard. Especially in the last days under the Nazis, prisoners received a mere 500 to 700 calories each day, and a sudden increase to the recommended 2,000 to 2,500 would be too great a shock to their fragile systems. In fact, many inmates died from overeating immediately after liberation, occasionally a result of the uninformed good intentions of passing or visiting soldiers.[22] Survivor Kurt Kupferberg believed it was the high fat content of the new foods, particularly bacon, that caused the problems.[23] After existing in a prolonged state of starvation, the former prisoners’ instinct to overindulge is completely understandable, as the American plan of gradual dietary increase would have seemed irrational. Benjamin Bender’s greatest wish at liberation was simply to stuff a large piece of bread in his mouth, “for maximum pleasure.”[24]

As for the procuring of rations for the inmate population, Army officials required the citizens of Weimar to contribute the necessary foodstuffs. Civilians of the surrounding area were also brought into the camp to view the atrocities committed by their government. American authorities even pressed some into the service of cleaning the camp and burying the dead.[25]

By 25 April, the 120^th Evacuation Hospital had stabilized conditions. The death rate had fallen to around twenty per day, and American officials could at last begin to tackle the task of repatriating the inmates. The greatest problem in this arena was the fact that some of the inmates, now termed Displaced Persons by American authorities, simply did not want to return to their former homes. This was especially true of Russians fearful of the Stalinist state and Polish Jews who did not wish to return to Poland. Sadly, the sustaining hope for many Jews that liberation from the camp would mean the end of anti-Semitism never came to be.[26] A friend of Bender’s commented after liberation that he “would never go back to Poland. Poland is a big cemetery for all Jews.”[27] In most cases, the ravages of war had destroyed Europe’s infrastructures to the point that simple transportation was difficult, especially in the countries to the east. Even with the acceptance of the fact that repatriation might be impossible for some time, survivors were also disheartened by the lack of postal services and operational telephone lines; they could not contact loved ones elsewhere in Europe.[28]

Many survivors wished to go to Switzerland, and a good portion of Jewish survivors wanted passage to Palestine. According to the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, only the very sick or very young would be allowed to go to Switzerland.[29] Inmates who were forced to remain in the camp became restless: “we were free already, we craved for return to normalcy, which we wanted faster than was possible.”[30] The camp itself was not under quarantine, and prisoners were free to visit Weimar and the surrounding countryside with an American-issued pass.

The first organized repatriations left the camp two weeks after liberation. The first to leave were the French, Belgians, Dutch, and residents of other Western European nations. On 8 May, Czech survivors boarded a train sent specially for them from Prague. Next were the Norwegians and Russians.[31] The Soviet government pressured the United States into returning its citizens, though many of them, especially prisoners of war, feared a return for political reasons.[32] Finally, when the decision came that Thuringia would fall under the occupational jurisdiction of the Soviet Union, all inmates who continued to resist repatriation were sent to Displaced Persons camps in the American occupation zone. Most of these were Jews who wanted to resettle in the West.[33] When the camp was turned over to the Soviets on 4 July 1945, nearly all of its inmates had left for home or for further processing in the UNRRA camps in the Western zones.

The post-liberation administration of KZ Buchenwald was a massive undertaking, and despite the close cooperation of American authorities and the International Committee, conflicts did arise, particularly regarding the gradual nature of the ration increases. In the end, about 3,000 of the 20,000 former prisoners of the Nazis died in American care, although responsibility for their deaths should not rest on the Americans.[34] They died as a result of the continuing and lingering effects of the Nazi concentration camp system. Clearly, American administrators acted with the best of humanitarian interests, even though unforeseen problems complicated the actual rehabilitations and repatriations. Perhaps this point may best be told through the voice of Buchenwald survivor Raymond Kantor: “I, as well as many others, recovered slowly but surely. The casualty rate was indeed still very high but would have been much higher if not for the efforts of the Americans.”[35]

NOTES