#otd1945

On 23 June 1945, 350 children and adolescents from Buchenwald arrived in Switzerland. What were the circumstances leading to their journey?

On 15 June 1945, newspapers in Germany and abroad reported the arrest of Hermann Pister, the last commander of the Buchenwald concentration camp. American investigators had taken him into custody after tracking him down in a prisoner-of-war camp near Munich a few days earlier. Like many other SS men, he had tried to disappear among the masses of German POWs.

On 3 June 1945, 16 Jewish survivors left Buchenwald and moved to an estate in Egendorf near Weimar. Just a few days earlier, in the precarious situation of the Buchenwald DP Camp, they had resolved to establish a kibbutz hakhshara.

Josef Dvořáček died in the tuberculosis hospital in Blankenhain near Weimar on 29 May 1945. Tuberculosis patients from the liberated Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora concentration camps received treatment there and in the sanatoria in Sülzhayn.

On 7 May 1945, the American town major William McEllroy ordered the inhabitants of Nordhausen to visit the honorary cemetery for the victims of the Boelcke-Kaserne subcamp the following Sunday. He wanted to confront them with the crimes committed “by the Germans”.

Revivre! That was the title of a newspaper whose first – and presumably last – issue came out in Seesen, Lower Saxony on 5 May 1945. The editor of the “Journal of the French Liberated from the Nazi Yoke and Presently in Seesen” was François Le Lionnais.

On 3 May 1945, the 34-year-old Isidoor Mols of Antwerp was still in the hands of the SS. They had crowded him and thousands of other Buchenwald inmates into dirty, open coal cars on 10 April. More than three weeks later, the transport still hadn’t reached its intended destination: Terezín.

On this 1 May 1945, the whole of Paris seemed to be on its feet. It was the first Labour Day to be celebrated in freedom after the end of the German occupation. Parades organized by the labour movement marched through the town. And although the fighting continued in Germany, it was also a celebration of victory over National Socialism.

On 30 April 1945, the liberated concentration camp inmate Walter Brinkmann returned home to the city of Braunschweig. The criminal police had committed him to the Buchenwald concentration camp in November 1943 for several petty criminal offences. The Buchenwald SS had registered him as a “professional criminal” and transferred him to Dora a short time later.

On 28 April 1945, 17 days after the liberation, the 26-year-old Belgian Gilbert Demoulin died in the former Dora concentration camp. The Americans had begun providing medical assistance to the surviving inmates immediately after liberating the camp. Many of those inmates were so debilitated, however, that further lives were lost daily.

After the liberation of Dora – the main camp of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp –, the American military authorities set up a DP camp on the grounds. The abbreviation DP stood for Displaced Persons: that is, persons who had been deported to Germany during the war.

Buchenwald was the first major concentration camp to be entered by American troops. From mid-April 1945 onwards, photos and reports documenting the harrowing conditions they encountered spread throughout the Western world.

The medics and officers of the Third U.S. Army’s 120th Evacuation Hospital had been working day and night for a week. Sunday, 22 April 1945 was no exception. But it was only now that they managed to curb the mass dying in the liberated Buchenwald concentration camp.

American investigators began their work in Buchenwald immediately after the camp’s liberation. Their assignment was to gather evidence of the crimes. Statements by survivors played a major role in this process.

On 18 April 1945, there were still some 300 men in the barrack camp in Abtnaundorf to the northeast of Leipzig. They were inmates of the Buchenwald Leipzig-Thekla subcamp. Many of them were from Poland and the Soviet Union. Because they were ill and unable to march, the SS had left them behind when they cleared the camp.

On 16 April 1945, 1,000 men and women of Weimar had to tour Buchenwald by order of General Patton, the commander of the Third U.S. Army. On the camp grounds, liberated inmates and U.S. soldiers confronted them with evidence of the crimes.

When American soldiers reached the Boelcke-Kaserne subcamp in Nordhausen on 11 April 1945, they found hundreds of dead inmates there. Over the next few days, the American military administration compelled some 1,000 residents of Nordhausen to bury the corpses anonymously in an honorary cemetery newly created for that purpose.

“They were in frightening condition. […] Although we had administered all kinds of medicines and carried out scores of amputations, most of them died.” That is how the survivor Zbigniew Pęckowski described the transfer of sick and injured inmates from the Boelcke-Kaserne in Nordhausen to the Dora infirmary around 14 April 1945.

On 12 April 1945, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces Dwight D. Eisenhower visited Ohrdruf, south of Gotha. U.S. Army soldiers had reached the Buchenwald subcamp the previous week, shortly after its clearance, and come across hundreds of corpses and a few survivors there.

On the night of 11 April 1945, a Buchenwald concentration camp inmate trek passed through Grosslöbichau, a village to the east of Jena, with its guards. The situation was chaotic: the procession had disintegrated into small groups; yelling and gunshots echoed in the darkness. Several dozen inmates fled.

On 10 April 1945, shortly before the arrival of the Americans, SS Untersturmführer Erich Scholz ordered the clearance of the IVth SS construction brigade camps in Ellrich-Bürgergarten and Günzerode.

This Sunday was the second day of the operation to clear the Buchenwald concentration camp. More than 7,000 inmates had already been forced to leave on death marches, and the SS assembled another 4,500 for departure that evening.

On 8 April 1945, American fighter planes attacked the goods station in the Lower Saxon town of Celle, a strategic transport hub. The pilots were unaware that their bombs also hit a train carrying concentration camp inmates. Several hundred of the inmates died. Like many of the survivors, Armand Roux and Camille Delétang fled the burning waggons.

On the morning of 6 April 1945, the SS drove some 450 concentration camp inmates through Clausthal-Zellerfeld. The residents were accustomed to the sight: other death marches had passed through the town on the preceding days.

On the evening of 4 April 1945, the Gestapo murdered eight members of the camp resistance in the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp prison. Among the victims were the former camp seniors Georg Thomas and Ludwig Szymczak.

On the evening of Easter Sunday, the Niederorschel subcamp was in a state of hectic activity. The SS detachment officer announced that the camp would be cleared of its 600 inmates the following day, 2 April 1945.

On 31 March 1945, as he did every three months, the Buchenwald camp physician Gerhard Schiedlausky drew up his quarterly report for submission to SS headquarters in Berlin. The numbers he presented showed how the Buchenwald concentration camp had changed since the beginning of the year.

Maurice Pertschuk had not yet reached the age of 20 when he volunteered with the British military after the outbreak of war. He was from a family of Russian Jews who had lived in France for a long time. Because he spoke French without an accent, the secret service assigned him to a new task force called the Special Operations Executive (SOE).

The German frontlines were obviously crumbling, but the last V2 rocket was nevertheless launched at Antwerp as late as 27 March 1945. A final German rocket had hit London just a few hours earlier.

On 25 March 1945, the 14-year-olds of Nordhausen and the surroundings were enrolled in the Hitler Youth.

Szymon (Simon) Herling was born on 23 March 1945 in the HASAG-Leipzig subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp. The German occupiers had deported his parents Fela and Shmuel (Sam) Herling from their hometown near Kielce (Poland) to a camp in 1942.

On just one day – 21 March 1945 –, 30 inmates were hanged on the muster ground of the Dora camp. A similar incident had played out there just a day earlier. Most of the victims were from the Soviet Union, some from Poland. The SS had accused them of planning an uprising in the camp.

The 19th of March 1945 was the Belgian Charles Brusselairs’s first day on the “rescue team”. From now on, he would leave the camp on the Ettersberg with this labour detachment every day to clear rubble in Weimar. In the ruins, one of his comrades found a little tin can with pencils in it. He took the pencils out and tossed the tin away. Although it was prohibited, Charles picked it up and kept it.

On 17 March 1945, some 500 Hungarian women passed through the ruins of Essen on their way to Bochum on foot. The SS had brought them to the Essen-Humboldtstrasse camp from the Buchenwald Gelsenkirchen-Horst subcamp seven months earlier in response to a request for inmates from the Friedrich Krupp company.

In the summer of 1944, inmates of the Buchenwald concentration camp learned of the imminent liberation of Paris by Allied troops. All the more surprised were many of them by the arrival of new inmate transports from the cleared detention facilities near the French capital.

On 15 March 1945, the SS set up the only women’s subcamp of the Mittelbau concentration camp in the village of Gross-Werther near Nordhausen. Two restaurants there served as lodgings for approximately 300 Jewish women from a Gross-Rosen subcamp. One of those women was the 18-year-old Lili Jacob.

The Gestapo committed Maurice Eyben, a member of the Belgian resistance, to the Buchenwald concentration camp on 13 March 1945. A year earlier, at the age of 22, he had been accused of espionage and imprisoned by the German occupiers.

On the first ten days of March 1945, 1,000 persons died in the Buchenwald Little Camp alone. The SS camp physician had already sounded the alarm at the end of February: due to the failure of coal deliveries, corpses were piling up in the crematorium.

In March 1945, Fausto Pecorari and his companions reckoned in three currencies: “marchi” (money), “sigarette” (cigarettes) and “tabacco” (tobacco). They were the initiators of “Solidarity”, the aid committee of the Italian inmates in the Buchenwald concentration camp.

On 7 March 1945, the Buchenwald SS drove 905 Jewish men into the camp disinfection building. They were the survivors of a clearance transport from subcamps of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp, including Hirschberg, the present-day Jelenia Góra. One in four inmates had perished along the way.

On 5 March 1945, the SS of the Leipzig-Thekla subcamp admitted 579 new arrivals to the “Lagerstärke”, or camp population. The inmates had performed forced labour in aircraft production in the Gassen subcamp of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp before being sent to Leipzig on a death march.

On 3 March 1945, forty inmates arrived at Buchenwald. Referred to as “Sippe” (“kin”), they were lodged in an isolation barrack near the SS caserns. By order of the Nazi leadership, they were to atone for the participation of their family members in the 20 July 1944 attempt on Hitler’s life.

On 1 March 1945, 229 persons died in the Buchenwald concentration camp and its subcamps. Block 61 in the Little Camp alone counted 135 dead. The inmates called it the “Block of Death”. It served as a sick ward. In January 1945 it became the scene of a murder operation.

The brothers Hans and Ernst Siegel reached the Mittelbau concentration camp in early 1945 on one of the murderous transports from Auschwitz. After their arrival, the two young men from Barmen found themselves living in disastrous conditions.

On 28 February 1945, the Reich propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels gave one of his last radio addresses. At Ellrich-Juliushütte, a Mittelbau-Dora subcamp, the concentration camp guard Rudolf Zseby was listening.

A child’s perspective on an inhumane world: it was a boy who recorded his experiences in rhymes and drawings in this makeshift booklet.

On 24 February 1945, as he had done regularly for months, the SS labour allocation officer had a list drawn up under this heading. Wherever possible, the SS continued to insist on the separation of Jews and non-Jews, also in the subcamps.

After an Allied bomb attack, the city of Nordhausen requested inmates from the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp for rescue and clean-up operations. On 22 February 1945, 389 inmates had to march the five kilometres to the town and carry out the dangerous and exhausting work.

“Departure through death” is the heading on the death certificate of the Frenchman François Audran, who perished in the Elrich-Juliushütte subcamp of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp on 20 February 1945. He had been transferred to the Harz Mountains from Rechlin, a Ravensbrück subcamp, just a week earlier.

On 18 February 1945, 135 Jewish inmates arrived in the Langenstein-Zwieberge subcamp of Buchenwald. In an operation with the code name “Malachit”, the SS were having a tunnel system constructed there in the Thekenberge, a chain of hills in the Harz Mountains.

On 16 February 1945, six so-called temporary detainees were committed to the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. They were Wehrmacht deserters who were to serve their actual sentences after the war. Their varied fates testify to the despotic nature of Nazi terror in the final months of the war.

More than 700 persons died in the Ohrdruf subcamp in February alone. Their corpses were buried or burnt to ash in the open air. One of those to remain without a grave was the 30-year-old motorist Walter Roth of Kronberg, who died on 14 February 1945.

Bernhard Lüdtke was one of more than 200 inmates of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp categorized as homosexual. He lived to be only 31 years old. According to SS records, he was brought in dead to the Harzungen subcamp infirmary on 12 February 1945.

Alex Hacker recorded the events of his concentration camp imprisonment in a secret notebook. In Dora on 10 February 1945, he made a special entry: “And here I will enter the date when I see my dear and beloved mother and my father once again in health.”

Drawing gave the young Maria Brzęcka of Poland an escape from the agonizing realities of life in the Meuselwitz subcamp. Violence, vermin, hunger and forced labour to the point of exhaustion – the living conditions in the Buchenwald women’s camp were horrible.

On 6 February 1945, the officer in charge of the Harzungen subcamp reported the deaths of Eduard Florian, Mathis Dambrowski and Josef Herzenberger to Dora, the parent camp of the Mittelbau concentration camp. They had died of the consequences of forced labour, hunger, cold, miserable hygiene conditions and insufficient medical care.

The journalist Josef Ackermann of Munich had already been in concentration camp custody for more than five years, first in Buchenwald and since January 1944 in Dora. The Gestapo had arrested him when the war broke out.

By this winter, few Germans still believed in the “final victory” propagated by the Nazis. Although a defeatist mood had taken hold, there was neither any appreciable resistance nor any slump in armaments production.

On 31 January, the Gestapo deported 172 of the last Jews still in Germany from Weimar and other cities to the Terezín Ghetto.

On 29 January 1945, the SS put Pēteris Zunters in custody in the Buchenwald detention cell building. The following day they hanged him and eight other inmates from the Langensalza subcamp in the crematorium cellar.

He had talked to his son Bertrand just the night before – like he had every night since he had been in the infirmary. Now Willy Herz was at the end of his strength.

On 25 January, SS headquarters in Berlin sent a ten-page list containing 850 numerical codes – the first of its kind – to Buchenwald.

On 23 January 1945, after arriving in Buchenwald from Auschwitz, the 16-year-old Jewish inmate Robert Büchler experienced a hitherto unknown act of solidarity.

In 1944, the demand for guard personnel grew as the SS founded more and more new subcamps. To fill the gap, large numbers of Wehrmacht soldiers were assigned to duty in the concentration camps.

The inmates in the Holzen subcamp followed the Allied advance with a mixture of hope and anxiety.

Just a week earlier, a police officer in Cologne had raised Theodor Babilon’s hopes of being released. Those hopes were dashed.

On 15 January, the Mittelbau concentration camp SS founded a new subcamp in Wickerode, a village in what is now Saxony-Anhalt. There they put 30 Italian prisoners of war to work laying a gas line.

Even the inmates in the Ellrich-Juliushütte subcamp learned of the Red Army’s rapid advance. After the war, Serge Miller, a member of the French resistance, remembered 13 January 1945 as a day of hope.

“For assignment to heavy and dangerous labour […]” That is how an information bulletin for the German field army courts referred to the committal of convicted Wehrmacht soldiers to concentration camps in September 1944.

The network of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp outside Nordhausen gradually spread to the surrounding communities.

On this Sunday, more than 2,300 inmates of the Schlieben subcamp – men and women – went to work in the munitions factory. It was here, far outside the target range of the Allied bombers, that the Hugo Schneider company (Hasag) manufactured the Panzerfaust, the anti-tank weapon for the “final battle”. The aim was to produce one million a month, cost what it may.

One day in Buchenwald the order went out to assemble a children’s transport. Fearing the children would be sent to their deaths, the inmate functionaries tried to keep the number as small as possible. They had no means of preventing the transport altogether.

The eighteen-year-old René d’Halluin of France died in the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp on 3 January 1945.

New Year’s Day 1945. For the Buchenwald inmate Jean-Louis Guellerin it was a day of hope – hope for an end to the war, a life in freedom and a return home.