Bodies piled up at Buchenwald after the camp was liberated
Holocaust survivor Moshe Avital was a 16-year-old orphan at Buchenwald on April 11, 1945 when American troops found the camp. Communist prisoners had already taken over the camp, and the German SS guards had fled for their lives. According to estimates by the U.S. military, there were 21,000 survivors, including 4,000 Jews, in the Buchenwald main camp when American troops arrived to save them.
According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, 84-year-old Moshe Avital spoke to students in May this year at Wappingers Junior High School in Wappingers Falls, NY.
This quote is from the article in the Wall Street Journal:
In 1945, Avital weighed 70 pounds after a two-year period of starvation and hard labor in six concentration camps. He also was an orphan. Avital’s mother and father, along with half of his 10 siblings, were killed during the Holocaust. His parents were sent to the gas chambers at Auschwitz, the first camp the family went to. […]
Buchenwald, the sixth and final camp Avital was in, became infamous for the cruelty its SS, or Schutzstaffel, officers inflicted on prisoners. Most prisoners there died of starvation and poor living conditions, Avital said. […]
“The German high command gave orders to the SS to annihilate the entire population because the Americans were coming closer,” Avital said. “Barrack by barrack we were taken into the woods (surrounding the camp) and … 60,000 of 80,000 prisoners were executed.”
The Holocaust museum reports that exact numbers of the dead aren’t available, but at least 56,000 men in the camp system were killed, about 11,000 of them Jewish.
There were 63,084 prisoners in the Buchenwald complex, including the sub-camps, in December 1944 according to the records kept by the Germans. The population of the main Buchenwald camp and all the sub-camps reached 80,436 in late March 1945 after the death camps in what is now Poland were closed and the Jewish survivors were brought to various camps in Germany, including Buchenwald. Moshe Avital was among the prisoners who were evacuated out of the war zone in what is now Poland and brought to Buchenwald.
Non-Jewish survivors of Buchenwald, April 14, 1945 (US Army photo)
What the article in the Wall Street Journal neglected to mention is that the Nazis kept records of the deaths in the Buchenwald camp.
According to a U.S. Army report dated May 25, 1945, there was a total of 238,980 prisoners sent to Buchenwald during its 8-year history from July 1937 to April 11, 1945, and 34,375 of them died in the camp. This report was based on records confiscated from the camp by the US military, after the camp was liberated.
A later U.S. Government report in June, 1945 put the total deaths at 33,462 with 20,000 of the deaths in the final months of the war.
The International Tracing Service of Arolsen, an affiliate of the Red Cross, released a report in 1984 which said that the number of documented deaths in Buchenwald was 20,671 plus an additional 7,463 at the notorious satellite camp called Dora, where prisoners were forced to work underground in the manufacturing of V-2 rockets for the German military. (In October 1944, Dora became an independent camp named Nordhausen.)
According to an information booklet, which I obtained from the Buchenwald Memorial Site, records kept by the camp secretary show the number of deaths each year in Buchenwald, as follows:
1937 – 48
1938 – 771
1939 – 1235
1940 – 1772
1941 – 1522
1942 – 2898
1943 – 3516
1944 – 8644
January to March 1945 – 13,056
March to April 11, 1945 – 913
Total 34,375
The horrendous death toll during the first two months of 1945 was due to a typhus epidemic in the camp. During the same time period, there were also severe epidemics in all the other major concentration camps in Germany.
Monument in honor of the Resistance Fighters who were prisoners at Buchenwald
Buchenwald was primarily a camp for political prisoners, including prominent Communists and Social Democrats, as well as French, Polish and Dutch resistance fighters, and also pastors of the Confessional Church and Catholic priests who preached against the Nazis. A Monument to the Resistance Fighters is shown in the photo above; it stands on the highest point of the Ettersberg about one kilometer from the former Buchenwald camp.
On April 11, 1945, the day that American troops arrived to liberate the Buchenwald camp, the Communist political prisoners had already taken control of the camp and forced the SS guards to flee for their lives. When the American liberators arrived, they observed that some of the prisoners had left the camp and were hunting down the SS men in the surrounding forest. The SS soldiers were brought back to the camp and shot, hanged or beaten to death by the inmates while the American soldiers looked on and sometimes joined in.
Buchenwald was one of the two main camps for French Resistance fighters who were fighting as illegal combatants in World War II; the other one was Natzweiler. These captured Resistance fighters could have been legally executed because they were fighting in a war in violation of the rules of the Geneva Convention, but instead, they were allowed to live, but put into concentration camps.
Starting in January 1945, Jewish survivors of Auschwitz were brought to Germany and put into various concentration camps, including Buchenwald. Most of the Jews were sent to sub-camps of Buchenwald to work in factories, except for the youngest prisoners. One of the sub-camps was Ohrdruf, which was found by American soldiers on April 4, 1945. Ohrdruf was the only camp ever visited by General Eisenhower.
You can read about other Buchenwald liars in this article on another website here.
There should be a law in America that punishes persons who tell lies that promote hatred of a race or ethnic group. In this case, Moshe Avital should go to prison for at least 5 years for promoting hatred of the German people. It is highly unlikely that the junior high school students in Wappingers Falls, who were brain-washed by Moshe, will look up the facts about Buchenwald.
Scrapbookpages Blog 
“According to estimates by the U.S. military, there were 21,000 survivors, including 4,000 Jews, in the Buchenwald main camp when American troops arrived to save them.”
“The Holocaust museum reports that exact numbers of the dead aren’t available, but at least 56,000 men in the camp system were killed, about 11,000 of them Jewish.”
I did not take in very much else than these two sentences. Buchenwald is such an infamous name, and we hear of it only in terms of the Jewish experience.
If we cannot see the Jewish experience as anything else but racial prejudice ….instead of their suffering being the suffering of one set of many enemies of the state…..
“I went walking with a friend of mine yesterday who is close to a Jewish man who actually fought against the Germans in WW2, and who participated in early days of Israel. Before I had a chance to tell her about this article she shared that he was often concerned that the suffering of others under the Nazis is overlooked because of the dominance of attention on the Jewish experience. Sharing with her that that is something I am trying to make sense of as well, we mused about that saying:
“Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
I said out loud,
“But history will repeat itself…. how can we learn if we are looking at the wrong history?”
http://frombrokenstones.wordpress.com/2013/03/05/history-repeat/
Comment by Rose Nooteboom — June 8, 2013 @ 9:09 am
Comment by hermie — June 7, 2013 @ 5:32 pm
In early April 1945, as US forces approached the camp, the Germans began to evacuate some 28,000 prisoners from the main camp and an additional several thousand prisoners from the subcamps of Buchenwald. About a third of these prisoners died from exhaustion en route or shortly after arrival, or were shot by the SS. The underground resistance organization in Buchenwald, whose members held key administrative posts in the camp, saved many lives. They obstructed Nazi orders and delayed the evacuation.
Comment by Quinton G. Newman — June 7, 2013 @ 4:48 pm
J.B. Cambell made the publication of Under Two Flags by Heinz Weichardt, a memoir about a privileged Jewish youth in National Socialist Germany, possible in l995. “Heinz certainly has had an unusual perspective of the Twentieth Century. A supporter of Hitler who left Germany as an unwanted non-Aryan, he became an enemy alien in America. As the years passed, Heinz became successful in his field of physics (electron-optics), retiring from IBM as a manager in its research division. As his article reveals, he never wavered in his support for National Socialism, even if he had himself been rejected by it.” http://www.jrbooksonline.com/HTML-docs/Under%20Two%20Flags.htm
Comment by who dares wings — June 5, 2013 @ 7:11 pm
The story below could possibly be true. The author of the piece is well known in “the patriot movement”- as you can see readily if you search for “jb campbel” and “j bruce campbell.”
http://www.jbcampbellextremismonline.com/4/post/2011/09/anti-american.html
“The leakers are being called “anti-American.” What decent person, anywhere in the world today, is not anti-American? Is there anyone more dangerous than our typical ignorant, arrogant American “citizen,” who very likely couldn’t find America on a marked map of the world? Well, yes: the American military man, who is the most dangerous son of a bitch on the planet. And I don’t mean that in a good way.
I’m anti-American. I really wasn’t until I returned to Rhodesia in January, ’73 to join up and help in their struggle against Communist terrorists. I’d been down there in ’71 for discussions with the government on bringing Americans and others wanting to be part of a new country project based on a book by my boss, Michael Oliver, called A New Constitution for a New Country. The plan was to have a minimum of a hundred square miles with no taxes and no draft, replacing the former tax-haven in Freeport, Bahamas. Thousands of productive Americans and others were ready to relocate.
Mike’s real name was Olitsky and he was a Lithuanian Jew who’d fled into Germany to escape Stalin’s Red Army. He wound up in Dachau for four years. He introduced me to Holocaust Revisionism when I ventured to ask him about his experience. He shrugged and said, “It was a factory. We worked during the day and stayed in a dormitory at night.”
“But what about the, uh, the—“
“The what?”
“You know, the killings.”
“I never saw any of that.”
Four years in Dachau, never saw any of that.”
(…)
Comment by fnn — June 5, 2013 @ 4:56 pm
Dwight Eisenhower toured the camps with his pal and intelligence advisor C.D. Jackson whom I learned, quite by accident one afternoon in the [British] National Archives at Kew Gardens, was in a very small and select “black ops” unit within the PWE (psychological warfare dept.) run by Sir Bruce Lockhart. William S. Paley was the only other American member of this unit. Rail supply routes for food and medicine to the camps had been carpet bombed by the Allies which accounted for the prisoners condition when the camps were liberated. C.D. Jackson has been captured on an OSS Field Photography Unit film directed by Billy Wider frog marching citizens of the town of Weimar, the town nearest Buchenwald, past a table of Nazi atrocity props later used at the Nuremburg IMT by prosecutor Thomas Dodd to help launch the Holocaust meme. C.D. Jackson bought Abraham Zapruder’s film of the assassination of President Kennedy 22 years later for LIFE Inc. so it couldn’t be examined. It wasn’t released to the media, or to the public for another twenty years! C.D. Jackson was a key designer and promoter of “Americanism,” the hegemonic New World (economic) Order announced by fellow CIA mandarin George Bush Sr., and yet the only extant book about him is less than 150 pages and doesn’t even cover any of the diabolical crap he cooked up during WWII. The Holocaust fix was in decades before General Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote about Ordruf to General George C. Marshall. The really “unique” thing about this racket is that it’s a now a religion with a new temple opening up soon near you.
Comment by who dares wings — June 5, 2013 @ 11:36 am
“Being a Military man, I think Eisnenhower knew the difference between a Typhus outbreak and deliberate strarvation and barbarism-”
That makes no sense. He would have to have had medical training and the appropriate experience. But even if they had been all starved to death that was something our gallant Soviet allies did routinely even before AH stepped into the Chancellor’s office.
Comment by fnn — June 5, 2013 @ 11:21 am
“The things I saw beggar description…The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were…overpowering…I made the visit deliberately in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’”
— General Dwight D. Eisenhower, April 15, 1945, letter to General George C. Marshall following the liberation of Ohrdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald
Being a Military man, I think Eisnenhower knew the difference between a Typhus outbreak and deliberate strarvation and barbarism- nice try creep, but the problems in the camps were largely due to starvation of prisoners. The fact that Eisenhower actually went out of his way here to see with his own eyes what happens shows that this wasn’t some German Club Med gone bad. Look I know you guys lack an ability to process information in a reasonable manner, but come on already. These prisoners were starved to death.
As was the case at Bergen-Belson, many starved to death specifically in the period prior to Liberation.
Comment by NeverAGAIN! — June 5, 2013 @ 10:14 am
neverAgain wrote:-
‘These prisoners were starved to death.’
Yes, some will tell you they were starved for 5 years, yet continued to work long hours and then marched hundreds of miles in the middle of winter at the end of the 5 years. These weren’t men, they were absolutely super human. When any prisoner nowadays goes on hunger strike and just sits there all day in a cell doing nothing, it’s only a matter of weeks before they’re too weak to move.
Years starving and working?! Absolute nonsense!!
Comment by DB — June 5, 2013 @ 12:43 pm
Eisenhower never visited the Buchenwald main camp. He visited Ohrdruf, a sub-camp of Buchenwald, on April 12, 1945. I blogged about his visit to Ohrdruf at https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2010/07/03/general-dwight-d-eisenhower-the-things-i-saw-beggar-description/
I have added a link to my blog post about Eisenhower’s visit to this blog post.
Please do not call other people, who comment here, names such as “creep.” We are dealing only with facts here, not name calling.
Comment by furtherglory — June 5, 2013 @ 2:11 pm
NeverAgain wrote: “the problems in the camps were largely due to starvation of prisoners”
Yeah. That’s why the British had to burn down Belsen camp and the Americans had to put Dachau camp under quarantine. Did the Allied troops powdered the prisoners found in the nazi camps with DDT to prevent starvation from spreading around?
Buchenwald was special. There was a typhus epidemic during the last months but there was also a starvation policy imposed by the communist inmates on the other prisoners. The communist gained almost total internal control after 1943. This remarkable situation was confirmed in a detailed U.S. Army intelligence document of 24 April 1945 entitled “Buchenwald: A Preliminary Report” (Egon W. Fleck and Edward Tenenbaum, U.S. Army, 12th Army Group, 24 April 1945). That confidential analysis remained classified until 1972. As the report explained:
“The trusties had wide powers over their fellow inmates. At first they were drawn almost exclusively from the German criminals. This period lasted until 1942. But gradually the Communists began to gain control of this organization. They were the oldest residents, with records of 10-12 years in the concentration camps … They clung together with remarkable tenacity, whereas the criminal elements were simply out for their own individual welfare and had little group cohesiveness. The Communists maintained excellent discipline and received a certain amount of direction from outside the camp. They had brains and technical qualifications for running the various industries established at the camp.
[…]
Besides the top positions in the trusty organization, there were a number of key Communist strongholds in the administration of the camp. One was the food supply organization, through which favored groups received reasonable rations while others were brought to the starvation level. A second was the hospital, staffed almost exclusively by Communists. Its facilities were largely devoted to caring for members of their party … Another Communist stronghold was the Property Room … Each German trusty obtained good clothing and numerous other valuables. The Communists of Buchenwald, after ten or twelve years in concentration carnps, are dressed like prosperous business men. Some affect leather jackets and little round caps of the German navy, apparently the uniform of revolution.
[…]
… lnstead of a heap of corpses or a disorderly mob of starving, leaderless men, the Americans [who captured the camp] found a disciplined and efficient organization in Buchenwald. Credit is undoubtedly due to the self-appointed Camp Committee, an almost purely Communist group under the domination of the German political leaders.
… The trusties, who in time became almost exclusively Communist Germans, had the power of life and death over all other inmates. They could sentence a man or a group to almost certain death … The Communist trusties were directly responsible for a large part of the brutalities committed at Buchenwald.”
That U.S. report also explained that the Communists killed “large numbers” of Polish inmates who refused to submit to their rule, and that they forced French inmates to give up thousands of Red Cross parcels. The report even mentioned several particularly brutal Communist camp leaders by name. The German Communists lived better than any other group. “Even now,” the report noted, “they may be distinguished from the rest of the inmates by their rosy cheeks and robust health, though they have been in concentration camps for much longer than the others.”
As you can see, jewie, even your American friends don’t buy your “Nazi starvation” fantasies in their own confidential reports (Of course they ‘forgot’ to say that a little later in their Nuremberg circus.). Aren’t you fed up with losing every time? Try again, NeverAgain… 😉
Comment by hermie — June 5, 2013 @ 7:45 pm
Don’t you understand when you call someone ‘jewie’ you sound full of race hate and anger? it completely discredits what you have to say. Also it is no news to anyone that the camps were mostly run by inmates. The capos were usually the most horrible inmates, capable of starving and beating other inmates to death – yes, that proves nothing.
Comment by Superted — June 9, 2013 @ 2:35 pm
NeverAgain wrote: “Being a Military man, I think Eisnenhower knew the difference between a Typhus outbreak and deliberate strarvation and barbarism”
Before being a military man, Eisenhower was a jew. No need to say more…
NeverAgain wrote: “As was the case at Bergen-Belson, many starved to death specifically in the period prior to Liberation.”
Worst possible choice. Belsen is known a the worst case of typhus epidemic in human history. That’s why that camp was deliberately turned to the British troops by the Nazis.
Dr. Russell Barton, an English physician who spent a month in Bergen-Belsen after the war with the British Army, has explained the reasons for the catastrophic conditions found there:
“Most people attributed the conditions of the inmates to deliberate intention on the part of the Germans in general and the camp administrators in particular. Inmates were eager to cite examples of brutality and neglect, and visiting journalists from different countries interpreted the situation according to the needs of propaganda at home.
For example, one newspaper emphasized the wickedness of the “German masters” by remarking that some of the 10,000 unburied dead were naked. In fact, when the dead were taken from a hut and left in the open for burial, other prisoners would take their clothing from them …
German medical officers told me that it had been increasingly difficult to transport food to the camp for some months. Anything that moved on the autobahns was likely to be bombed …
I was surprised to find records, going back for two or three years, of large quantities of food cooked daily for distribution. I became convinced, contrary to popular opinion, that there had never been a policy of deliberate starvation. This was confirmed by the large numbers of well-fed inmates. Why then were so many people suffering from malnutrition?… The major reasons for the state of Belsen were disease, gross overcrowding by central authority, lack of law and order within the huts, and inadequate supplies of food, water and drugs.
In trying to assess the causes of the conditions found in Belsen one must be alerted to the tremendous visual display, ripe for purposes of propaganda, that masses of starved corpses presented.”
Comment by hermie — June 5, 2013 @ 8:00 pm