Death statistics at the Buchenwald concentration camp

 

The photo above shows American soldiers entering the gate into the Buchenwald camp after it was liberated.

One of the readers of my blog wrote in a comment that a recent news article mentioned that “at least 56,000 prisoners died at the Buchenwald camp.”

The 56,000 number is an estimate that was given, many years ago, by someone at the Memorial Site.

On April 19, 1945, only 8 days after the concentration camp had been liberated by the US Army, the Communist prisoners at Buchenwald held a mourning ceremony near the gate house where they had constructed an obelisk in honor of the victims. The obelisk is shown in the photo below.

Memorial in honor of the prisoners who died at Buchenwald

On June 5, 2009, President Barack Obama placed a single white rose on a plaque at the spot where this obelisk once stood. “The White Rose” was a student resistance group at the University of Munich which had opposed Hitler’s government during World War II.

The obelisk, shown in the photo above, was relocated in 1961 to the intersection in the road where the access road to the camp branches off the main road. The writing on the plaque lists the 18 countries of the victims.

In 1999, I went to visit the Memorial Site, where I learned that the official number of deaths at Buchenwald, that was given by the first U.S. Army Intelligence report, dated April 24, 1945, was 32,705.

After the camp was liberated, the Jews who were held in the “Small Camp” in the quarantine barracks at the bottom of the slope, which were the farthest away from the gate house, were not invited to attend the ceremony held by the Communist political prisoners. At this ceremony, the number of prisoners who died in the camp was estimated by the survivors to be 51,000.

In 1999 the Memorial Site at Buchenwald was giving an estimate of 56,000 prisoners who were killed at Buchenwald.

According to a booklet that I obtained from the Buchenwald Memorial Site, which was written by Sabine and Harry Stein, “A total of 11,000 Jews lost their lives in Buchenwald. Out of the 13,969 inmates who died in 1945, there were 7,000 Jews.”

The booklet written by Sabine and Harry Stein, which was available from the Memorial Site in 1999, states that, in addition to the number of recorded deaths at Buchenwald, “More than 8,000 Soviet prisoners of war were shot in the stable. An estimated number of 1,100 people were executed in the crematorium and an estimated number of between 12,000 and 15,000 people were dead upon arrival from the camps in the east or fell victim to the evacuation marches. This gives a total number of approximately 56,000 persons killed.”

The first U.S. Army Intelligence report, dated April 24, 1945, put the Buchenwald death toll at 32,705.

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.

In the first news reel film about what the victorious American troops discovered in Germany near the end of the war, the narrator says that “20,000 out of the 80,000 prisoners at Buchenwald were found alive.” This would mean that 60,000 prisoners died at Buchenwald, which contradicts the Army reports.

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 a guidebook which I purchased at Buchenwald in 1999, there were almost 10,000 Jews sent to Buchenwald on November 10, 1938, after the pogrom known as Kristallnacht, and more than 200 of them died after only a few weeks.

The Jews who died in 1945, in the last months of World War II, were prisoners who had been brought to Germany from the camps that were closed in the East as the Germans retreated from the advancing Soviet army. Under Article 7 of the 1929 Geneva Convention, Germany was obligated to move prisoners away from the combat zone.

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.

Typhus is spread by lice and prisoners coming into Germany from the death camps in what is now Poland were the carriers of the lice. The worst epidemic of all was at Bergen-Belsen where 35,000 prisoners died in March and the first two weeks of April 1945.

The death statistics for the first 11 days of April in Buchenwald indicate that the typhus epidemic was being brought under control there.

The Nazis did not use DDT, which was first used to stop epidemics in Europe in 1943. To kill the lice that spreads typhus, the Nazis used Zyklon-B, a poison gas which was also used to kill the Jews in the gas chambers in the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek camps.

The total number of prisoners at Buchenwald was only 5,382 at the start of the war on September 1, 1939, but by the end of September 1939, the camp population had increased to 8,634 after captured Polish soldiers were brought in. By December 1943, there were 37,319 prisoners in the camp, as Resistance fighters from Poland were brought in, along with many Soviet Prisoners of War that were sent to Buchenwald to be executed because they were Communist Commissars. The Soviet POWs were not registered as inmates.

There were 63,084 prisoners in the Buchenwald complex, including the sub-camps, in December 1944 according to the camp records. The population of the main 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.

Many concentration camp inmates died on enforced marches, and thousands more died after they were evacuated out of Buchenwald by train in April 1945.

According to the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, “on April 6, 1945, the Germans began evacuating the Jewish prisoners. The following day, thousands of prisoners of various nationalities were evacuated from the main camps and the satellite camps. Of the 28,250 prisoners evacuated from the main camp, 7,000 to 8,000 either were killed or died by other means in the course of the evacuation. The total number of prisoners from the satellite camps and the main camp who fell victim during the evacuation of Buchenwald is estimated at 25,500….”

Among the prisoners, who died as a result of the evacuation from Buchenwald, were those on the “death train” that reached Dachau on April 28, 1945 after a three-week circuitous route through Czechoslovakia.

The total number of prisoners registered in the Buchenwald camp was around 238,000 according to a guidebook for the city of Weimar, which is about 5 miles from Buchenwald. This book puts the death total at 65,000. Various other sources put the total number of people sent to the camp between 239,000 and 250,000.

Who can identify this photo?

This photo of prisoners, in the Buchenwald camp, was used in a news article, but the location  was not identified.

The photo above was used in this news article: http://www.timesofisrael.com/for-the-first-time-auschwitz-guides-taught-to-teach-about-jews-spiritual-resistance/

The following quote is from the news article:

Begin quote

NEW YORK — Building a clandestine sukkah; putting on phylacteries; seeking rabbinic counsel. Despite the risk of immediate death if caught, spiritual resistance — large and small — ran strong among religious Jews in the Nazi concentration camps.

End quote

I used the same photo on my scrapbookpages.com website, but in a much smaller size. This photo was taken at Buchenwald. It shows prisoners who were brought from Auschwitz in Poland to the Buchenwald camp in Germany when the Auschwitz camp was abandoned.

You can see the same photo on this page of my scrapbookpages.com website:

http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Buchenwald/Liberation7.html

I wrote the following about the photo:

Begin quote

An American Army Rabbi, Hershel Schacter, held Shavuot service on May 18, 1945

Buchenwald was not set up as a camp for Jews, but there were 4,000 Jews among the 21,000 prisoners there when the camp was liberated. They had been brought to Buchenwald after the death camps in the East were abandoned.

End quote

So what am I complaining about now, you ask. This photo shows that the prisoners at Auschwitz were saved by the Nazis who took them to Buchenwald when they abandoned the Auschwitz camp, and they allowed the Jews to practice their religion.

How many Romanis were killed in the Holocaust?

A reader of my blog wrote this in a comment: “No one should mock the holocaust and, by the way, it was not just Jews but Romanies,” [who were killed in the Holocaust]

I mentioned Romany prisoners on this page of my website: http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Buchenwald/Liberation7.html

The following quote is from my kosher website, written before I became a Holocaust denier:

Begin quote

The quarantine camp [at Buchenwald], known as the “Small Camp” was a different story. This isolated camp at the bottom of the hill held the sick and the dying, who were mainly the Jewish and Romany prisoners who had recently arrived after being evacuated from the camps in the east.

End quote

So it turns out that the Romany prisoners were not killed at Auschwitz. They were saved, to live another day, and transported out of the camp to places like Buchenwald in Germany.

This quote is also from my kosher website, written before I became a Holocaust denier:

Begin quote

In the first days after the liberation of Buchenwald, the political prisoners who had been freed by the Americans, hunted down 76 of the camp guards who had escaped into the surrounding woods, according to The Buchenwald Report. They were brought back to the camp and killed.

According to Robert Abzug in his book entitled “Inside the Vicious Heart,” the inmates “killed almost eighty ex-guards and camp functionaries in the days following the liberation, sometimes with the aid and encouragement of Americans.”

In his book Abzug quotes one of the liberators, Fred Mercer:

Begin quote

… a German soldier attempted to surrender to the Americans, but was intercepted by a prisoner with a four-foot wood log: “He just stood there and beat him to death. He had to – of course, we didn’t bother him.”

American newspaper reporter Marguerite Higgins wrote in her book “News is a Singular Thing,” that 20 to 30 American soldiers took turns beating 6 young German guards to death at Buchenwald.

End quote

90 percent [of Hungarian Jews] were exterminated in Auschwitz ovens or Birkenau gas chambers

The title of my blog post today is from a line in a news article which you can read in full at http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2016/07/08/amb-nancy-brinker-must-never-forget-elie-wiesel-and-his-message.html

Why were Elie and his father spared? The motive in sending the Jews to Auschwitz was to exterminate them with bug spray, known as Zyklon-B.

What was so different about Elie and his father?  Why weren’t they killed?

The following quote is from the news article:

Begin quote

In March of 1944, Hungary was occupied by Germany and the Final Solution to exterminate Jews of Eastern Europe was underway. Elie was just 15 years old when he and his family along with his Jewish neighbors were rounded up and sent to locally set up ghettos.

Once settled in the ghettos the Jews of Hungary in May of 1944 were sent to Auschwitz concentration camp and shortly after their arrival 90 percent were exterminated in Auschwitz ovens or Birkeneu gas chambers. Elie’s mother and one of this three sisters were killed there. Wiesel and his father were sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp. His father died just a few weeks before liberation. Elie was freed after the camp was liberated by the U.S. 3rd Army on April 11, 1945. Elie survived the Holocaust with his two sisters and they were reunited in a French orphanage. Elie finally made his way to America in the mid 1950’s.

End quote

So Elie was in a “French orphanage?” Is that where he met some young survivors of Auschwitz who had been sent to France after Auschwitz was liberated? Did he get his Auschwitz story from these young boys? I think that he did.

There is a website at http://www.eliewieseltattoo.com/ which devoted to exposing the lies told by Elie Wiesel.

Elie Wiesel claims that he is in this photo taken at Buchenwald but he was never in Buchenwald

Where in the world is Goethe Germany?

Today I read a news story about an American soldier who allegedly liberated a German concentration camp named Goethe. You can read the news story at http://www.akron.com/akron-ohio-community-news.asp?aID=30852

The following quote is from the news article:

COLUMBUS [Ohio] — Sen. Frank LaRose (R-District 27) welcomed decorated World War II veteran Bill Miller, of Fairlawn, to the Ohio Statehouse to take part in the Governor’s 36th annual Holocaust Commemoration Program May 25. According to LaRose, Miller, a retired U.S. Army colonel, recounted his experience as a young soldier leading a mission to identify an unknown site outside Goethe, Germany.

My photo of the stump of Goethe’s oak inside the Buchenwald camp

My photo of the gate into the Buchenwald camp

“I had the tank knock [the gate] down,” said Miller. “When it fell, we were in a concentration camp. The guards had fled, but it was the most horrible thing I think I’ve ever seen. Bodies everywhere … we stopped counting at 800 people. We found the gas chambers, the ovens. When somebody tells you that the Holocaust didn’t happen, I stress to you I have seen these things. It did happen. I’m grateful for the opportunity to tell you my story, and I hope you will relay that story to some of your friends.”

End quote

As you can see, in my photo above, the gate in the gatehouse was not knocked down.

I have searched and searched on the Internet, and I have not found a town, nor a concentration camp named Goethe.  I am guessing that this camp was the Buchenwald camp because it was built in a location where Johann von Goethe used to sit under an oak tree. The stump of the oak tree is still in the former Buchenwald camp, which is now a memorial site.

I have a whole section about Buchenwald on my scrapbookpages.com website at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Buchenwald/index.html

I have a sub-section about the liberation of Buchenwald at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Buchenwald/Liberation.html

Like most stories of the liberation of the camps by American troops, there is some controversy about what really happened.  I have written about the various claims, regarding the liberation of Buchenwald on this page of my website: http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Buchenwald/Liberation4.html

On my website pages about the liberation of Buchenwald, I have written what I believe is the truth about how this camp was liberated: http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Buchenwald/Liberation0.html

American soldiers entering Buchenwald on the day that the camp was liberated

Elie Wiesel still lying his head off at the age of 87

Elie Wiesel has recently admitted that he has no ID number tattooed on his arm, which is an admission that he was never in a concentration camp, as he has been claiming for years.

He was not a prisoner at Auschwitz, where all incoming prisoners were immediately tattooed with a number on their arm.

The gate into the Buchenwald camp is shown in the photo above.

He was not at Buchenwald which was a class II concentration camp in Germany. The sign on the gate into the camp reads “Jedem das Seine” which is German for “Everyone gets what he deserves.”

I have a section about Buchenwald on my website at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Buchenwald/index.html

According to a recent news article, Elie Wiesel was quoted as follows:

“I belong to a generation that has seen probably the darkest of its moments and lived them …but also the happiest. The Day of Liberation [of Buchenwald]…when suddenly, the Americans came in! Days earlier, 10,000 left Buchenwald [to be killed] and [we] were the last to leave literally the last…. we were supposed to leave the next day. ”

Read more: http://forward.com/the-assimilator/329182/michael-douglas-presents-award-to-elie-wiesel-at-blue-card-gala/#ixzz3wl8jYYHO

I have written extensively about Elie Wiesel and the liberation of Buchenwald on my scrapbookpages.com website:

http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Buchenwald/Liberation0.html

http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Buchenwald/Liberation4.html

 

Holocaust survivor says that Auschwitz was liberated by the British

The Hollywood Reporter [an American newspaper] is commemorating the 70th anniversary of the end of the Holocaust with a feature on 11 survivors who went on to careers in American entertainment. You can read the article in full at  http://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/Roman-Polanski-10-other-Hollywood-Jews-open-up-about-surviving-Holocaust-437656

This quote is from the news article, cited above:

Branko Lustig, 83, Academy Award-winning producer of films like Schindler’s List and Gladiator

When the British army liberated Auschwitz, where Lustig was a prisoner at age 12, the sound of their bagpipes made him think that he “had died finally, and that was the angels’ music in heaven.”

Years later, he met Spielberg when the director was developing Schindler’s List.

“He kissed my number [from the concentration camp, tattooed on Lustig’s arm] and said, ‘You will be my producer.’ He is the man who gave me the possibility to fulfill my obligation,” Lustig says.

So that is where Spielberg got all of his misinformation about the Holocaust!  From a man who was liberated by the British at Auschwitz.

To be fair, this survivor might have been a prisoner in Bergen-Belsen where he was liberated by British soldiers after he had been marched out of Auschwitz just before Soviet soldiers arrived to liberate the camp.

Obelisk in honor of the non-Jewish prisoners who died at Buchenwald

I have written about the death statistics at Buchenwald on my website at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Buchenwald/DeathStatistics.html

To get back to the news article this quote tells about another Holocaust survivor:

Begin quote

Bill Harvey, 91, cosmetologist to the likes of Judy Garland, Mary Martin, Zsa Zsa Gabor and Liza Minelli

After being transported from Auschwitz to Buchenwald on a frigid cattle car, Harvey fell unconscious and was left for dead in a pile of corpses stacked by the crematorium. Someone pulled him out days later. He was 21 years old and weighed about 72 pounds.

“My humble explanation for all the tragedies and the bad people who want just to kill is that maybe there have to be some bad things in order to appreciate all the good things that this world gives you,” Harvey says.

End quote

According to a booklet that I obtained in 1999 from the Buchenwald Memorial Site, which was written by Sabine and Harry Stein, “A total of 11,000 Jews lost their lives in Buchenwald. Out of the 13,969 inmates who died in 1945, there were 7,000 Jews.”

The booklet written by Sabine and Harry Stein states that, in addition to the number of recorded deaths at Buchenwald, “More than 8,000 Soviet prisoners of war were shot in the stable. An estimated number of 1,100 people were executed in the crematorium and an estimated number of between 12,000 and 15,000 people were dead upon arrival from the camps in the east or fell victim to the evacuation marches. This gives a total number of approximately 56,000 persons killed.”

 

 

You can’t always judge a book by it’s cover

Cover of book written by Eugen Kogon

The new addition of a book, written years ago by Eugen Kogon, which is shown in the photo above, has a cover with a photo of the “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign over an entrance into a building in the Little Fortress at Theresienstadt.

Kogon’s book is about the Buchenwald concentration camp. Did the Buchenwald concentration camp have this sign on any of the buildings in the camp?  No! This photo was taken at Theresienstadt. Only Class 1 camps had the Arbeit macht Frei slogan.

I took this same photo which you can see below.

My photo of the “Little Fortress” at Theresienstadt

 

Sign on Buchenwald gate says “Jedem das Siene” (Everyone gets what he deserves)

The Buchenwald gate with its famous sign “Jedem das Seine” was designed by Franz Ehrich, a prisoner who studied with Moholy-Nagy, Klee, Kandinsky and Josef Albers at the Bauhaus in Weimar.

Ehrlich was arrested as a Communist resistance fighter in 1935 and sent to Buchenwld two years later. In 1937, the Buchenwald camp was still new and had few buildings. Ehrlich, who had worked with architect Walter Gropius in his Bauhaus Berlin office, volunteered to work in the joinery workshop at Buchenwald; he was assigned to design and build the entrance gate.

The sans-serif lettering of the words “Jedem das Seine” show Ehrlich’s training under Bauhaus typographer Joost Schmidt. After he was released from Buchenwald in 1939, Ehrlich stayed on and worked as a paid architect at the SS training camp and munitions factories at Buchenwald.

Buchenwald was a Class II camp for hard-core political prisoners, mainly Communists, who were considered to be harder to “rehabilitate.” Consequently, conditions in the Buchenwald camp were more severe than at Dachau and Sachsenhausen, which were Class I camps where many prisoners were released after being induced to accept the Nazi principles of obedience and hard work.

The sign over the iron gates at both Dachau and Sachsenhausen read “Arbeit Macht Frei” or Work Brings Freedom.

Irving Roth still educating American children about the Holocaust

I blogged about Irving Roth in this previous blog post:  https://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2011/12/05/african-american-soldiers-were-among-the-liberators-of-buchenwald/

Irving Roth is back in the news because he is still educating American children about the Holocaust:  https://ninertimes.com/2015/12/holocaust-surviver-speaks-at-unc-charlotte-educates-students-through-personal-experience/

The photo above shows Hungarian Jews getting off a train at Auschwitz. Notice that there are no guns pointed at them.

The following quote is from the news article, cited above:

Begin quote:
He [Irving Roth] lived [the good life] like this for a few years until 1944, when he was stuffed in a cattle car and taken to Auschwitz at the age of 15 years old.

He was taken there with his 18-year-old brother, but was separated from his mother and father.

Stepping off the train, he was greeted by Nazi’s, pointing guns at the crowd, who were dividing people into groups. Roth watched as people he knew were walked over to take a “shower”, but were instead led to the gas chambers and executed. His grandmother and 10-year-old cousin died that day in the gas chamber, along with thousands of others.

“It was a factory of death … the final solution to the Jews,” said Roth.

Roth and his brother were given tattoos and sent to work. He was sent to work with the horses, which he knew nothing about, but his life depended on his ability to work.

While he was working, Roth often questioned how he ended up in Aushwitz. [Auschwitz] He wondered how the perfectly normal life he had, was uprooted by the Nazi’s. How his life changed after Germany invaded Czechoslovakia.

One day, Roth and his brother are forced on a death march to another camp [Buchenwald]. Weak and malnourished, they some how made it.

Not long after that, his brother is taken away and Roth never sees him again.

The end of the war is nearing and the Nazi’s are preparing Roth and the other people at the [Buchenwald] camp for another death march. There is no chance Roth could survive another one, but as they assembled at the gates, the alarm signaling an air raid forces everyone into hiding.

The next day, the Nazi’s are gone and American soldiers have liberated the [Buchenwald] camp. Two [black] soldiers, who had searched Roth’s bunker, saw how malnourished everybody was, brought food for them.

Roth, a 15-year-old boy in the middle of post-war Germany is now liberated. He decides to go home, hoping that, by some miracle, his family is still alive.

End quote

What about the black soldiers that liberated Buchenwald?  Has Irving Roth stopped telling this fake story?

Black soldiers look at the bodies of prisoners who died at Buchenwald

The American army was segregated during World War II, with white soldiers fighting in exclusively white divisions while black and Asian soldiers had their own separate divisions, commanded by white officers.

The 183rd Engineer Combat Battalion was attached to the 1126th Engineer Combat Group in April 1945. On April 12, 1945, the 1126th Engineer Combat Group was sent to the town of Eisenach, around 100 kilometers from the Buchenwald concentration camp.

Five days later, on April 17, 1945, several black soldiers were sent to Buchenwald to deliver some supplies. For most of the liberated prisoners, this was the first time they had ever seen a black man, and many of them would recall it later in their survivor accounts.

By 1993, the story of the black troops at Buchenwald had escalated to an account of how African Americans had been the ones to actually liberate the Jews of Buchenwald.

Even though there were only 4,000 Jewish prisoners among the 21,000 inmates still in the camp when the American liberators arrived, the irony of the persecuted people of America freeing the persecuted people of Europe appealed to the Politically Correct generation.

Now it appears that Irving Ross has cut the story of the black liberators of Buchenwald out of his talks to children.

John Wiernicki, an illegal combatant in World War II, has died

You can read the obituary of John Wiernicki here.

This headline is on a news story about Wiernicki’s recent death:

Janusz Mikolaja Strojnowski (John Wiernicki), Holocaust survivor and architect: born Sarny, Poland (now Ukraine) 28 July 1925; married Anne Macander (died 2015; two sons); died Bethesda, Maryland 17 July 2015.

John Wiernicki when he was an illegal combatant in World War II

This quote is from the news article about Wiernicki’s death:

He [Wiernicki] was a cadet at military school and was 14 when Germany invaded his country [Poland]. He fled into the forests with a band of older cadets and for the next four years fought in guerrilla units, launching hit-and-run attacks.

He was captured by the [German] Gestapo in a mass round-up in 1943 at a railway station and sent to Auschwitz for having false identification papers. Had the Gestapo known he was a partisan fighter, [illegal combatant] he would doubtless have been shot.

[…]

Shortly before Auschwitz was liberated [on Jan. 27, 1945], Wiernicki was transferred to Buchenwald in Germany. He escaped while being marched to yet another camp, and was not yet 20 when Germany surrendered.

Wars are fought on the battlefield, unless you are fighting against Germany. Then it is O.K. to fight as an illegal combatant, or partisan.