Buchenwald demographics are different than you’d expect. The well-known Holocaust experience and vision of Jews arriving packed in cattle cars, being separated and led to the gas chambers simply doesn’t apply to Buchenwald, and not just because prisoners didn’t arrive by train until 1944. Furthermore, ‘Buchenwald’ was not a single camp, but a main camp with many ‘satellite’ sub-camps.
Thousands of prisoners, including Jews did perish at Buchenwald; the museum estimates approximately 56,000 total deaths occurred at Buchenwald, out of a total of 238,980 prisoners through the nine years 1937 – 1945. But it was never a major ‘killing’ or ‘execution’ center like Auschwitz and other camps in Poland became. There were no gas chambers there, and only one crematorium. Most deaths came through work, abuse and horrible living conditions. Mid-war – Jews were only 1% of the total prisoner population. Thus, as we look at Henry’s experiences in upcoming posts – remember Buchenwald was its own different hell.
From early 1937 (founding of Buchenwald) until Spring 1938 most Jews were committed to Dachau; communists and Jehovah’s Witnesses went to Buchenwald. In 1938 (after the pogroms began) the Reich committed a mass of German and Austrian Jews to Buchenwald; in the six months between April and December 1938 the Gestapo committed 13,687 Jews to Buchenwald. At this point the ‘Final Solution’ of killing Jews had not been fully devised, so the purpose at that point was really to force the Jews to relinquish all their property and emigrate from Germany. In 1938 of those arrested, 10,012, or 73% were released to emigrate. Of the 17,000 Jews arrested between 1937 and late 1941, a full 11,600 were released. However while in custody, Jews suffered the highest proportions of deaths.
Prisoners were segregated by race and status. Jews were housed in a separate enclosure and living spaces of the worst conditions, so Henry would have had little contact with Jews. Commandant Koch promoted Jew-hating among the guards and there many guards who advanced in camp by harshly abusing Jews. Called alternately ‘Mistjuden’ (shitty Jews), ‘Saujuden’ (Jewish pigs) or ‘Stinkjuden’ (stinking Jews) guards gave them the lowest of jobs, whether it was the (deadly) quarry, or jobs such as transporting vats of excrement from latrines to the gardens, often with their bare hands. This was at a time when Koch only allotted four buckets of water per barracks – so cleaning hands was near impossible.
Jews that could no longer work were transported to other camps, such as Auschwitz for extermination after mid-1942. In 1942, a full third of remaining Jews in camp were transported elsewhere to be killed. However in 1944 the Jewish population again swelled with massive arrests of Hungarian and Polish Jews most of whom became slave labor.
Buchenwald was in Germany; thus the majority of prisoners were Germans for the first six years. The following table is copied from the Buchenwald Concentration Camp, Guide to the Permanent Historical Exhibition, page 155. The numbers are extremely telling, when you realize for example that in December 1943 the camp population was 37,221, including a large increase of Poles and Russians. Yet at the same time there were only 352 Jews, or 1% of total prisoners left in Buchenwald. The rest were political, asocial and criminal. I’m not sure if ‘Russian’ means Soviet POWs as in soldiers, or ‘political’ communists, however there was a very specific and insidious killing program of Soviet POWs there. At no other concentration camp did political prisoners rise to such a level of internal or ‘delegated’ authority as in Buchenwald.
Another component of Buchenwald that was different than other camps – there was a separate ‘VIP’ prisoner enclosure . Several well-known prisoners, including royalty and two sons of Claus von Stauffenberg were interred there (think Valkyrie with Tom Cruise.) More on that later.
A chilling number – by December 1944, more than a third (37%) inmates were minors under 21 years of age. Equally young were many Nazis. The especially cruel and torture-loving, sadistic jailer of the detention block, Martin Sommer, a Koch protégé, was born 1915. That made him only age 23 in 1938 when he began his program of torture for those in detention. For good reason he earned the nickname “Hangman of Buchenwald.”
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Inmates according to origin
(Largest groups according to nationality; in the counts Jews had no nationality – they were all counted as simply Jews)
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Date
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Total No.
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Russians
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Poles
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Frenchmen
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Jews
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‘Reich Germans”
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Czechs
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8/29/1942
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9,881
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3,688
12%
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1,155
12%
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10
0.1%
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694
7%
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Appr 3,050
31%
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568
6%
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12/25/1943
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37,221
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14,451
39%
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7,569
20%
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4,689
13%
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352
1%
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Appr 4,760
13%
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2,831
8%
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10/15/1944
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88,231
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23,934
27%
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17,964
20%
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13,437
15%
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10,816
12%
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6,666
8%
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4,960
6%
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As of November 1944, the number of inmates in the lethal Mittelbau “Dora” command rose to over 46,000 (I think included in the totals above.)
Primary Source: Buchenwald Concentration Camp, Guide to the Permanent Historical Exhibition.
Primary Source: Buchenwald Concentration Camp, Guide to the Permanent Historical Exhibition.