David Olère was a Polish-French artist known primarily for his powerful and haunting artworks depicting the Holocaust. Born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1902, Olère survived internment in several concentration camps during World War II, including Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
After the war, Olère settled in France and began creating art that bore witness to the atrocities he had experienced. His works often depicted scenes from the camps, capturing the brutality and inhumanity of the Holocaust. Olère’s art served as a form of testimony and remembrance, ensuring that the horrors of the Holocaust would not be forgotten.
One of his most well-known works is a series of paintings and drawings depicting the gas chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz, based on his firsthand experiences. These works are particularly striking in their stark portrayal of the grim realities of the Holocaust.
Olère’s art continues to be a significant contribution to Holocaust remembrance, offering a unique perspective from someone who survived the horrors of the camps and felt compelled to document them through his art.
I did post some of his works before, the painting at the top is titled, “The Food of the Dead for the Living,” and below are more.
Admission in Mauthausen by David Olère.
The Experimental Injection by David Olère
The Oven Room by David Olère
Gassing by David Olère.
On 20 February 1943, due to his Jewish origin, he was arrested by the French police and placed in the Drancy Camp. On 2 March, he was deported from Drancy to the German Nazi Auschwitz Camp, where he was registered with number 106144. Throughout his entire stay at the camp, he worked in the Sonderkommando, a special work unit forced by the Germans to aid in the operation of the crematoriums and gas chambers.
“David Olère is the only prisoner of Sonderkommando who transferred his traumatic experiences from the shadow of the crematorium chimneys on paper and canvas.” — Dr. Piotr M. A. Cywiński
Buchenwald was one of the largest concentration camps established by the Nazis, located near Weimar, Germany. It was operational from 1937 until its liberation on April 11, 1945, by American forces.
When the American soldiers arrived at Buchenwald, they were shocked by the appalling conditions they encountered. The camp was overcrowded, with thousands of emaciated prisoners subjected to forced labor, starvation, disease, and brutal treatment by the SS guards. Many inmates were on the brink of death, and mass graves dotted the landscape.
The liberation of Buchenwald was a moment of both relief and horror. For the survivors, it meant freedom from the daily torment and the hope of rebuilding their lives. However, it also revealed the extent of Nazi atrocities to the world. The images and testimonies from Buchenwald played a crucial role in documenting the Holocaust and holding perpetrators accountable for their crimes.
As American forces closed in on the Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald, Gestapo headquarters at Weimar telephoned the camp administration to announce that it was sending explosives to blow up any evidence of the camp–including its inmates. What the Gestapo did not know was that the camp administrators had already fled in fear of the Allies. A prisoner answered the phone and informed headquarters that explosives would not be needed, as the camp had already been blown up, which, of course, was not true.
Among the camp’s most gruesome characters was Ilse Koch, wife of the camp commandant, who was infamous for her sadism.
Witnesses claimed “she wore clothes which were deliberately chosen to be inciting for the prisoners”,. They accused her of whipping prisoners for daring to look at her and of having “a desire to own certain objects made of human skin”, such as lampshades, a cover for a family photo album, and gloves.
Various objects made from human skin were found in Buchenwald when it was liberated. Despite the testimony of former prisoners who were forced to make such grisly objects, prosecutors could not conclusively prove her involvement in committing such crimes.
On April 11,1945, around 2:30 pm the tanks of the Fourth Armoured Division rolled through the SS complex without stopping. The SS fled. Armed inmates took control of the camp and overpowered the last remaining SS soldiers. By 4:00 pm they had taken control of the camp. Buchenwald was freed from within and without. About one hour later, scouts from the Fourth and Sixth Armoured Divisions were the first American soldiers to reach the camp. 21,000 inmates were liberated on that day, among them some 900 children and youth.
In the aftermath of liberation, efforts were made to provide medical care, food, and support to the survivors.
Many displaced persons would face a long road to physical and psychological recovery. The liberation of Buchenwald stands as a reminder of the horrors of genocide and the importance of never forgetting the lessons of history.
Among those saved by the Americans was Elie Wiesel, seen in the photo at the top of the blog-seen in the second row, seventh from left-who went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. His mother and the youngest of his three sisters were murdered in Auschwitz, while he and his father were moved to Buchenwald where his father died of starvation and dysentery just months before it was liberated by Allied troops. Seventeen-year-old Elie was barely alive when American soldiers opened the camp.
I’ll finish with some of Elie Wiesel’s quotes:
“The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.”
“For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.”
“To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.”
“We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”
“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.”
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On December 9, 1946, an American military tribunal opened criminal proceedings against 23 leading German physicians and administrators for their willing participation in war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution was Telford Taylor, and the chief prosecutor was James M. McHaney. In his opening statement, Taylor summarized the crimes of the defendants.
“The defendants in this case are charged with murders, tortures, and other atrocities committed in the name of medical science. The victims of these crimes are numbered in the hundreds of thousands. A handful only are still alive; a few of the survivors will appear in this courtroom. But most of these miserable victims were slaughtered outright or died in the course of the tortures to which they were subjected. For the most part they are nameless dead. To their murderers, these wretched people were not individuals at all. They came in wholesale lots and were treated worse than animals.”
Siegfried Handloser was one of the men on trial. He was born in Konstanz. Since World War I, he has been in the German Army Medical Service. He entered the Kaiser Wilhelm Academy in Berlin in 1903. After passing the state examination in 1910, he was employed in various positions in the medical service from 1928-32. Eventually, he became a consultant in the Reichswehr Ministry.
Handloser was a Lieutenant General in the medical service and medical inspector in the Wehrmacht. He also served as chief of medical services of the armed forces. He was found guilty of participation in high altitude, freezing, malaria, mustard gas, sulfanilamide, seawater, epidemic jaundice, and spotted fever experiments on humans. He also conducted bone, muscle, and nerve regeneration and bone-transplantation experiments. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Handloser joined the committee of the German Society for Internal Medicine (DGIM-Deutsche Gesellschaft für Innere Medizin) in 1937. The German Society for Internal Medicine (DGIM) was founded in Wiesbaden in 1882 and, with over 30,000 members, still is one of the largest medical-scientific professional societies in Europe.
Handloser effectively became the Nazi delegate In 1938. He only got here because of his political role, not through scientific achievement. He had not previously been a member of the DGIM.
Handloser was promoted to the position of Army Group physician of the Nazi Army Group Command 3. In October 1939, and was named honorary professor.
Handloser’s career took him to Army Group Command 3 in Vienna in 1938. He was an Army Medical Inspector and Army Surgeon in the General Quartermaster’s Office of the Army High Command from February 1941. He was appointed the first Chief of Wehrmacht Medical Services (“Chief W San”) at the High Command of the Wehrmacht in June/July 1942.
Handloser cooperated with Ernst Robert Grawitz, “Reichsarzt-SS und Polizei,” but was not his superior. He was in charge of all the Wehrmacht medical personnel—including the medical units of the Waffen-SS.
Handloser became responsible for all medical crimes in the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS. He experienced increasing criticism during the war, as there were deficiencies in medical supplies, which eventually came to a complete collapse.
Handloser attended a meeting on December 29, 1941, at which it was decided to conduct human experiments to test typhus vaccines at Buchenwald Concentration Camp.
The tests resulted in the deaths of about 100 people. Handloser actively operated the organization of forced prostitution in the territories occupied by the Nazis, using his position as chief of the Wehrmacht Medical Service. Handloser strove to minimize the danger of venereal disease and to prevent “sexual intercourse with Jewish women.”
Orderly prostitution was also intended to avoid undesirable contact with women in the occupied territories, which could have been used for espionage purposes. After Hitler refused parole for soldiers convicted of homosexual acts in 1942, Handloser turned his attention to this issue as well. In this context, the establishment of more Wehrmacht brothels to “remedy the sexual emergency” was discussed.
Handloser was convicted by the American Military Tribunal No. 1 (the Doctors’ Trial) in August 1947 and sentenced to life imprisonment. This was later reduced to 20 years, but in 1954, he was released shortly before dying of cancer in Munich at the age of 69. He was shown compassion where he had none himself.
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Life is only a sequence of events and accidents, often determined when and where you are born. When I was 15, as a young man in the 1980s in the Netherlands, my main interest was girls and trying to get beer. When Elie Wiesel was 15 and a young man in Romania (or then Hungary) in the 1940s, his interest was survival.
Elie Wiesel was born in Sighet (in Transylvania, now a part of Romania, but part of Hungary between 1940 and 1945) on 30 September 1928 and grew up in a Chassidic (an Orthodox Jewish) family.
In March 1944, Germany occupied Hungary (extending the Holocaust into Northern Transylvania). Elie Wiesel was 15, and he, with his family and the rest of the Jewish population, was placed in one of the two confinement ghettos set up in Máramarossziget (Sighet), where he had been born and raised. In May 1944, the Hungarian authorities, under German pressure, began to deport the Jewish community to Auschwitz, where 90 per cent of the people were murdered upon arrival.
When Elie Wiesel and his family arrived at the camp, he was separated from his mother and sisters when he heard eight quietly, emotionless spoken words, ”Men to the left! Women to the right!”
Elie Wiesel was 15 years old and was tattooed with inmate number A-7713 on his left arm. He had lied about his age, claiming to be 18, the advice he received from another inmate.
After being held at Auschwitz I, Wiesel and his father were transferred to Monowitz (Buna) Workcamp, part of the extensive Auschwitz camp complex. There, he was put to work as a slave labourer. The loss of his mother and sister and the daily brutality of the camp led Wiesel to question his faith. “My eyes had opened and I was alone—terribly alone in a world without God, without man. Without love or mercy, I was nothing but ashes now.”
Elie and his father were later transported from Auschwitz to Buchenwald. His father died while imprisoned at Buchenwald. His younger sister had been murdered together with his mother in Auschwitz. After the war, he was reunited with his older sister, Beatrice.
I could write more about Elie Wiesel—instead, I will finish with his own words.
“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky. Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes. Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself.”
“The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.”
“Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere.”
“We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must—at that moment—become the centre of the universe.”
“The survivors had every reason to despair of society; they did not. They opted to work for humankind, not against it.”
“No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them.”
“In any society, fanatics who hate don’t hate only me – they hate you, too. They hate everybody.”
“To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.”
—Elie Wiesel’s speech, “The Perils of Indifference” Recorded April 12, 1999
Elie Wiesel sadly passed away on 2 July 2016. He was 87 years old.
When people hear or read the name of a concentration camp, they often assume there is only one camp. In fact, most main Camps had subcamps—Buchenwald had approximately 100 subcamps. (You can find the list of the camps at the end of this post.) This piece will show photographs of Buchenwald and some testimonies from survivors.
The photo above was taken by Willem Hoogwerf, a prisoner at Buchenwald. The following photographs were also taken by him and include his descriptions.
He was born on 24 January 1916 in Vlaardingen, the Netherlands. He trained and worked as a car mechanic. On 24 February 1941, he was arrested as a member of the Dutch resistance group, Geuzen. He was admitted to Buchenwald Concentration Camp as a political prisoner (Detention No. 5434) on 9 April 1941. There, he worked in the garages of the Commandant. In April 1945, he was liberated and returned to the Netherlands. He died on 3 August 2004 in Vlaardingen.
The description he gave for the photograph above: “The gallows. On a rainy Sunday when the SS were bored, they made 100 prisoners to walk one after the other inside the fence and under the gallows. Everything had to stop at a whistle and those who stood under the gallows were hanged. During an execution the entire camp had to watch. Once, when 3 prisoners were being hanged, the camp commander thought the empty hooks were so untidy and had 3 of the forced spectators hanged as well. At least then all 6 hooks were used.”
“Camp Buchenwald, each barrack is surrounded by barbed wire. If typhus broke out in a barracks (lice), the gate would not open in the morning and typhus and hunger would take care of the rest.”
“In the right corner, the corpses are stripped of their clothes and thrown naked onto the wagon. The cremator awaits. This is part of a day’s harvest.”
“The gallows at the crematorium. In the background a mountain of cremation remains.”
Felix Müller
Born on 6 June 1904 in Leipzig. He was a construction worker and was admitted to the Buchenwald Concentration Camp as a political prisoner on 23 September 1943. After liberation on 11 April 1945, he returned to Leipzig. He passed away on 5 January 1962.
“View from a window in the effects room of a prisoner orchestra giving a concert for the camp inmates in front of the chamber building.”
Nina Andrejewskaja
“And there we stood for as long as we could still hear the shuffle of the wooden clogs.”
Nina Andrejewskaja was forced to look on as the German occupiers burnt her native city to the ground in the autumn of 1943. She was deported with her mother and sister to Saxony to perform forced labour, and there they were separated. The fifteen-year-old attempted to flee but was apprehended by the Gestapo. After interrogations and abuse, she was committed to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in the autumn of 1944. In Taucha, a Buchenwald subcamp, she was put to work manufacturing grenades. She managed to flee when the camp was cleared. She found her mother and sister near Chemnitz and returned home with them. She learned German and later worked for a German diplomat in Moscow.
The so-called Blood Road (Blutstraße) was the 5-km-long access road to the Buchenwald Concentration Camp built by inmates. At the beginning of mid-1938, the prisoners were forced to turn an old wooden road into a broad, concrete street.
Hundreds, many of them Jews, worked from dawn to dusk. Hungry, thirsty, and driven by blows from the SS, they carried construction materials on their shoulders from the quarry to the construction site. Work had to be carried out without proper tools and largely by hand. During the year-long construction period, inmates gave the new street its nickname, the Blood Road.
Beginning in April 1939, a regular bus line drove this Weimar-Buchenwald route and was accessible to the general public. Just in front of today’s memorial site portions of the cement street are visible and have been preserved in their original condition.
Éva Fahidi-Pusztai
“We did not even say goodbye to each other.”
Éva Fahidi was born on 22 October 1925 in Debrecen, Hungary, the daughter of the affluent middle-class timber merchant Desiderius Fahidi and his wife Irma Fahidi. In 1936, this Jewish family converted to Catholicism, and Éva and her sister attended the convent school. In the late 1930s, ever stricter anti-Semitic laws were introduced, increasingly excluding the Jewish population from society. When the German Wehrmacht occupied Hungary in the spring of 1944, the Fahidi family was forced to move to the ghetto. In late June, the Jewish population of the city were herded into a brick factory and deported to Auschwitz in several transports. On 27 June 1944, the Fahidi family was placed on the last transport—which took them to Auschwitz/Birkenau. Upon arrival, Éva Fahidi was separated from her mother and sister, who were both murdered in the gas chambers. Her father died soon afterwards because of the conditions in the camp.
In mid-August 1944, Fahidi was transported along with 999 other Hungarian Jewish women to a subcamp of Buchenwald Concentration Camp to carry out forced labour. At Münchmühle near Allendorf, she was set to work producing shells.
While on a death march in March 1945, Fahidi was liberated by American troops; she returned to Hungary and worked in the export trade. She now lives in Budapest. She is a member of the Advisory Board of Former Inmates of Buchenwald Concentration Camp of the Buchenwald und Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation and of the International Committee of Buchenwald-Dora and Subcamps. In 2012 she was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, and in 2014 was made an honorary citizen of Stadtallendorf.
Éva Pusztai works, in part together with the Buchenwald Memorial, to ensure that the fate of the Jewish women is not forgotten. Current social and political developments in Hungary give added impetus to her efforts to oppose any reinterpretation of the annihilation of the Hungarian Jews and to bring about the conviction and sentencing of the last surviving criminals from the Nazi concentration and extermination camps.
“We are grandparents, and the fate of our grandchildren is what matters most to us. with four grandchildren, i myself have a stake in the future. the best i can wish for them – however utopian this may sound – is that they can create for themselves a life without fear. that they will build themselves a democratic society in which institutional hatred is unknown.”
Music is not just a series of notes strung together, it is also a tool that can be used for good and bad. Music evokes deep emotions, a bit of music often remains with you in your mind for the rest of your life.
The Nazis used music in the concentration camps, not to make life more pleasant, but as a psychological weapon. Those who survived hearing the music they heard in the camps, often triggered the traumatic memories associated with that bit of music.
Primo Levi, in what is one of the most prominent written accounts of life in the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, recounted an incident he witnessed in the infirmary there:
“The beating of the big drums and the cymbals reach us continuously and monotonously, but in this weft the musical phrases weave a pattern only intermittently, according to the caprices of the wind. The tunes are few, a dozen, and the same ones every day, morning and evening: marches and popular songs dear to every German. They lie engraved on our minds and will be the last thing in the Lager that we shall forget: they are the voice of the Lager, the perceptible expression of its geometrical madness, of the resolution of others to annihilate us first as men in order to kill us more slowly afterwards”
I recently lost my best friend. We both loved music and I have noticed that some songs, which we both loved, are no longer a source of pleasure for me they have become a source of grief and pain. However, I know in months and years to come, these songs will once again become a source of joy, they will bring back good memories, For those who were forced to listen to the music in the camps, and maybe some pieces would have been their favourite music before, would now forever be a constant reminder of suffering.
The musicians would feel guilty for being used as an instrument of torture, but they had no choice.
The trumpeter Herman Sachnowitz, among others, described his duties in Monowitz as follows:
“Every morning we played as the inmate work crews departed; the same in the evening, when they returned to the camp . We also played on other occasions, especially during executions, which usually occurred on Sunday afternoons or evenings . Perhaps they intended to drown out the last protests and final curses with music. A grotesque spectacle that had been ordered at the highest level. And the SS men surrounded us with loaded weapons.”
Erika Rothschild recalled being
“driven from the cattle cars and lined up . In addition, a band, consisting of the best inmate musicians, played, and depending on the origins of the transport, they performed Polish, Czech, or Hungarian folk music. The band played, the SS tormented, and there was no time to think , one person was driven into camp, the other to the crematorium.”
Karl Röder, who had been a prisoner in Dachau and Flossenbürg, wrote that singing songs on command was part of the daily routine of camp life:
“We sang in small groups, or one block would sing, or several thousand prisoners all at once. In the latter case, one of us had to conduct because otherwise it would not have been possible to keep time. Keeping time was very important: it had to be crisp, military, and above all loud. After several hours’ singing we were often unable to produce another note.”
The most common musical experience at Buchenwald was SS-organised musical torture, which was a part of every inmate’s daily life. The most ubiquitous form was forced mass singing. As thousands of exhausted inmates gathered for evening roll call, the camp commander would insist that they all sing in unison, on key and loudly. One former inmate recalled, “How could this singing ever go right? We were a chorus of ten thousand men. Even in normal conditions, and if all singers had really known how to sing, it would have required several weeks of training. And how were we to get over the laws of acoustics? The mustering ground measured three hundred paces or more across. Hence the voices of the men on the far side of the ground were bound to reach, Camp Commander Rödl’s ear almost a second later than those of the men near the gate.”
The singing gave the guards a chance to humiliate and arbitrarily punish prisoners.
Early on, the camp leadership organised a competition for the best camp song. Ironically, the winning song, which became the official camp song, Buchenwaldlied (Buchenwald Song), was loved by the prisoners and the guards who forced them to sing it. Set to an energetic march, its rousing chorus focused on the inevitable freedom that awaited them beyond the camp walls. For many of the prisoners, singing the song felt like an act of resistance. One former prisoner said, “The camp leader walked through the camp and whoever wasn’t singing loud enough or at least didn’t open his mouth wide enough while singing, was beaten…but the BuchenwaldSong also brought us a little pleasure, for it was our song. When we sang, Then once will come the day when we are free, that was in itself a demonstration, that sometimes even the SS officers noticed, and it could have cost us a meal as punishment.”
The Buchenwald Trial was a war crime trial conducted by the United States Army as a court-martial in Dachau, then part of the American occupation zone. It took place from 11 April to 14 August 1947.
On 14 August 1947, the Buchenwald main trial United States of America vs. Josias Prince of Waldeck et al. ended. All 31 accused were found guilty of war crimes in the Buchenwald Concentration Camp and its satellite camps—22 were sentenced to death. Ilse Koch, the only woman in the dock, received a life sentence. Former prisoners accused her of being particularly sadistic. However, because she was pregnant when the verdict was announced—the court waived the death penalty.
Ilse Koch wasn’t only considered sadistic by the Buchenwald prisoners but also by the Nazis. On 17 August 1944, SS judge Konrad Morgen formally charged Ilse’s husband, Karl Koch, with the “embezzlement and concealing of funds and goods in an amount of at least 200,000 RM,” and the “premeditated murder” of three inmates, ostensibly to prevent them from giving evidence to the SS investigatory commission. Ilse was charged with the “habitual receiving of stolen goods, and taking for her benefit at least 25,000 RM…” While Ilse Koch was acquitted at the subsequent SS trial in December 1944, Konrad Morgen described her as “a hussy who rode on horseback in sexy underwear in front of the prisoners and then noted down for punishment the numbers of those who looked at her.”
Aside from Ilse Koch, most of the accused were members of the former camp staff, but also the Higher SS and Police Leader (HSSPF) Josias zu Waldeck und Pyrmont, who was responsible for the Buchenwald concentration camp. In addition, the camp commandant Hermann Pister and members of the commandant’s staff.
Josias Erbprinz zu Waldeck und Pyrmont: Life Imprisonment (Commuted to 20 Years Imprisonment) Ilse Koch: Life Imprisonment (Commuted to 4 Years Imprisonment) Hermann Pister: Death Sentence (Died In Prison on the 28 September 1948) SS Dr Hans Eisele: Death Sentence (Sentenced in Absentia) August Bender: 10 Years Imprisonment (Commuted to 3 Years Imprisonment) Kapo Hans Wolf: Death Sentence (Executed on the 19 November 1948) Werner Greunuss: Life Imprisonment (Commuted to 20 Years Imprisonment) Helmut Roscher: Death Sentence (Commuted to Life Imprisonment) Franz Zinecker: Life Imprisonment Phillip Grimm: Death Sentence (Commuted to Life Imprisonment) Hubart Krautwurst: Death Sentence (Executed on the 26 November 1948) Emil Pleissner: Death Sentence (Executed on the 26 November 1948) Albert Schwartz: Death Sentence (Commuted to Life Imprisonment) Hans Merbach: Death Sentence (Executed on the 14 January 1949) Friedrich Wilhelm: Death Sentence (Executed on the 26 November 1948) Hermann Hackmann: Death Sentence (Commuted to Life Imprisonment) Dr Edwin Katzenellenbogen: Life Imprisonment (Commuted to 12 Years Imprisonment) Wolfgang Otto: 15 Years Imprisonment Hans – Theodor Schmidt: Death Sentence (Executed on the 7 June 1951) Gustav Heigel: Death Sentence (Commuted to Life Imprisonment) Quido Reimer: Death Sentence (Commuted to Life Imprisonment) Richard Köhler: Death Sentence (Executed on the 26 November 1948) Max Schobert: Death Sentence (Executed on the 19 November 1948) Kapo Dr Arthur Dietzsch: 15 Years Imprisonment Hermann Helbig: Death Sentence (Executed on the 19 November 1948) Walter Wendt: 15 Years Imprisonment (Commuted to 5 Years Imprisonment) Hermann Grossmann: Death Sentence (Executed on the 19 November 1948) Peter Merker: Death Sentence (Commuted to 20 Years Imprisonment) Josef Kestel: Death Sentence (Executed on the 19 November 1948) Anton Bergmeier: Death Sentence (Commuted to Life Imprisonment) Otto Barnewald: Death Sentence (Commuted to Life Imprisonment)
Peter Zenkle, a former prisoner at Buchenwald, said the following about the camp, “The pigs in the SS stables received better feed than the inmates were fed.”
Leon Bass, an African-American soldier, described his experiences entering the Buchenwald concentration camp in April 1945.
“I was sent as part of a liaison group to see if we could arrange for a campsite for our unit. And we arrived in this place called Weimar and drove out to, what I found out now, was to be a concentration camp. And I didn’t know anything about concentration camps. So when the officer told us to follow him and get on the trucks, I did ask him…I said, ‘Where are we going?’ And he said, ‘We’re going to a concentration camp.’
I really was puzzled because I didn’t know a thing about that. No one had ever mentioned it in all the training I received. But on this day, in April 1945, I was going to have the shock of my life. Because I was going to walk through the gates of a concentration camp called Buchenwald. And you got to believe me when I tell you I wasn’t ready for that. I was totally unprepared for that kind of experience.
But you see, I can never, I can never forget that day because when I walked through that gate, I saw in front of me what I call the walking dead. I saw human beings, human beings that had been beaten, had been starved, they’d been tortured. They’d been denied everything, everything that would make anyone’s life livable.
They were standing in front of me and they were skin and bone. They had skeletal faces with deep-set eyes. Their heads had been clean-shaved, and they were standing there, and they were holding on to one another just to keep from falling. Many of them had sores on their bodies. And I can remember this so vividly, sores that came from malnutrition. One man held out his hands, and his fingers had webbed together with the scabs that had come from the sores brought on by the malnutrition.
Oh, my God, I’d seen nothing like this in all my life, nothing. But when they started to move, stumbling forward toward me, I backed away. Oh, I backed up and I stopped. And I said to myself, my God, my God, what is all this insanity? Who are these people? And furthermore, what have they done that was so terrible that would cause anybody to treat them like this? And you see, I didn’t know really, I didn’t know.
But there was this young man who spoke English and he began to tell us about Buchenwald. And he said that these people were Jews, they were Gypsies, they were Jehovah’s Witnesses, and there were some Catholics. There were trade unionists, communists, and homosexuals. Oh, he went on and on. He listed so many different groups that had been placed in the camp. And I knew, that in my judgment, the Nazis had placed them there because the Nazis were saying none of them were good enough, therefore, they were not fit to live. They could be terminated—murdered. Man, I couldn’t get a handle on this. This was beyond anything in my experience.
But I walked about the camp. I went to a place where the men would sleep—they called it a barrack—and I opened the door, I stepped back across the threshold, and I closed the door. But I could go no further. You see that odour, the stench, that comes from death and human waste—well, it was overpowering. It was awesome. I stood there and I was holding my breath all the time. I was holding my breath, and I was going to leave. I knew I couldn’t stay.
And so I turned, but before I could step away, I looked down. And there, on the bottom bunk near the door, was a man. Oh, he was an emaciated—that person. He was skin and bone. He was on a bed of filthy straw and rags. And he was trying so desperately to look at me with that skeletal face and those deep-set eyes, but he was so weak. You see, the man had been starved for so long, and it was a struggle for him just to look at me. But finally he did. He looked up at me and he said nothing. Nor did I. So now, I opened the door, stepped across the threshold, and closed the door.
I was going to walk away from that place but another man came by. He was– oh, he was skin and bone. And he stopped right there in front of me. He undid what was holding his trousers, he let them fall, he squatted down, and he began to defecate right in front of me. And I couldn’t believe this. Oh, he was so thin, it looked like the bones of his buttocks would come through the skin. But I stood there saying, no, no. You don’t do this in public. Where’s your dignity?
But you see, that was my hang-up. I was hung up on something called dignity when that man was merely trying to survive. He wanted to live. I didn’t know.”
In the decades that followed, the crimes committed in Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora were tried before courts in both Germanys and abroad. Yet even if some of these trials were quite sensational, most of the judicial inquiries were ultimately dropped without results.
Of the thousands of SS men and women overseers who had served in Buchenwald, Mittelbau-Dora and their subcamps, only a small fraction were brought to trial. The persons who had participated in the countless crimes against concentration camp inmates in the weeks before the end of the war were likewise almost never prosecuted.
A SS guard who abused prisoners was identified on 14 April 1945 by a former Soviet Buchenwald prisoner at Buchenwald.
I am always amazed why so many evil men got away with murder. Especially the physicians who were supposed to, “first do no harm.”
Hans Eisele was an SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer and Nazi physician in various camps, including Mauthausen and Buchenwald. There he mistreated and murdered prisoners, for example, by operating on them without anaesthesia and by giving lethal injections to people with tuberculosis. In 1945, he was convicted of the crimes he had committed. He was released again in 1952 after a reduced sentence.
Nazi party member 3125695, former SS Hauptsturmführer, began fighting on the Western Front and then worked in Nazi concentration camps at Sachsenhausen, Natzweiler, Dachau and Buchenwald. According to the American who prosecuted Eisele, Colonel William Denson, Eisele started as the good doctor, called, The Angel by prisoners, but steadily became cruel and sadistic, until at Buchenwald when given the moniker, The Butcher, because he carried out medical experiments on prisoners, allowing them to die slowly after injections of cyanide.
On 13 December 1945, Eisele and 39 others were tried at the main court trial for atrocities at Dachau.
Eisele was found guilty of complicity in three executions which he had issued death certificates for afterwards. His sentence was death. However, after a mandatory review of his case and those of his codefendants, the death sentence was one of eight out of 36 reduced to prison terms on appeal. The reasoning for sparing Eisele was that the military could not find evidence of him individually mistreating prisoners. In addition, medical care in the camp under his purview had improved somewhat, and he had barely spent any time in Dachau whatsoever.
On 11 April 1947, Eisele was tried at the Buchenwald main trial. He was found guilty and received another death sentence for complicity in murder and alleged human experimentation. However, the basic conviction against Eisele proved dubious and uncertain (much of what is now known about Eisele was then unavailable), so four of the eight military judges submitted an application that the judgment be converted by the reviewing body to a ten-year sentence, which was granted.
During his detention in a prison for war criminals, Landsberg wrote an extensive defence titled, Audiatur et altera pars, in which he denied the allegations and represented himself as a convinced Christian who had always been a physician only for the sake of others. In contrast, numerous witnesses of his crimes were former concentration camp prisoners and some former SS members. After his sentence was reduced [to ten years], Eisele was released from prison on 26 February 1952.
After his release, he opened a medical practice in Munich. In 1958, during the trial of Martin Sommer, a guard at Buchenwald, new allegations were made against Eisele. That he had murdered at least 200 Jews and performed gruesome medical experiments came to light. Eisele fled to Egypt with the help of an SS underground group, where he settled under the pseudonym Carl Debouche in the upmarket Cairo suburb Maadi. Eisele was arrested in July 1958 by police in Cairo.
However, before being extradited, he disappeared from custody the following month.
Eisele moved in the circles of former Nazi scientists in Egypt after a German extradition request had been rejected. The Mossad tried to assassinate Eisele via a mail bomb on 25 September 1963. However, the bomb detonated early, instead killing a postal worker. Eisele died on 3 May 1967 and was buried in the small German cemetery in grave No. 99
Primo Levi is one of the most famous Holocaust survivors. He wrote in 1986, “It happened, and thus it can happen again.” For some survivors, this was a reality soon after being liberated.
Howard Cwick was an American Jewish soldier who liberated Buchenwald. The shame he and other liberators felt came from not liberating the camp in time to save more prisoners, but there was one last gassing only a few minutes before the liberators arrived.
Something that must have troubled him more was the treatment of the liberated by [some] of the US troops. Below is a testimony he gave for the USC Shoah Foundation.
“I came into contact with quite a bit of antisemitism. We had a mess sergeant, who at that time was the assistant mess sergeant named Cooley. Cooley came from someplace—I have it in my records—either North Carolina or South Carolina or Georgia, in that area. And he was a racist to the roots, and he would call me Jew boy and kike. And on more than one occasion, we had to be separated—physically separated.
I think he actually could have almost erased me. But I made a vow to myself when I was a kid that I never again would accept that without fighting back, and that was my pattern.
Overseas, when we were no longer actually in combat, there was an opportunity or a situation where I literally came very close to and almost killed him for antisemitism. We had picked up some liberated displaced persons. They were wandering along the road, and they pleaded with us because they wanted to get back as close as they could to where they had last seen any of their relatives still alive.
And they would sew our uniforms, help the cooks, work on our vehicles, sew on patches—whatever they could do for us, even cut hair, just so we would take them along as we travelled. I came home from a patrol one day with five or six other fellows, and we heard a large commotion in the camp area where we were. And we dropped our gear on the floor, on the ground, and went to see what was happening.
And I realized—I heard Cooley’s voice yelling, you dirty kike, blankety blank blank blank. You’ll eat all of that, or I’ll kill you. And I pushed my way through the crowd, and sitting on a box was this displaced person, Grisha. He had a large, opened peanut butter tin on his lap with a big spoon in his hand. He had peanut butter smeared all over his face. And Cooley was screaming at him every invective imaginable.
It horrified me that anybody could—whatever he was doing, whatever caused it didn’t even matter. This was a man, a Jew, from a camp. And Cooley, the antisemite, was doing this to him. I walked over. I knocked the can out of Grisha’s hand pulled him to his feet and pushed him away.
And, of course, Cooley turned to me and screamed, what the hell do you think you’re doing, you kike bastard? And I remember as I faced Cooley, I took my pistol from my belt and holding it down at my side, I said, Cooley, if I ever see you treat another Jew like this again, I’ll kill you. And I brought the hammer back. It sounded like a steel door being slammed. It was so quiet. The crowd around us didn’t make a sound.
Cooley looked at me with disbelief and he turned around and pushed his way out of the crowd. I’ve thought about that so very, very many times, and I swear to this day, I don’t know what had he stood up to me, what could have happened. I don’t know if I could have or I would have—I don’t know.
But in those days, we weren’t human. I can’t say we were living like animals because animals don’t act that way. But the euphemism of being human and sane just didn’t exist anymore. We weren’t normal. We just weren’t normal in those days. And whether I could have, I don’t know. But Cooley never came near me again. He avoided me like the plague.”
Between 1816 and 1949, the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia, was a Dutch colony. Between 1941 and 1945 it was occupied by Japan.
On 19 and 20 July 1940, 231 people who were on leave from the Dutch East Indies in the Netherlands were arrested by the Germans. They were called ‘Indian hostages’. It was in retaliation for the arrest of nearly 2,400 Germans by the Dutch governor-general in the Dutch East Indies in May 1940. The 15 female hostages went to Ravensbrück, the men to Camp Buchenwald. On October 7, 116 Indian hostages arrived in Buchenwald, but they did not come from the Dutch East Indies. The women were released again in early November 1940, and the men who survived were released more than 4 years later.
On October 7, another 116 men arrive in Buchenwald, who have been taken prisoner as ‘Indian hostages’. They do not originate from the Dutch East Indies and all hold prominent positions, including in the academic world. The women are released in early November 1940. In November 1941, after a difficult year in Camp Buchenwald, the men go to Camp Haaren. From there they are merged with the ‘notable hostages’ in Beekvliet in May 1942. There are frictions between the 2 groups. Because they have been held hostage for over a year longer, the Indian hostages feel a bit elevated, a bit more ‘hostage’.
Moreover, the food packages, which the Indian hostages received and the other hostages did not, created division. At their request, the Indian hostages were transferred in July 1943 to the boarding school De Ruwenberg, located further away.
Due to several deaths in Camp Buchenwald and some releases, about 150 hostages remain. Among them also, four Jews. They are transferred to Camp Westerbork at the end of July 1943.
The men were under the protection of the International Red Cross. The Germans agreed to this so that the German hostages in the Dutch East Indies would also receive decent treatment. In practice, this meant that the Swedish and Swiss Red Cross provided them with food packages as much as possible.
This group of hostages was treated very differently in Buchenwald from the other prisoners, their designation, ‘Das goldene Block’, says enough. They were the goldcrests in the camp, but they had a rough time nonetheless. Goldcrests in various respects: they did not have to work, were not mistreated and were allowed to receive parcels. So there was very limited contact with the outside world: they were allowed to write a letter once a month, in German! During the day they were free to do as they pleased.
The hygiene left much to be desired. In the winter of 1940-1941, twelve (or fourteen) hostages died of malnutrition and pneumonia, despite the food parcels and protection of the Red Cross.
Yet camp life was a heavy psychological burden, there was a constant fear, the sword of Damocles, of which they were constantly aware. The protection of the Red Cross didn’t mean much either, the Germans were masters at circumventing the controls!
Arthur Seyss-Inquart was the Reich commissioner for the Nazi-occupied Netherlands. In the latter capacity, Seyss-Inquart shared responsibility for the deportation of Dutch Jews and the shooting of hostages.
On 9 September 1940 he issued the following statement:
The Hague, September 9, 1940
In the foreign possessions of the Netherlands, a large number of Reich Germans resident there were arrested by the Dutch authorities and interned under undignified and extremely unhealthy conditions. These measures by the Dutch authorities are in stark contrast to the loyal and generous treatment accorded to the Dutch people by the occupying powers.
To my regret, I feel compelled to leave several Dutch nationals—including you—in custody until this situation, which is intolerable for the German sense of honour, is remedied.
The Reich Commissioner for the Occupied Dutch Territories signed Dr Seyss-Inquart”
In the context of these hostage internments, lists were also drawn up for hostage-taking on occasion; these concerned more or less well-known Dutch people who had played an opinion-forming, political or economic role. Incidentally, Seyss-Inquart exercised the necessary caution in this respect, as he did not wish to thwart his strategy of gradual Nazification.
On May 4, 1942, 460 persons on these lists were forcibly taken from their homes. These included some top people of the Dutch Union and former MPs; in addition, professors, journalists and various well-known ministers such as Willem Banning and Rev. Gravemeijer. There was no direct reason for this action. However, German repression was noticeably hardening during this period: shortly before, 72 members of the Ordedienst had been executed; 2,000 professional officers had also been called up and taken prisoner of war. Not much later, the first Jewish deportations would begin.
In a second wave of hostages in mid-July 1942, 600 people were arrested. These groups were imprisoned resp. in the minor seminary in Sint-Michielsgestel and the major seminary in Haaren, both in Brabant.
The express intention was to have these hostages serve as “guarantors” against acts of sabotage and resistance; in some cases, therefore, hostages would be put to death; they served as Todeskandidat, death candidates.
In order to crush the resistance, in 1942 Sint-Michielsgestel the minor seminary Beekvliet, as well as the major seminary Haarendael in Haaren, was requisitioned to house prominent Dutchmen as hostages as Todeskandidaten, Death Candidates. One or more of them could be designated as reprisal for any act of resistance to be executed. The first of these executions took place on 15 August 1942, in the woods of Gorp and Rovert, Goirle, where five Todeskandidaten were shot: Willem Ruys (director of the Rotterdamsche Lloyd), Mr Robert Baelde (social worker), Otto Ernst Gelder, Count of Limburg-Stirum (judge and public prosecutor), and Christoffel Bennekers (superintendent of police) and Alexander baron Schimmelpenninck van der Oye (landowner).
On 11 September 1944, a Niedermachungsbefehl [put down order] was issued in the Netherlands by Karl Eberhard Schöngarth. From then on, persons found at a meeting of a resistance group could be shot. In addition, resistance fighters were arrested for interrogation. The female persons were sent to camps, the male persons were placed on a death list. The number of those executed in retaliation was determined per attack by the national leader of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD—Security Service) and Sicherheitspolizei (Sipo—Security Police). The Todeskandidaten [death row inmates] were initially supplied by the regional SD, possibly supplemented by prisoners from other districts.
After the war, many execution sites were provided with a resistance monument where the victims are commemorated on National Remembrance Day.
History of Sorts 
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