Buchenwald is a concentration camp that, thanks to a well-established system of mass murder, has become one of the most famous testimonies of the crimes of the Nazi regime in Europe. He was not the first either in the world or in Germany itself, but it was the local leadership that became the pioneers in the conveyor killings. Another famous camp in Auschwitz started to work in full force only from January 1942, when the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) headed for the total physical extermination of Jews. But much earlier this practice came to Buchenwald.
The concentration camp was marked by its first victims in the summer of 1937. In early 1938, a torture chamber for prisoners was first created here, and in 1940, a crematorium, which proved its effectiveness as a means of mass extermination. Prisoners for the most part were political opponents of Hitler (in particular, the leader of the German Communists - Ernst Thalmann), dissidents who dared to disagree with the course of the NSDAP in the late thirties, all kinds of inferior, according to the Chancellor, and, of course, Jews. In the summer of 1937, the first settlement took place in Buchenwald. The concentration camp was located on the land of Thuringia, near Weimar. Behindall the time of its existence, for eight years, until April 1945, about a quarter of a million people passed through its barracks, of which 55 thousand were destroyed or exhausted by physical labor. This was Buchenwald - a concentration camp, a photo from which subsequently shocked the whole world.
Experiments on people
Apart from everything else that Buchenwald noted, the concentration camp was also famous for experiments on people. With the full approval of the highest Nazi leadership, in particular Reichsführer Heinrich Gimmer, people here were deliberately infected with dangerous viruses for the experimental testing of vaccines. The prisoners of Buchenwald were infected with tuberculosis, typhus and a number of other diseases. Very often, this ended not just in the death of the experimental subjects, but also in the infection of their neighbors in the barracks and, as a result, severe epidemics that claimed the lives of thousands of prisoners. In addition, experiments were actively carried out in the camp regarding the pain threshold of a person, his extreme degree of endurance, the possibility of surviving in extreme conditions, when local doctors simply watched
people dying in artificially created conditions: in water, cold and so on.
Liberation
Buchenwald (concentration camp) was liberated in April 1945. On April 4, one of the satellite concentration camps, Ohrdruf, was liberated by American troops. The lengthy preparation of the prisoners made it possible to form armed resistance forces right on the territory of the camp. The uprising began on April 11, 1945. In its course, the prisoners managed to break the resistance and take the territory under their control. Several dozen Nazi guards and SS men were taken prisoner. On the same day, American formations approached the camp, and two days later, the Red Army.
Post-war use
After Buchenwald was captured by the Allied forces, the concentration camp was used by the Soviet People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) as a Nazi internment camp for several more years.
