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Buchenwald Death Statistics

Obelisk in honor of prisoners who died at Buchenwald

On April 19, 1945, only 8 days after the Buchenwald concentration camp was liberated by the US Army, the political prisoners held a mourning ceremony near the gate house where they had constructed an obelisk in honor of the victims. 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.

The Memorial Site at Buchenwald now estimates that 56,000 prisoners were killed 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 Univeristy of Munich which opposed Hitler's government during World War II.

The obelisk 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.

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.

This page was last updated on August 24, 2009

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Death Statistics from Buchenwald Concentration Camp

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Obelisk in honor of prisoners who died at Buchenwald On April 19, 1945, only 8 days after the Buchenwald concentration camp was liberated by the US Army, the political prisoners held a mourning ceremony near the gate house where they had constructed an obelisk in honor of the victims. 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.

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Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team

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Introduction

Together with its many satellite camps, Buchenwald was one of the largest concentration camps established within the German borders of 1937.

Location of the Camp

The Buchenwald concentration camp was constructed in 1937 about five miles northwest of the city of Weimar in east-central Germany. It was located in a wooded area on the northern slopes of the Ettersberg, a hill north of the city of Weimar.

Before the Nazis rose to power, Weimar was primarily associated with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832). Goethe was a leading European literary figure and a product of German liberal tradition in the 18th and early 19th centuries. It was in Weimar that Goethe made his home.

Weimar was also known as the birthplace of German constitutional democracy, the Weimar Republic (1918-1933).

During the Nazi regime, Weimar became associated with the Buchenwald concentration camp.

US Holocaust Memorial Museum

Camp Facilities

Prisoners lived in the Buchenwald main camp. This area was surrounded by an electrified barbed-wire fence, watchtowers, and a chain of sentries outfitted with automatic machine guns.

Inside the main camp, there was a notorious punishment block, known as the Bunker. It was located at the entrance to the main camp. This is where prisoners who violated camp regulations were punished and often tortured to death.

In addition to the punishment block, the main camp included

33 wooden barracks

15 two-story stone buildings

a prisoners' infirmary

kitchen

laundry

canteen

warehouses

workshops

disinfection buildings

It also eventually had a railway station, brothel, and crematorium. SS guard barracks and the camp administration compound were located in the southern part of the camp.

Prisoner Population

SS authorities opened Buchenwald for male prisoners in July 1937.

Women were not part of the Buchenwald camp system until 1943. The presence of female prisoners significantly increased in 1944. At that time Buchenwald took over subcamps from the Ravensbrück concentration camp, which primarily imprisoned women.

Political Prisoners

Most of the early inmates at Buchenwald were political prisoners, people who had been arrested for some form of political opposition to the Nazi regime. Given their long-term presence at the site, these "politicals" played an important role in the camp's prisoner infrastructure.

In 1944, camp officials established a "special compound" for prominent German political prisoners near the camp administration building in Buchenwald.

One of the most prominent political victims of Buchenwald was Ernst Thälmann. Before Hitler's rise to power in 1933, Thälmann had been the chairman of the Communist Party of Germany. In 1933, he was arrested by the Nazi regime. In August 1944, the SS staff murdered Thälmann in Buchenwald after holding him there for several years.

Jewish Prisoners

In 1938, in the aftermath of Kristallnacht, German SS and police sent almost 10,000 Jews to Buchenwald. There, camp authorities subjected them to extraordinarily cruel treatment upon arrival. Over 250 of these prisoners died as a result of injuries incurred during their arrest or from their initial mistreatment at the camp.

Other Prisoner Groups

In addition to political prisoners and Jews, the SS also interned the following groups of people at Buchenwald:

Furthermore, Buchenwald was one of the only concentration camps that held so-called "work-shy" individuals. These were people whom the regime incarcerated as "asocials" because they could not, or would not, find gainful employment.

In the camp's later stages, the SS also incarcerated

prisoners-of-war from various nations, including the United States

resistance fighters

prominent former government officials of German-occupied countries

foreign forced laborers

Starting in late summer 1941 until 1943, a special guard unit named "SS Kommando 99" shot 8,000 Soviet prisoners-of-war at an SS stable adjacent to the camp. The SS often shot prisoners in the stables and hanged other prisoners in the crematorium area.

Medical Experiments at Buchenwald

Beginning in 1941, a number of physicians and scientists carried out a program of medical experimentation on prisoners at Buchenwald. These experiments took place in special barracks in the northern part of the main camp. Medical experiments aimed at testing the efficacy of vaccines and treatments against contagious diseases, such as typhus, typhoid, cholera, and diphtheria. They resulted in hundreds of deaths.

In 1944, Danish physician Dr. Carl Vaernet began a series of experiments that he claimed would "cure" inmates who had been imprisoned for homosexuality. In particular, these were prisoners who had already served prison sentences for violating Paragraph 175 and were sent to a concentration camp instead of being released. These experiments involved transplanting an artificial male sex gland. The experiments proved a failure. Vaernet quickly lost favor with Nazi officials.

Forced Labor and Subcamps

During World War II, the Buchenwald main camp administered at least 88 subcamps. These subcamps were located across Germany, from Düsseldorf in the western part of Germany to Germany's eastern border with the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

While some subcamps were state-owned, others were private enterprises. For example, in February 1942, the Gustloff firm established a subcamp of Buchenwald to support its armaments works. In March 1943, the company opened a large munitions plant adjacent to the camp. A rail siding completed in 1943 connected the camp with the freight yards in Weimar, facilitating the shipment of war supplies.

In these subcamps, the Nazi regime used prisoners in the Buchenwald camp system as forced laborers. SS authorities and firm executives (both state-owned and private) deployed Buchenwald prisoners to

the German Equipment Works (Deutsche-Ausrüstungswerke; DAW), an enterprise owned and operated by the SS

camp workshops

armaments factories

stone quarries

construction projects

Periodically, the SS physicians conducted selections throughout the Buchenwald camp system and dispatched those too weak or disabled to work to so-called euthanasia facilities such as Sonnenstein. At these facilities, euthanasia operatives gassed them as part of Operation 14f13, the extension of euthanasia killing operations to ill and exhausted concentration camp prisoners. SS physicians or orderlies used phenol injections to kill other prisoners unable to work.

Evacuation and Liberation of Buchenwald

As Soviet forces entered German-occupied Poland, the Germans evacuated thousands of prisoners from Nazi German concentration camps. After long, brutal marches, more than 10,000 weak and exhausted prisoners from Auschwitz and Gross-Rosen, most of them Jews, arrived in Buchenwald in January 1945. By February, the number of prisoners in Buchenwald reached 112,000.

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. There are no records of the deaths resulting from starvation, exposure, exhaustion, or murder by guards.

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.

On April 11, 1945, in expectation of liberation, prisoners took control of the camp. Later that afternoon, US forces entered Buchenwald. Soldiers from the 6th Armored Division, part of the Third Army, found more than 21,000 people in the camp.

Between July 1937 and April 1945, the SS imprisoned some 250,000 persons from all countries of Europe in Buchenwald. Exact mortality figures for the Buchenwald site can only be estimated, as camp authorities never registered a significant number of the prisoners. The SS murdered at least 56,000 male prisoners in the Buchenwald camp system. Some 11,000 of them were Jews.

Barack Obama's 2009 Visit to the Site

Then President Barack Obama visited Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany on June 5, 2009. In a speech at the site, he repudiated Holocaust denial. June 6, 2009, marked the 65th anniversary of D-Day. Obama's great-uncle Charlie Payne, with the US Army in 1945, was one of the liberators of Ohrdruf, a satellite forced-labor camp close to Buchenwald.

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The Nazi regime established the Buchenwald camp in 1937. Learn about the camp's prisoners, conditions there, forced labor, subcamps, medical experiments, and liberation.