History of the Jews at Buchenwald
When the first Jews arrived at Buchenwald early in 1938 the camp
was still largely run by criminals
imprisoned there who completely went along with the SS and
their methods. The Jews involved, all 1,000 of them, were taken there as a result of a
so-called campaign
- that is, the authorities had simply arrested
people en masse in several towns so as to spread terror among the rest and force
them to emigrate and give up their property. The people who were pulled in came from the widest variety of groups in
terms of age and social origin and were consequently unable to unite in response to their
persecution. They had to camp
out in an unfurnished cowshed, where they made do with 300 grams of bread
and a 3/4 litre of watery soup a day. The prisoners overseeing them regularly cheated them even of this. Their working
time was around 14 to 15 hours a day, and the living
conditions and all kinds of ……. meant that they could only think of sleeping for
around 5 hours a night. As result of constant harassment and attacks, especially in the quarry, three of four a day were systematically bullied
into trying to run through the cordon of guards,
where they were shot for attempting to escape
. Aside from a small number who were released, all of them were murdered apart from a remnant of twenty who are still in Buchenwald today.
On each of the 23rd and the 24th of
September 1938 around a thousand more Jews arrived at Buchenwald, which now counted as a liquidation
camp. The vast majority of men on
both these transports had been arrested as part of a campaign
following the occupation of Vienna for the same reasons as mentioned above. Along with them though were
some, partly long-term, prisoners who had been interned because of their anti-fascist views. Over the following weeks and months, the struggle of these
imprisoned
German
anti-fascists reached its first high point, with the result that the overseers’
roles were purged of criminal elements. As a result, the Jewish prisoners found themselves in a position which was clearly more advantageous in
that it led the Kommandant to declare on 30 January
that prisoners who oversaw the Jews would in future be Jews themselves. Later on these
too came to include various negative and dangerous elements, but they were considerably
easier to get rid of than if they had been so-called Aryans
. In terms of the way they were looked after and generally dealt with,
and of their working hours, the Jewish prisoners remained pariahs in the camp,
and the great number of deaths among them over the following years must be traced to
that.
On 9th November 1938 over 12,000 Jews entered the camp as a result of the so-called Rath campaign. As they came in, the SS, armed with clubs and whips, were lined up in the streets of Weimar so that only a few Jews reached the camp uninjured. The streets, strewn with bloodied bits of luggage and clothing with injured
These thousands of people were put up in five emergency barracks where they lay up to four deep without any organisation, without latrines, without sanitary facilities and without straw mattresses or blankets. As a result of this and their mistreatment by the SS, who chased them round with whips and pistols, there was such utter chaos during the first night that you could easily think you were looking at a mutiny. Many were picked out at random for special reprisals and chained hand to hand in circles so that dogs could be set on them, and seventy went mad that night. They were thrown into a wooden shed for a while and then moved in groups to the cells where they were beaten personally by Oberscharführer Sommer.
Because the twelve thousand newcomers included a relatively large number of well-off business
people, the SS used this opportunity not only to satisfy their lust for killing
but also as a means to personal enrichment. This went on right down to the lowliest SS man
and in an almost unimaginable way. It was announced over loudspeakers that people
who handed their cars or houses over to the camp
leadership would be released first. Coins and notes were in constant circulation around the SS and
their criminal accomplices. They must have extorted thousands of Marks
every day on pretexts such as disturbance, damage, or release expenses. When the campaign
ended with a mass release a few weeks later - after it had cost hundreds of dead -
millions worth had gone through the camp.
Their corruption and their close financial connections with criminal
prisoners undermined the position of the SS.
That contributed substantially to Kommandant
Koch's decision to bite the sour apple and fill the camp
overseer roles with political
prisoners in order to regain command in the camp.
At the start of the war in September 1939 the Kommandant forbade further medical
treatment for Jews, an order which was silently ignored in the sick
bay. The next mass campaign saw around 2,500 Jews delivered to the camp,
mostly stateless
men
from Vienna and the
occupied territories in the East. They were accommodated behind barbed wire in five large tents
on the parade ground. The way in which they were treated and fed,
and the fact that this little camp
was taken over by the notorious SS-Scharführers
Blank and Hinkelmann showed, as the SS
often said, that they were going to be liquidated to the last man.
The group included the complete populations of various old people’s homes
and boarding schools, and Camp
Leader
Hüttig, shaking his head, said in my
presence it’s unbelievable that they let this lot run around free up to now
. To start
with, they liquidated them by the usual work
methods and by shooting them while trying to escape.
Then they moved onto keeping them confined within their barbed wire enclosure, giving them
half of the food ration, denying them underwear, and leaving them standing so long on the parade ground in the winter
weather that sixty of them were dying
every day. On top of that, Scharführers
Blank, Hinkelmann and Sommer got
involved with particular enjoyment. Among other things, several containers of poisoned food
were given out.
From the start we fought a campaign to put a stop to all this. Given the nature of the power relationships in the camp we could only act against the SS at one remove. But we had to act directly against their creatures among the prisoners. We managed to get rid of the foreman of the work gang that took food into the little camp, putting our comrade Kurt Posener in his place, and he was able at the risk of his own life to smuggle in extra food for at least some of the comrades there.
The two worst creatures, Wolf and Rosenbaum, stayed in their positions, but we managed
to put in our Polish comrade Vulkan as
clerk, who through dedicated effort saved the lives of several further people. Early in 1940, the German
antifascist
Walter Krämer (murdered in November 1940) who was in charge of the
prisoners’ sick bay, succeeded in working
on the doctor so as to evacuate the entire hellhole on the grounds that it was spreading
infection into the main camp
and into the ranks of the SS and
the surrounding villages. A little before that, comrades in the sick
bay had managed to set up an illegal ambulance
service
there. This rescue
action succeeded in getting five hundred barely living skeletons into the main camp.
Meanwhile, the following things had happened since the start of the war.
On the 9th of November 1939, the day after the provocation of
the so-called beer hall assassination attempt, all the Jews were locked in their barracks, in darkness. A group of SS
men, among them Scharführers
Blank and Jännisch, picked out 21 young, strong men and
took them to the quarry, where they were shot
trying to escape
. The rest spent three whole days shut up with nothing to
eat and wondering what was going to happen to them. Since the whole camp
then had to go five days without food, allegedly because a pig had been stolen, these
measures had especially grave results.
The emptying of the little camp
, described above, had not put an end to the plans for murdering its inmates. They were assigned to workgroups breaking or carrying rocks in the quarry (whose leaders were again
Blank and Hinkelmann) where the bloody task was supposed
to be carried out alongside the usual torments and shootings. And indeed this did largely happen. The successful
elimination of various creatures of the SS in
the course of the constant struggle led to the then block leader of 22, the Jewish
Berlin
antifascist
Rudi Arndt, being denounced, replaced, and murdered in the quarry on 3 May 1940. Alongside the
Thuringian
comrade Ernst Frommhold, a camp
elder who was released, he had been mainly responsible for the organised struggle against the SS.
Fourteen days later Comrade Max Vulkan,
mentioned above, was killed in the same way. I myself had been an unobserved witness to
Wolf
threatening him If you ever say anything about what went on in the little camp,
I will make sure you don’t leave here alive!
My attempt to compromise the camp
leader of this gang and break his neck through an anonymous letter
to the camp
Kommandant did not succeed, on the contrary, they tried to check the handwriting
of every prisoner to find out who wrote it. Fortunately, that turned out to be too
In the same year there was the first example of open resistance to SS
murder. Oberscharführer
Abraham
drowned the Jewish prisoner
Hamber in a puddle. His brother, formally
questioned about the cause of death
as an eyewitness, told the truth. The entire work
group were then called to give evidence but understandably none of the others dared to say
that they had seen anything. The foreman had to make a list of the names of his 28 workers. When he handed it over, Oberscharführer
Petrik asked him Have you put your own name on
the list? No! Then write your own name down as well!
. Finally, they were all sent back
to their blocks. The murdered
man’s brother told me I know that I must die
because of what I have said, but perhaps these criminals might hold back a little in future if they are afraid of being reported, and then I will not have died
in vain
. Around 9 o’clock he was called to testify again and then to our astonishment
came back to us half an hour later. Kommandant
Koch,
the Adjutant, the camp
leader, the Rapportführer etc. had questioned
him. The Kommandant had said We want the complete truth from you. I give you my word of
honour that nothing will happen to you
. He repeated what he had said before. Around
11.30 he was called out of the block again, went to the cells
and was dead four days later. It seems likely that at least until 1942 no Jew left the cell
block alive, irrespective of why he might have gone there. The 29 Jews who had been listed
as being in this work group were all taken to the cell
block one after another and each one died on
the fourth day. They tried in the stupidest way to cover up this multiple murder
which the entire camp knew about. One after another the next man on the list was
transferred to another work detail a day or two beforehand, so as to disguise his
membership of the group. One of them, who was in the sick
bay with a broken leg, was carried to the cell
block on a stretcher on Sommer’s orders
and suffered the same fate as his colleagues. Another, a short shoemaker called Löwitus, aged about 40, was released before they got to him, because he could emigrate to the SU as a citizen of one of the Baltic States.
The following examples will show the kind of thing that happened in the cell block. Jochen Pickard, an antifascist from the Rhineland, who was with me in Dachau and had after a while confessed to political offences in order to be sent to a penitentiary, was moved to Buchenwald after he had finished his sentence. The SS had not forgotten that he had for years denied all the allegations that had been thrown at him while he was in the concentration camp. A few days after his arrival in Buchenwald he went into the cell block, and did not leave it alive.
Ernst Heilmann, the Social Democratic Party President of the Prussian Parliament, was put in the cell block in 1940 for no reason whatever and died shortly afterwards. Kurt Eisner, the son of the Minister-President of Bavaria of the same name, who had already survived several extraordinarily coldblooded attempts to murder him, was questioned as a witness about some minor unpolitical nonsense involving another prisoner. He told the Lagerführer: I have been a prisoner for ten years. You will not expect me to denounce a comrade. He died in the cell block.
In the winter of 1941 the notorious typhus experiments began. Ten Jews were chosen as the first victims. There were fifty Jews in the next group. After that, the Nazis’ racial superstitions stopped them from using any more Jews, because their blood serum was not supposed to be injected into Aryans.
Early in 1942 around 400 Jews whom Dr Hoven, the camp
doctor, had declared unfit for work
were sent on so-called invalid
transports
to a secret destination - this turned out to be an experimental poison gas
station. Over a year later the prisoner records office was instructed to register these transports as dead. Hoven told
our comrade Weingärtner (from Mannheim) who was in
charge of the camp hospital at that time If anything gets out about this,
Weingärtner, we’ll both be hanged for
it
. He did not know that this apparent accomplice had in fact falsified the lists and
rescued a large number of comrades. In fact, our main task, in as far as we could
not prevent these things from happening altogether, was to strengthen our cadres by
protecting at least those comrades who were the most principled, cleanest, and most disposed
to resistance. An objective that was justified by success on 11 April 1945. The transport mentioned above took place over four days, on which three lorries drove
up at morning parade and thirty men
whose names had been read out were loaded into each one. On the last day a lorry drove to
the hospital, where the sick
prisoners who were scheduled to go were thrown on wearing shirts
but no trousers and driven off.
On 17 October 1942 the Jewish prisoners from all camps, penitentiaries and jails were taken away to the liquidation camp at Auschwitz. I stayed behind with 200 comrades who were retained as skilled armaments workers.
Our position in the camp was now for the time being substantially improved. First, systematic struggle by the illegally organised antifascists had caused the practically complete elimination of antisemitism, and the majority of the camp had been made immune to this plague. Second, the SS believed that they needed us
In summer 1943 we had another crisis. Scharführers Schmidt and Greuel, Arbeitsführer Simons and Rapportführer Hofschulte along with Lagerführer Gust, camp doctor Hoven and Wilhelm, the SDG began a new liquidation campaign. The first two randomly reported a number of Jewish comrades for alleged idleness at work. Simons and Hofschulte respectively authorised the floggings and carried them out. Gust transferred the victims to the cellblock and took them to the hospital the next day, where a poisoned injection by the management there saw to the rest. The self-sacrificing work of our comrades in the hospital succeeded in rescuing some of the victims and eventually stopping the campaign. Bribery of the appropriate SS criminals played a role here, as so often. But 15 comrades, among them the Czech antifascist Max Gallander, died.
The pressure of this crisis for the first time raised the issue of forcible resistance. Along with the responsible comrades in the camp we were clear that any attempt at a general revolt would have no prospect of success and thus could only have acted as a provocation. On the other hand, if our efforts to stop this series of murders in the ways usual in the camp failed then we, as the responsible people in the Jewish group, were determined to die in a hopeless struggle rather than let ourselves be slaughtered one after the other like sheep.
The effects of our previous work then began to show themselves. The great majority of the Buchenwald Jews had trodden this path with us in contrast to all the millions who had allowed themselves to be murdered without resistance. The Warsaw Ghetto unfortunately still offers us the only exception to that. Constant withdrawal of rations for the Jewish block, allegedly as a punishment, was taking place at this time. The food which was left over as a result of this was allocated to a number of other workgroups. Solidarity among prisoners in the camp showed itself in that these people decided to hand this food back to us even though they would have had to reckon with being punished if that became known. The Kammer, the Lagerschutz, and the fire brigade must be mentioned here above all, while other workgroups whose members had not been so carefully vetted for antifascist views could, through fear of betrayal, only support us through individual actions by sympathetic comrades. The clerks’ office, work statistics, block elders, and controllers must be added to the first-named workgroups. It is of course obvious from what is said above that all these actions had to be kept secret so that most Buchenwald inmates were unaware of them.
1944 brought a change to the position through the mass transfer of Jews from the East. First, following the complete subjection of Hungary, transports of Hungarian Jews consisting of 1,000 to 1,500 men at a time arrived from Auschwitz where they had been selected as capable of work.
Along with these,
There was in practical terms as little accommodation available for them as for the thousands upon thousands of non-Jews who were dragged here in the same way. The camp leader took the view that so long as they could still close the door the camp was not over-full. The non-stop, self-sacrificing work of the prisoners’ leadership, above all Comrade Hans Eidan, succeeded by means of more or less open theft of SS property in providing emergency quarters, first in tents and later in emergency barracks.
These mass transports were all put to work outside the camp, where they were more or less condemned to waste slowly away in appalling conditions. In particular, they were unable to develop any sense of unity and so had no leadership that could have stopped the worst happening. It is first of all the comrades in the work statistics office who must be thanked that we were able to extract not only the most actively helpful elements but also hundreds of children and youths who would otherwise certainly have died. And it is above all to the comrades from the Hungarian and Polish sectors, who voluntarily took on fatigue duty in the so-called tent camp, that we thank for the possibility in the short time we had at our disposal - sometimes a transport of 1,000 to 1,500 was only in the camp for three to four days - of sorting out the transports so that we could free them from dangerous Nazi informants and even sometimes set them up with their own leadership.
A pleasant exception, which filled us with pride, was the evacuation transport from Auschwitz-Monowitz. Here was a thorough, well-led, anti-fascist prisoner leadership. They were comrades from Buchenwald, who had been taken there two and a half years earlier. But one of our best people, the Austrian anti-fascist Erich Eisler - along with Rudi Arndt one of the strongest leaders of our work - had been murdered in the cells at Auschwitz.
By the autumn of 1944 the outside work groups which had been made up from men in these transports had turned so many work-fit men into cripples that the so-called sick transports began to come back here to take them off to liquidation camps. The Magdeburg and Zeist work groups alone sent back 1,500 candidates for death. The efforts of our comrades in the sick bay succeeded in removing around 500 of them from the list. As a result of rather evident sabotage by the work statistics and clerks’ offices yet others were kept here whom the SS had listed to be taken away. But more than 900 had to leave for Auschwitz and death, just before the Red Army put an end to the SS’s activities there.
Later on the work leader demanded a list of children in order to send them to the notorious camp at Bergen-Belsen. Once again the work statistics office managed to reduce the number of victims to 21 out of several hundred. The prisoner sick bay helped here as well, just as it made a major contribution to everything that was achieved in Buchenwald.
The continuously increasing overcrowding of the camp
meant that control by the SS
lacked the same intensity as before. The separation between Jews and non-Jews increasingly
broke down as 1944 went by. As a result, Jewish comrades
accordingly began to operate more or less closely alongside their corresponding national groups. The constant defeats for the Nazis and the approach of the Allied
liberation
forces meant that we did not have long to wait for the SS to
mount a special action against the Jews. Then on the evening of 4
April came the sudden order
All Jews to fall in on the parade ground immediately!
. None of us doubted what that
meant. A rapid, spur of the moment discussion came to the conclusion that open mutiny
of the whole camp would, in view of the military position, be pointless suicide. However, obeying the order -
even though we would have had no choice but to obey it a few weeks before - would, equally,
be cowardice. So we went in for open sabotage: no-one went to the parade ground. On the urging of the active elements
hundreds, if not thousands, fled to their non-Jewish comrades in different barracks, the documentation in the blocks was burned, and the clerks’ office
declared it was impossible to put together a list of the Jews in the camp in
a short time. The Lagerschutz claimed that they could not
find the Jews and in any case were not able to force eight thousand people
together with a team of only one hundred! The SS
hesitated and put the parade off until the next morning. It all ended according to plan with
the collapse of the Nazis’ intentions as a result of open mutiny
among the active elements of the Jews and the passive resistance of the non-Jewish comrades. Around half, about 3,000, had fled
again and hidden themselves among the others. These men
were of course the most active and determined to resist.
True to the order that had been given out not to give up without a fight our
comrade Kurt Baum from Herne, an antifascist who had been locked up since 1935, attacked
the Scharführer who had run him down in his hiding
place with a spade and fell as the first victim.
But the block leaders were baffled and the search was not continued. 3,000 Jewish prisoners were in the camp
illegally. With that, the SS
totally lost control of the situation.
The good effects of this development showed themselves over the next few days. It had become significantly easier to hide the 46 comrades who were supposed to have been liquidated, to whom I myself had been added to due to the sabotage of the Jewish transport. What happened in the next week does not belong here, as it concerns the camp as a whole. This chapter ends on the afternoon of 11 April 1945.
The present report can obviously only set out the framework of the development of the history of the Jews in Buchenwald and is only intended to do so. It only goes into details where these are especially typical. On the other hand, the significance of some specific events can only be understood in the light of the overall history of Buchenwald. This cannot be dealt with here, although some of the content of the various reports will constantly recur. In all the events mentioned
The way in which our work and our struggle developed taught us that it would have been impossible to operate using the rules of Jewish life which we know and obey in freedom. Our struggle for survival against the SS could not be carried out in an orthodox, liberal, Zionist or socialist way. There was clearly only one option - unity among everyone who was willing to resist, on the common basis of antifascism. We rejected all those believers who preached that we should surrender to the Hitler barbarism as a deserved punishment from God for a lack of piety among the Jews just as we rejected the cynicism of the informers who would sell their brother for a slice of bread. We killed the Nazi bacillus within the barbed wire, even when the SS were still in the watchtowers. Every Jew who, thinking and fighting, survived Buchenwald will and must know his duty.
signed Emil Carlebach
Frankfurt am Main
formerly Blockelder 22
prisoner number 4186