We visited the Buchenwald concentration camp near the city of Weimar today which was the third largest camp in Germany after Dachau and Sachenhausen during the holocaust. During the Third Reich, 250,000 people were imprisoned here and 51,000 were murdered. We visited various exhibitions, memorial sites, as well as the camp grounds themselves.
Its a kind of unreal experience seeing where thousands of people were worked to death, and murdered that made me sick to my stomach. It is however good to see the Germans opening the doors to the world about the truth of what happened with education to see what humans are capable of so it will never happen again.
We stayed in Weimar the night, another former East German city.
This was the huge Buchenwald concentration camp 1937 - 1945. When the first Holocaust prisoners arrived here there was no camp. Over the years the prisoners slave labour built the entire camp, including the railway which transported other prisoners there. A one stage there were 130,000 prisoners at Buchenwald at one time. And this was only one of 1500 camps throughout Europe.
The sad thing is that after the camp was taken over by the Americans and the prisoners were liberated Germany was split into into parts (French, American, British and Soviet). The soviets then controlled this camp and put it back into use from 1945 - 1950. This is a mass grave of 7000 inmates who died during this time from hunger and sickness.
Massive guard towers and barbed electrified fenced meant no one ever escaped.
This is the main camp where all the prisoners housing was. 16 people shared a bunk made for 4. You can see the crematorian on the left where up to 400 bodies could be burned a day for those murdered or those who died from hunger and sickness. Whenever they had an official visit they told people it was the prisoner bakery.
The building on the left is the where they stored all the prisoners possessions and beside that the disinfecting rooms where new prisoner had to get cleaned. Now they house really informative in depth information about the camp and history to get a full account on what happened here in the Buchenwald forest.
Sunset over Weimar
They had a huge monument built to remember those that died here. Its so sad to think that this is just one of hundreds of camps throughout europe where a total of 6 million people perished on such a huge scale.
Part of the Buchenwald monument
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