Qualla: Buchenwald concentration camp

Buchenwald concentration camp: Introduction

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chiode, CC BY-SA 4.0. The clock over the gatehouse reads a quarter past three. It has read a quarter past three since 11 April 1945, when American troops of the 6th Armored Division reached the top of the Ettersberg and found what was behind the wire. Weimar lies below the ridge, less than ten kilometres off — Goethe's town, Schiller's town, the town where the German republic was drafted in 1919. The drive takes about twenty minutes. The camp opened on 15 July 1937 and ran for seven years and nine months, and roughly 280,000 people passed through it and its 139 subcamps.

Image: Chiode | CC BY-SA 4.0

Buchenwald concentration camp: The Camp the Prisoners Built

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. The first arrivals built the place themselves. They cleared the beech wood on the ridge that gave the camp its name, felling the trees and levelling the ground under guard, in the summer of 1937. One oak was left standing inside the compound, and prisoners called it the Goethe Oa...

Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Buchenwald concentration camp: What the Work Was

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Diether, CC BY-SA 3.0. Prisoners were worked in a quarry cut into the hillside, in clay pits and brickworks, and in armaments factories built alongside the camp. Labour was not incidental to the system here; it was the system. At the northern end of the compound lay the Little Camp, a quarantine secti...

Image: Diether | CC BY-SA 3.0

Buchenwald concentration camp: Jedem das Seine

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Colin Smith on geo.hlipp.de, CC BY-SA 2.0. The lettering set into the camp gate reads Jedem das Seine — to each what he is due. It was designed by Franz Ehrlich, a Bauhaus-trained architect who was himself a prisoner, and it was mounted so that it read from the inside. Every man who walked through that gate had the motto ...

Image: Colin Smith on geo.hlipp.de | CC BY-SA 2.0

Buchenwald concentration camp: April 1945

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Diether, CC BY-SA 3.0. American forces reached the camp at 3:15 in the afternoon on 11 April 1945. The 89th Infantry Division had already overrun Ohrdruf, one of Buchenwald's satellite camps, a week earlier on 4 April. What followed was deliberate. General Patton ordered the mayor of Weimar to produce...

Image: Diether | CC BY-SA 3.0

Buchenwald concentration camp: The Ground Afterwards

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown authorUnknown author or not provided, Public domain. The site did not close in 1945. Between August 1945 and 1 March 1950 the Soviet secret police ran NKVD special camp Nr. 2 here, holding former Nazis and anti-communist dissidents; Soviet records list 28,455 people detained and more than seven thousand deaths. When the camp shut, ...

Image: Unknown authorUnknown author or not provided | Public domain