Guest Post: Buchenwald Concentration Camp

~ written by Emily Lamb

Weimar, Germany -- Weimar is a small city made up of 60,000 people which is located in-between Erfurt and Jena, Germany. It takes roughly fifteen minutes by train to get from Erfurt to Weimar. Once you get to the Weimar train station there is a bus stop directly outside the front doors where you can catch bus number 9 and endure a short twenty-minute ride through the middle of nowhere until you wind up at the very last stop, the Buchenwald concentration camp.

It was difficult to comprehend that only eight kilometers away from Weimar’s peaceful city center was a concentration camp where an estimated 56,545 people were murdered. There are just over 60,000 people living in Weimar today, that is just barely over the number of 56,545 deaths accumulated at the concentration camp located within that same city.

A small zoo was constructed so that the families of the SS officers were able to happily play with the animals, meanwhile a few feet away stood the barbed wired fence holding the camp prisoners.

I have been learning about World War II since I was young. I have watched all the documentaries, I have read all the textbooks, and I have seen all the photos. I was always very aware of the terrible events which took place during that time, so I was quite surprised by how different it felt to actually be standing where the documentaries had been taped, where the textbooks had been written about, and where the photos had come from.

A flower left in the barbed wire fence in honor of the prisoners who were once held at Buchenwald.

“It’s a lot bigger than I imagined.” I heard my friend’s voices say, perfectly aligning with my thoughts when we first entered the camp. I always knew these prison camps housed more than just individuals of the Jewish religion but it didn’t really sink in until I saw a photo of all the different patches that the different “criminals” had to wear. If you wore a red triangle you were imprisoned for political reasons, green meant you were a criminal, black meaning you were asocial, purple you were Catholic clergy, pink you were homosexual, yellow was Jewish, and violet meant you were Jehovah Witness.

Rudolf Barzada is thought to be the last known pink badge concentration camp survivor.
He was held at Buchenwald camp and he survived thanks to the help of two SS guards,
one of which who was more than likely gay himself and infatuated with Rudolf.

On April 16th, 1945 one thousand citizens of Weimar city were ordered by the liberating American commander to tour the Buchenwald camp, where the evidence of the mass murders and tortures were still painfully evident.

The above is a drawing which was completed by a Buchenwald 

camp prisoner, the title is “We did not know that!”