By Ernest Walker
11th April 1945, taking advantage of the close proximity of US troops, what was known as the International Camp Committee gave the order to 850 inmates of Buchenwald concentration camp, organised in 178 groups, to stage an armed attack on the camp guards. The revolt commenced at 2.30pm and by 3.15pm the SS (Schutzstaffel) guards had been overcome, the liberation banner was flying over the camp gate, and 21,000 people were free.
The camp was set up by the Nazi regime in 1937, the first inmates being German anti-fascists. 3 It was sited on the Ettesberg hills just outside the town of Weimar. From 16th July, 1937 to 31st March, 1945, 239,000 people passed through its gates. Like all the camps the gates were adorned with what might be described as an ironic inscription. In the case of Buchenwald it was Jedem, Das Seine, ‘To each his own’. 56,545 inmates died there, among them over 8,000 Soviet prisoners of war, who, like many others, were brutally murdered. About 161,000 prisoners left the camp to work in arms factories or were transferred to other camps .
The SS who ran the camp hired out thousands of prisoners to the armaments industry. It is known that the SS made 60,624,230 marks out of the labour of Buchenwald prisoners in 1944, with Himmler fixing a rate of between .30 and 1.50 marks for the work of a prisoner. A statement by the former head of the SS economic central and administrative office, SS Obergruppenfǖhrer Pohl at the Nuremburg trial stated: “As a result of the acute shortage of labour nearly all arms industries approached my office to obtain labour from the concentration camps, and those already employing such labour constantly asked for larger numbers of prisoners.”
One of the main employers of camp labour was IG Farbenindustrie AG, the producer of Zyklon B, the gas used to murder millions of people. In 1932 its profit was 48 million marks, by 1943 this had increased to 822 million marks. The major supporters of the Nazis were the Flick, Krupp, Thyssen, IG Farbenindustrie, Siemens and AEG trusts. They not only financed Hitler and the Nazi party but were the main beneficiaries financially. Some of these companies are still around today, and of course, the Belfast skyline is dominated by the shipyard cranes, Samson and Goliath, built by Krupp and installed in 1974 and 1969 respectively. There was also a “Children’s Block” at the camp. The SS administration was forced to allow children imprisoned in Buchenwald to be accommodated in one block together, and protected by other prisoners they were secretly taught by German and Soviet inmates.
In this way 904 children survived Buchenwald. The youngest was four-year old Stefan Zweig, a Polish boy whose story is told in the book Naked among Wolves by Bruno Apitz, himself a former inmate. Some of the prisoners worked on the production of so-called ‘V’ weapons which terrorised London. However, knowing they were “bearers of secrets,” and were destined to die, they sabotaged numbers of these weapons which stopped them reaching their destination. 4 As we know, the man responsible for designing these weapons was the Nazi, Werner Von Braun, who was recruited by the United States after the war. The prisoners worked at the “”Dora” camp which was situated in natural caves which meant they worked 12 hours per day underground so did not see daylight for weeks.
Their sabotage activities probably saved the lives of many Londoners. Buchenwald is where the chairman of the Communist Party of Germany, Ernst Thalman was murdered on 18th August, 1944, after being held for 11 years. In his speech at the inauguration of the Buchenwald National Memorial, the Prime Minister of the German Democratic Republic, Otto Grotewohl said: “We must never again allow the world to be plunged into an abyss of blood and misery and the peoples to be pushed to the edge of a catastrophe.” We remember all those who perished at Buchenwald and pay tribute to those who took it on themselves to liberate the camp from Nazi terror.