Buchenwald: Hell on a Hilltop (The Buchenwald Trilogy) by Whitlock Flint

Author:Whitlock, Flint [Whitlock, Flint]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cable Publishing
Published: 2015-10-02T16:00:00+00:00

THE YEAR 1944 ended with the prisoner population of Buchenwald and its sub-camps growing to 87,000, with 50,000 of them atop the Ettersberg, crowning it the bloated king of the concentration camps. Its Totenbuch also named 8,644 prisoners who had died during the year, making Buchenwald one of the deadliest of the non-death camps.10Throughout the Nazi empire, it is estimated that, by January 1945, at least 714,000 persons were still incarcerated in concentration and death camps.11

As he faced the dilemma of what to do with this huge number, Heinrich Himmler’s stomach was in knots. At the beginning of 1945, with the Allies crushing Germany from all sides, the Reichsführer-SS realized that the prospects of him––and the Third Reich––surviving the onslaught were diminishing by the day. Could the evidence of the enormous crimes that the Nazis had perpetrated against humanity be destroyed before the regime collapsed in defeat? And would not the thousands of camp guards and administrators be more useful on the front lines than in continuing to watch over a sick and starving prison population?

Finally, to keep the inmates from falling into the hands of the advancing Allies, Himmler gave the order to abandon the camps; prisoners were to be removed and sent on evacuation marches. Already in mid-January 1945, Soviet forces were bearing down on Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Germans’ principal extermination factory near Krakow, Poland.The camp was emptied and its 60,000 survivors forced to march through snow and bitter cold toward Wodzisław, thirty-five miles to the south. Anyone who fell behind was shot by the SS guards and left on the side of the road; over 15,000 never made it to Wodzisław.12Those who did make it were then packed into boxcars and transported to Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Flossenbürg, GroßRosen, Neuengamme, Ravensbrück, and other camps inside Germany.With little or no food or water, and with the brutal winter weather taking its toll, thousands of evacuees died or were killed along their march to oblivion.13

An ice-coated transport carrying 2,000 inmates from Compiegne, France, pulled into the Buchenwald rail yard on January 19, 1945. Another train, this one from Auschwitz, which had pulled out in the face of the Soviet advance, had nearly 3,000 freezing inmates on board in open cattle cars, despite the fact that the temperature was well below zero. Although prisoners in each of the cars on the train from Auschwitz were dying from exposure, the train sat on the tracks at Buchenwald for five hours before the doors were unlocked and the prisoners admitted to the camp; many of the boxcars were full of frozen corpses.14

Louis Gros was working in the rail yard on the day that train from Auschwitz arrived. “The wood-fired locomotive wheezed its way up the hill,” he said, “but on this winter day it seemed more arduous than usual, more abrupt, like it was tired.The other days it was just a roulade made of bass and sharp tones, of plaints and signs more or less perceived, according to the wind’s humors and the vale’s turns and detours.

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