Buchenwald Concentration Camp

Scope and content

The collection contains primarily:
Entry books and departure books, Block books, work-detail books, announcements of change, transport lists, names registry of Camp 2, files of the Gestapo/Stapo office Düsseldorf, flight attempt announcements, registries of effects, lists reg. packages/post, social insurance documents, transfer lists of prisoner funds, money transfer lists, cash disbursement lists, premiums lists, documents reg. outside units, documents reg. inside commandos/units, interrogation records, documents reg. Block transfers, documents reg. work detail, punishment reports and lists, documents reg. ill-prisoner barracks, release orders and Transport orders, prisoner lists, German Red Cross correspondence, death lists and death books, lists of property of deceased or emigrated or deported prisoners, cemetery lists, WASt (German Service Office), registries of survivors according to nationality, daily logs (arrivals and departures, patient registries of US American hospitals, prisoner number list.

History of Buchenwald Concentration Camp1937- 1945:
Buchenwald Concentration Camp belonged to the second generation of National Socialist concentration camps. It was opened in July 1937 and was located on the outskirts of the city of Weimar on the Ettersberg mountain. Upon its completion the prisoners camp comprised 3 parts: “Large camp”, “tent camp”, established in October 1939 originally for Polish prisoners, and the “small camp”, created in 1942 as a quarantine station and which became a death camp in the final phase. The prisoners camp area the SS administration, housing for members of the SS and the camp’s own economic enterprise were next to the prisoners camp area. The first inmates of Buchenwald Concentration Camp were political opponents of the NS-Regime, Jehova´s Witnesses, homosexuals as well as those who had been sentenced several times, so-called temporary preventive custody prisoners. Only a few Jewish prisoners were among the inmates. From April until June 1938 by order of the Reich leader SS Heinrich Himmler so-called “work-shy” and “asocial people”, primarily beggars, homeless and prostitutes, were imprisoned. What is more, under the guise of the police operation “Arbeitsscheu Reich” (work-shy Reich) numerous Jews as well as Sinti and Roma were arrested and deported to the camp. After the pogroms on 9 November 1938 a further 9,845 Jews were forcibly taken to Buchenwald. Up until the start of WW2 the prisoners had labored primarily in constructing the camp and in the camp’s own stone quarries; their tasks changed dramatically beginning 1942. From that point on, due to the focus of the SS being increasingly on economic exploitation of the concentration camps, the inmates were sent to 129 satellite camps where they were put to work on manufacturing airplanes, rockets, synthetic fuel and ammunition. From 1941 on the main camp was increasingly becoming a place of mass murder and death. Sick prisoners were either deported or killed in the camp area, several thousand Soviet prisoners of war were murdered by a single shot in the back of the neck. In October 1942 well-nigh all Jewish prisoners were deported to Auschwitz. Of the large numbers of East-European Jews sent to work as slaves in the outlying camps from the summer of 1942, many of them died from the working and living conditions or in the final days of the death marches. From approx. 240,000 prisoners of Buchenwald Concentration Camp and its satellite camps approx. 34,000 deceased were registered, the actual number of victims was at least 50,000.
Source: Distel, Barbara: Buchenwald (KZ), in: Lexikon des Holocaust, ed.by Wolfgang Benz, München 2002, p. 37-38 and http://www.dhm.de/lemo/html/wk2/holocaust/buchenwald/index.html [Latest access 2012-07-30].