Buchenwald Liberated Sixty Years Ago

Sixty years ago on April 11, American troops liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp.


From AP:

...Buchenwald had no gas chambers. Here prisoners were mainly worked to death. Among the methods was forcing prisoners to carry enormous loads up a slope while singing. The SS guards called them "Singing Horses." It was also the camp where Ilse Koch, the commandant's wife, had lampshades made from dead prisoners' skin.

More than any other Nazi camp, Buchenwald stands for the contrast between the humane, cultured Germany and the nation that voted in 1933 for Adolf Hitler, started World War II and organized the killing of 6 million Jews.

Weimar would rather be known for Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Germany's most revered writer, who lived there until his death in 1832. It's also the place where the democratic Weimar Republic was set up after Germany's defeat in World War I, only to collapse when Hitler came to power.

Nazi prisoners began building the camp on the Ettersberg hill in the summer of 1937, clearing part of a forest where Goethe once sought inspiration.

The first inmates included criminals, homeless people, Jehovah's Witnesses and homosexuals. By late 1938, Buchenwald held more than 10,000 Jews, mainly from Germany and Austria.

After Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, more and more inmates from German-occupied areas were brought to Buchenwald. Soviet prisoners began arriving in 1941; the SS built a special chair in which to shoot them in the back of the head.

Though not built expressly for killing, like Auschwitz, Buchenwald was just as much part of Hitler's effort to wipe out those deemed un-German. Starvation, disease, overwork and medical experiments claimed many lives among the 240,000 prisoners brought to Buchenwald...

At a ceremony to mark the anniversary on Sunday, some survivors wore replicas of their striped inmate's uniforms and their old prisoner numbers.

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and American veterans who took part in the liberation came to the camp memorial outside Weimar for the commemoration.

Schroeder spoke of the need to remain vigilant against racism and anti-Semitism.

Dieter Althaus, the governor of Thuringia, the state where Weimar is located, said, "We remember what happened, and we remind others of it, because we must not forget. Because if we forget, we risk that it will repeat itself."

"IF" we forget?

Tragically, it has happened again, repeatedly.

Although Germans weren't the killers, hundreds of thousands have been victims of genocide since Buchenwald was liberated, many under the watch of the United Nations.

Cambodia, Rwanda, Kosovo, Macedonia, Sudan.

"Because if we forget, we risk that it will repeat itself."