WARNING.....SOME PICTURES DIFFICULT TO LOOK AT......
The road through Weimar, just a few Kilometers away from the concentration camp called Buchenwald is beautiful but once you approach the camp, you get real feeling in your gut and in your heart that something horrible happened in this place. The feeling here is very strong. It has perhaps changed me forever. In July 1937, the SS had a forest cleared on the Ettersberg near Weimar and built a new concentration camp. The camp is intended to fight political opponents, persecute Jews, and exclude "common foreigners", among them homosexuals, homeless, Jehovah's Witnesses and pre-eminence,permanently from the German "Volkskoper". Buchenwald will soon become synonymous with the system of national socialist concentration camps.
At the end of the was, Buchenwald is the largest concentration camp in the German Reich. More than 56,000 people die from torture, medical experiments and exhaustion. More than 8,000 Soviet prisoners of war are shot in a specially built killing facility. Resistance fighters form and underground organization in the camp in order to curb the furiousness of the SS to its best advantage. Nevertheless the "small camp" becomes the hell of Buchenwald. Just before liberation, thousand of oppressed prisoners die.
When American's reached Buchenwald and its outlying camps in April 1945, Dwight D. Eisenhower, ...writes: "Nothing has ever shattered me like this sight."
(Internet Historical Overview, Buchenwald de)
This picture below is the walk to the "little camp" where mostly children as young as four years old were imprisoned here. Dwight D. Eisenhower said of this camp as he saw the dead corpses lying on the ground..."I have never been able to portray the feelings that came to me as when I first witnessed such indisputable testimony of the inhumanity of the Nazi, and that they were unscrupulous about the most primitive commandments to humanity. "So far I had only known that there were camps of this kind, I knew nothing else about hearing, nothing ever shattered me as much as this sight."
This below is a photo I took of the remains of their eating bowls and shoes...the picture tells it all.
Shoes
Anita and Steve Canfield looking in disbelief
As we walked thru the camp, many of the buildings that had been destroyed but we could see where the buildings once stood...............
This building was used to house the sick
Barbed wire still remains to the entrance of the "little camp"
Description below.........
This picture below is one of the saddest I posted.....read the caption below the picture ... it explains this picture.....The villagers of Weimar were brought into the camp by the US army....they claimed they knew nothing........ The town of Weimar is literally walking distance from the camp!
The small town of Weimar is just a short distance from this camp.....read the inscription below the picture. I have such a difficult time thinking that people could watch such atrocities with no feeling of quilt or of helping in some way, even at the risk of their own lives.....why did people DO NOTHING!??????
This picture below I got from the Archives of the Buchenwald camps 10,000 photos. This picture is a picture of men who were liberated from the "small camp" on April 16, 1945 by the American Troops.
I walked thru this courtyard and into the crematorium where I could only stand for about one minute total.....It saddened me so much to know that such atrocities could actually happen.
The Crematorium
See below for the description for this photo below
As we depart the camp, we drove in silence down a beautifully fall lined road wondering how in the world did this happen? Unbelievable. We should never forget and EVERYONE should go to these camps to see what happened.
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