Buchenwald Concentration Camp Essay

On top of a mountain five miles north of Weimar, in east-central Germany lies the death of thousands of innocent people. This was the Buchenwald concentration camp. It was constructed in 1937 with one hundred and thirty satellite camps and extension units. The camp was surrounded by electrified barbed-wire fence, chain of sentries outfitted with automatic machine guns, and watch towers. Buchenwald was divided into three parts. The “large camp” contained prisoners with a higher ranking in society, the “small camp” is where prisoners were kept in isolation and the “tent camp” is for Polish prisoners after the German invasion in Poland in 1939. The Bunker is also located in the main camp where shootings and hangings of prisoners were taken place. Unlike most concentration camps, Buchenwald had no gas chambers. By the end of 1937, 2,561 prisoners entered the camp most of them being political. Women were not opened to the Buchenwald camp until 1944.

Prisoners wore suits with blue and white vertical stripes and were forced to shave their heads. They wore clogs that made them difficult to walk in the stony ground. The dormitory consisted of three tiers of long rows of bunks set two by two and each bunk was used by two men. The camp was built for forced labor as workers worked in 12 hour shifts. Forced labor included military equipment and weapon factories, stone quarries, and construction projects. Medical experimentation was present and performed by scientists and physicians. Victims were injected with vaccines that supposedly treat diseases such as typhus, typhoid, cholera, and diphtheria; this caused thousands of deaths. Most experiments were performed with homosexuals through castration and hormonal transplants to change them heterosexual. If inmates were weak or disabled, they would be killed with hazardous gas or phenol