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66 Buchenwald, January–June 1945 8 Buchenwald’s original name had been the Ettersberg Concentration Camp, after the nearby mountain of that name, located about five miles north of Weimar in Thüringen, in east-central Germany. A group of 149 men, most of them convicted criminals but some of them political prisoners , had arrived there on July 16, 1937, to lay the foundations for what would eventually become one of the largest concentration camps on German soil. At its height, Buchenwald was the center of a network that included 130 subcamps and external units. A total of 238,980 prisoners from thirty countries passed through it during its period of operation, and 43,045 of them, including Soviet POWs, were murdered there or died of other causes.1 The camp had three branches. The so-called Large Camp held long-serving prisoners; the Small Camp was a detention center where prisoners were held until their fate was decided; while the Tent Camp was designated for Polish prisoners incarcerated there after the German invasion of their country. These three branches were supplemented by administrative buildings, an ss barracks, and factories built on site. During its final period, a special block was built to hold child prisoners. Hermann Pister served as the camp’s commander from 1942 through its liberation in April 1945.2 Since 1942, tens of thousands of slave laborers from the camp had been employed in an arms factory located next to the camp. But hardly any of them were Jews—on October 17, 1942, an order mandated the transfer of all Jewish prisoners from concentration camps located in Germany to Auschwitz. Only 204 Jews, who had skills vital to the camp’s operation, remained. This changed only in 1944, when Buchenwald began to receive shipments of Hungarian Jews from Auschwitz. After a brief stay in the main camp, most of these were sent on to the sub-camps to be used for arms production.3 Thousands of more Jews, including children and teenagers, began to arrive on January 18, 1945, after Auschwitz and other camps in the east were evacuated. A special block was built in the Tent Camp Friling - Jewish Kapo.indb 66 4/11/2014 2:48:58 PM Buchenwald, January–June 1945 ||| 67 to hold them—Block 8, which held more than six hundred prisoners. Most of them survived.4 Some of Eliezer’s former associates from the other Auschwitz camps also survived their death marches and made it to Buchenwald. They found an already operating prisoner underground there, one that had been formed in the camp’s early years. The group’s original goal had been to plant members in central positions of influence, provide mutual support, and to remove the camp’s criminal elements from positions of power. Some of the criminal prisoners enjoyed the backing of the ss and some figures in the camp administration. Nevertheless, the underground was gradually able to insinuate its own members into positions of influence, even if their standing was always tenuous. After the war broke out the Germans arrested masses of political prisoners in the countries it occupied and sent them to Buchenwald. As a result new underground groups formed by prisoners of different national groups sprang up. In 1943 the different groups united under an International Underground Committee. As in Auschwitz, Jews were members.5 In addition to saving the lives of prisoners and, in a modest way, improving conditions, the Buchenwald resistance scored some impressive successes of other kinds, in particular by carrying out sabotage operations in the arms factories. These were pursued in nearly all the factories in which prisoners were employed. The underground was also able to disrupt the evacuation of the Jewish prisoners during the camp’s final days. The ss sought to remove the Jews from areas that were in danger of being taken over by the invading forces so that the annihilation of these prisoners could continue at a time and under conditions amenable to the Nazis. Furthermore, the ss wanted to do away with all witnesses to the atrocities its forces had committed. The Nazis also believed that they might be able to use the Jews as bargaining chips. The evacuation of Buchenwald began on April 6, 1945, and reached its climax the next day, when tens of thousands of prisoners were removed from the main camp and sub-camps. The underground did its best to disrupt the process by scrambling ss orders and creating bureaucratic, logistical...

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