Photo Credit: A pitiful Buchenwald inmate lifts a food bowl to his frail mouth, hardly seeming to comprehend that freedom has come at last. For many, the end of the nightmare had come too late. This article appears in: October Soon others were added to the list of prisoners—outspoken priests and pastors, men guilty of shirking work, even vagrants.
The first camp built specifically to hold these persons was constructed in March at a small Luftwaffe airbase at Nohra, a tiny farming village near Weimar, in the rabidly pro-Nazi state of Thuringia. Consisting of just a few buildings that could hold only prisoners, the camp was soon overflowing; a better and larger solution needed to be found.
Here, adjacent to the sprawling SS compound, dozens of barracks sprang up, surrounded by an electrified barbed wire fence and a high wall to keep out the prying eyes of the neighbors.
Here, too, were special facilities for the mistreatment of inmates, and a crematorium for the mass disposal of corpses that, given the harsh treatment and torture, the medical experiments on live subjects, the rampant diseases, and the starvation rations, were becoming more numerous by the day. By the time the war ended, there would be hundreds of main and subcamps, mostly slave-labor camps Buchenwald, for example, had subcamps.
It was also the concentration camp system that drew little protest from German citizens that emboldened the Nazi regime to go to the extreme and create the death camps—places of mass extermination, primarily but not exclusively of Jews. In July , the first buildings of Buchenwald began to be erected atop the Etterberg hill, which dominates the otherwise flat landscape around Weimar.
