Buchenwald: Horror in the Beech Forest

The barracks of misery are gone now, nothing more than outlines traced on a field of grass, a field where 56,000 men, women and children left their lives. On this fine spring day, the sky is deep blue and the meadow grass is verdant, punctuated by bright impertinent dandelions. Yet the beauty of Buchenwald, the beech woods of Thuringia, is painful to see atop the knowledge of its ugly past, and I cannot help but shudder at white dandelion fluff floating on the breeze by the former crematorium.

Now a memorial, the camp’s extensive exhibits offer details of the horror of Buchenwald, the suffering of many, the sadism of some. When it was first opened in 1937, Buchenwald was to imprison German enemies of the Nazi regime. By April 1945, when the camp was liberated, prisoners had represented more than 50 nations. The world passed through its gate, with its cynical motto of Jedem Das Seine, To Each His Due. None of the prisoners deserved what they got, and few of the perpetrators got what they deserved. The exhibit includes many photographs, some from albums kept by SS guards, of men in uniforms smiling, while men in striped pyjamas appear as shadows, ghostly.

One photograph made me wince particularly. It was taken at the funeral, held in the nearby town of Weimar, for 100 SS guards killed in an aerial bombing of the Gustloff-Werke factory and part of the camp, on August 24, 1944. The townspeople pictured, many of them no doubt newly widowed, have their arms raised in the Nazi salute. After the camp was liberated in April 1945, when General Patton made them walk to the camp to stand witness to the nightmare, the townspeople said they had had no idea what had been going on. This was a blatant lie. The excellent memorial takes pains to expose that lie, among others.

The town of Weimar also is a beautiful place – wide, tree-lined streets, elegant 19th-century buildings, a castle and churches – with a tragic history. There began the first German democratic republic (in lower-case letters), an elected assembly rising from the ashes of the First World War to meet in Weimar’s municipal theater building. Berlin was deemed too dangerous, too big a mess in the wake of the war. So at Weimar, the assembly gave women the vote, cut the work day to eight hours and opened the door to union organizing, among other progressive liberal measures. Following as it did a solid history of authoritarian monarchy, opposition reaction was harsh: assassinations, violent protests, attempted coup. The conservative judiciary was lenient; judges did not disagree with the opposition’s goals, if it could not condone its methods.

The right-wing opposition gathered its members under the umbrella of victimization. They told a lie, over and over, that became known as the “stab-in-the-back” myth: Germany had lost the First World War because of the Jews, because of the communists, because of its internal enemies. And the Treaty of Versailles, demanding high reparations and prohibiting the nation’s re-arming, was just that: a stab in the back. This was repeated and recycled until it was widely held to be true. Germany, they maintained, was the real victim of the war.

And then, in the heat of the divisiveness, came a financial crisis of unprecedented proportions. Hyper-inflation, unemployment, hunger and despair struck the nation, and were blamed, of course, on the government. One man insisted he had the cure, he had the answer, he knew where the problem lay. Adolf Hitler was elected chancellor in 1933, and the world would know no peace until he was dead.

This history of Weimar is explained in clear and compelling detail in the town’s Weimar House Museum, which we visited the afternoon before going to Buchenwald. The Holocaust, the murder of 6 million Jews in death camps, the torture and starvation of hundreds of thousands of political enemies in labor camps, has always seemed to me to be a singular event carried out by an insane regime. It could not happen again.

Yet in Weimar, the path to fascism has been laid out before us. Fractured, divisive politics, an exaggerated feeling of victimization, dire financial disaster, and then someone posing as a savior, demanding attention, shutting down disagreement, persecuting supposed enemies. Are we on such a path? The United States is close to celebrating its 250th birthday as a constitutional democracy, a milestone that seems ever more remarkable in the context of our allies’ histories. Keeping democracy going demands that we pay a bit of attention to the past, present and future.

Sketch from the Buchenwald Memorial exhibits: Doctor-prisoners from the infirmary at a Saturday morning roll call in 1943.