<< Dr. Ralph Wolpaw's Account >>
Ralph Wolpaw, M.D. Major, Medical Corps, 120th Evacuation Hospital, United States Army 1945
We arrived in the Buchenwald area on Sunday 15 April late in the evening. Our bivouac area was about one mile from the concentration camp on a dirt road leading to the camp. We immediately noted a number of ex-prisoners wandering through the section in which we were camped, many of markedly emaciated and showing evidences of ill treatment over a long period of time. The camp had been liberated the previous day in the morning. The following day, we visited the camp to survey the work which had to be done. We were accompanied or rather, we were there at the same time as 1000 citizens from the nearby city of Weimar. These people were being taken on a personally conducted tour of the camp at the express invitation of General Patton. They were thoroughly frightened and reacted by weeping, moaning, and protesting innocence and lack of knowledge of everything that had transpired at the camp. The prisoners did not bear out these protestations, it appeared that the good citizens of Weimar had been quite delighted to heap abuse, both material and verbal on the prisoners as they arrived in crowded box cars just prior to entering the camp.
The sights that met our eyes and the stories were heard, borne out by graphic evidence on every side, made us sick and ashamed to be members of the so called enlightened human race which could perpetrate such atrocities. There were 25,000 persons living in the utmost filth and squalor in the camp. The German "supermen", with wanton brutality, had chosen the easiest and most efficient method of creating the greatest misery in the camp after their departure. They had blown up the water main so that there was no water at all in the camp except the amounts that could be brought in by truck and so forth. The devilish cruelty of this action can be more readily understood when one realizes that a large number of the inmates were seriously sick, many at the point of death, and the lack of water if only for sanitary facilities was equivalent to a death sentence. The stench of the place is [sic] indescribable, it combined every foul odor ever known and then added some. In some areas, men were packed into barn-like barracks on wooden shelves, so close together that they could not turn over or even move because of the bodies on either side and in some cases, they had so little space that it was necessary for them to lie on their sides. Most of these individuals were so thin it was almost difficult to conceive of them as having once been healthy, robust, perhaps even happy human beings. Some of them were weeping and crying for joy, other were too weak to do that but just looked their happiness while many were only able to stare vacantly, liberation had arrived too late for them. There were many dead mixed with the living, sometimes it was difficult to differentiate the quick from the cold. Everywhere on the ground in the compound and around it, there were dead people lying around, some pitifully clothed, evidently dying in the last struggle to get a breath of free air, others stark naked, lying in all varieties of grotesque positions and even in death, not achieving the certain dignity that should have been theirs. Outside many of the charnel houses which were called barracks, in little alcoves surrounded by low walls, there were piles of bodies, so wasted that they gave the impression of being groups of arms, legs, and heads without bodies. These were the dead of the previous day, waiting to be carted away on the death wagon to the crematorium.
The crematorium was the acme of horror, to such an extent that many men actually became sick on seeing it. It was a building off to one of side of the great open compound before the barracks and on entering, there were steps leading down. A large number of bodies were piled outside, waiting for final disposition. Inside, there was a hall like room with hooks along the wall, we were told that at times, men were hung from these hooks while the S.S. guards practiced little refinements of torture on them. The furnace was a large one and there was an opening into it just large enough to admit one body at a time. In one place, there was a pile of ashes including some partially burned and charred bones. There were even some partially burned bodies. Hanging about on the walls were wicked whips and bludgeons, some still caked with blood, these had been used to hasten the demise of stubborn prisoners who persisted in clinging to life in a way which was obnoxious to the kind-hearted guards. In some cases, to be sure, the guards had not been quite efficient so that prisoners who were still at least partially alive were fed into the flames but these minor details did not interfere seriously with the progress of the murder factory. The crowning glory of the place was the sign over the entrance which said something on the order of "You who enter here are lucky because you will leave through the chimney."
Elsewhere in the great compound, there were two whipping stocks in which a man was placed bent over in an extremely uncomfortable position after which the skin was neatly stripped from his back of his buttocks of his thighs [sic] by means of whips well designed for this purpose. Sometimes, the men were left in these stocks for long periods after the whipping and some even died there.
At the entrance to the camp, there were a group of cells in which prisoners were interrogated, in most cases not verbally but by means of persuasion involving the mashing of some fingers or the stripping of portions of skin or even the loss of certain parts of the anatomy. These cells were well constructed and soundproof so that the prisoner being interrogated would not be disturbed by the others and of course, that he would not disturb them. Usually, also, at the time of entrance into the camp, the prisoners were taken before the wife of the commandant for purely cultural and artistic purposes. She was an art lover and was particularly fond of good tattooing. Each prisoner was stripped to the waist and was carefully examined by the lady in question. If he had any skin tattooing which appealed to her, she obtained the drawing for her collection. The skin was removed from the prisoner, tanned, and then mounted on a plaque or made into a lamp shade for her use. Whether the prisoners so honored were alive or dead at the time of removal could not be determined but it is known that most of them were never seen again.
There was a beautiful scientific laboratory at Buchenwald. It had fine appointments and facilities for the most painstaking and minute work in bacteriology. Research work was done there, research on typhus fever, ranging from the symptoms of the disease, the period of incubation, to the pathological changes produced in a human being. Four footed guinea pigs were not used for this purpose, what was the need when there were so many perfectly good two footed ones available? Many men died to no end for the cold blooded amusement of several power mad so called scientists. The man in charge of the experimentation admitted later on that it was purely for his own gratification that it was carried on rather than for any far reaching or helpful results that might have been obtained. But the prisoners had a little revenge. All the typhus vaccine for the German army was made in this laboratory and the work was done by skilled prisoners, leaders in the particular field. The supervision of this particular activity was placed in the hands of a group of S.S. doctors, diploma-mill specialists who had a complete lack of knowledge of the procedures involved and the product produced. The prisoners were able to sabotage every bit of the vaccine, not only making it useless for the original purpose but even adding disease producing organisms to it so that it created rather than prevented disease. The S.S. doctors, unwilling to admit their ignorance (they had to save face just like their Japanese allies) approved the vaccine and it was sent to the army for use. The regular German army doctors knew it was not good but could not protest against it because they would then be questioning the S.S. which was something that was just not done! The fact that the incidence of typhus fever in the German army was not greater was because they took other precautions against lice and prevented the disease in that way.
Buchenwald had a quota, a death quota. Eighty people had to die daily in order to meet this quota. The exact reasons for this are obscure but the guards accepted the cross they had to bear without complaining and saw to it that they never went under the quota. If 80 people did not die of normal causes (starvation, maltreatment, or disease) they could be disposed of by other means and at the same time, the S.S. troops, many of them receiving their initial training there, could be properly indoctrinated in brutality and savagery. Of course, toward the end, the death rate from disease far surpassed the quota but no one was ever censured for this. Among the methods of increasing the death rate was the practice of beating a man to death for the failure to perform some slight task in the barracks such as dusting a high ledge. The S.S. guards did not mind the dust, the filth, or anything else, they searched for reasons to liquidate the prisoners for their own amusement. The S.S. men were sadistic children in mental age with the physiques of adults. They had to be amused constantly, had to be played up to or they made life more of a living hell for the prisoners that it already was. The prisoners would take turns keeping the guards amused or occupied so that the remainder of a group could be undisturbed for a period. However, when the prisoners were brought in initially and run through the processing which included a delousing shower using very coarse soap and extremely hot water, they could not take time for this and they were painfully aware of the presence of the S.S. men who jabbed them, mashed their toes, forced them to submerge in strong cresol solution, or used other little tricks of a playful nature to make them miserable.
Prisoners were occasionally sent out in large numbers on work details, some of these included working on the tunnels used to house the large underground factories. The men were worked hard and long hours with little rest, improper housing, and very inadequate food so that most of them gradually wasted away and finally fell by the wayside. They were literally worked to death. The food was not only poor there, it was very inadequate in the camp proper. The amount of food necessary to keep an adult man alive at absolute rest is well known, it varies from 1200 to 1500 calories per day. Yet these prisoners were given 400 to 800 calories a day and made to work hard on that. It was planned, scientific, starvation, in most cases, brazenly admitted by the men in charge. The reason - pure madness because a healthy strong prisoner obviously will work better and last longer than the opposite. One last thing, perhaps the most degrading of all. Large numbers of the prisoners were emasculated, coldbloodedly, ruthlessly, and with malice aforethought. Many times it was done brutally also, the ultimate in savagery.
Buchenwald was a hell hole. After our initial reaction we went to work and bringing to bear all the equipment we could get, using everything in our power to help the prisoner doctors who had been working so valiantly, including blood, plasma, glucose and saline solution, drugs, and good nursing care by our ward men, managed to cut down the terrific death rate which prevailed when we arrived. The prisoners were all deloused with DDT powder, transferred to other quarters where they had blankets, cots, sanitary facilities, and were given increasing amounts of food as it became available. The degeneration of years could not be undone in a few days but an effort was made and the improvement in the short time we were there was very gratifying to all of us who worked there and helped a little.