"[In a small courtyard in the German
concentration camp of Buchenwald] there were two rows of bodies stacked up like
cordwood. They were thin and very white. Some of the bodies were terribly
bruised, though there seemed to be little flesh to bruise. Some had been shot
through the head, but they bled but little. Some had been shot through the head,
but they bled but little. All except two were naked. I tried to count them as
best I could and arrived at the conclusion that all that was mortal of more
than five hundred
men and boys
lay there in
two neat piles.
“There was a German trailer, which must have
contained another fifty, but it wasn't possible to count them. The clothing was
piled in a heap against the wall. It appeared that most
of the men
and boys had
died of starvation; they had
not been executed. But the manner of death seemed unimportant.
Murder had been done at Buchenwald. God alone
knows how many
men and boys
have died there
during the last
twelve years. Thursday I was told
that there were
more than twenty
thousand in the
camp. There had been as many as sixty thousand. Where are they now?"—American
journalist Edward R. Murrow (1908-1965), “For Most of It I Have No Words” (CBS
Radio broadcast, Apr. 15, 1945), in Reporting World War II: American Journalism 1944–1946 (1995)
Seventy-five years ago today, Allied forces came
upon the ghastly scene described by Murrow. The carnage at this first of the
Nazi concentration camps to be liberated was far beyond what he or anyone else
could have anticipated beforehand.
From its 1937 opening to its 1945 liberation, this
site—constructed in woods a mere five miles from one of the pillars of German
culture, Weimar—held some 250,000 prisoners under the thumb of the SS. The best
if uncertain estimate for the death total is 56,000 male prisoners, some 11,000
of them Jews, according to an account by the U.S. Holocaust Museum.
Astonishingly, Buchenwald
was the best concentration camp in
Germany, according to five of the “evil-smelling horde” of prisoners encountered
by Murrow. It was just one of 44,000 incarceration sites erected by the Nazis and
its allies in World War II.
Within them, a previously unimaginable horror show
took place: medical experimentation on prisoners; forced labor; detention
of those deemed unfit to live by reason of ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation or mental condition; and
mass murder.
The cry continues to ring out over the years: Never forget. But we cannot only forget
the statistics and scenes that occurred here and elsewhere under the sway of
Hitler’s regime, but also what preceded it: economic dislocation that uprooted
millions of Europeans from the best parts of their civilization and their most generous instincts and left them
prey to the counsels of fear, prejudice and unreason.
Don’t think it can’t happen again. Stay alert
to the signs around you, and beware.
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