Friday, April 11, 2008
This Day in the History of Evil Being Destroyed
On this day in 1945, American soldiers of the 6th Armored and 83rd Infantry Divisions liberated the minor Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald. They put the piles of dead and the walking skeleton survivors on film.
Although Buchenwald was not an extermination camp but a work camp, of the quarter million prisoners it held between 1937 and liberation, nearly 60,000 died. Such were the conditions.
We turned the camp over to the Soviets who for a time used it to house Nazi war criminals but then turned it for a short while into one camp in what Solzhenitsyn called the Gulag Archipelago. It was largely demolished except for a few buildings in 1950-51.
Labels: WWII history; European theater; Buchenwald
# posted by Roger Fraley @ 8:03 AM 
