Histories Of The Holocaust - Buchenwald 1937-42

This program documents the events of Buchenwald, where the prisoners were dealt out savage punishment for the slightest infraction of the rules. Inmates would freeze in -20° temperatures, starved and were worked to death; the guard dogs enjoyed significantly better living conditions. The camp was originally built to house 8,000, but by the end in 1945, when the U.S. forces arrived, contained over 50,000 enemies of the Reich, including Jews, political prisoners, homosexuals and Jehovah s Witnesses. Never an extermination camp like Auschwitz, Buchenwald was a labor camp, but it excelled in making everything aspect of life within its fences a torture where mistreatment by the guards was not only encouraged, it was compulsory.