NOTE FROM BUCHENWALD
Christopher Bollyn
American Free Press
During a recent visit to the former Nazi and Soviet prison camp at Buchenwald, American Free Press came across an interesting entry in the guest book at the information center.
On April 12, 2005, 60 years after the camp was taken over by the U.S. Army, an American named Bill Coulter from Southport, Connecticut, visited the camp with his two daughters.
Bill Coulter wrote that he had been a soldier in the 6th Armored Division, which "broke into Buchenwald on April 11, 1945 at 2 p.m."
His daughter, Col. Leigh A. Coulter, U.S. Army, wrote beneath her father’s entry:
"Visiting the camp with my father William Coulter and my sister Pam. We have an interesting story as a family as my father helped liberate the prison in 1945. In March 2003, I was commander of the 724th MP BN which helped build and operated Camp Bucca, Iraq."
Pamela Coulter Mason, who works with ABC News in Washington, D.C., added:
"I so appreciate being able to visit this site with my father who as a member of the U.S. Army 6th Armored Division was one of the first soldiers to discover the camp on April 11, 1945. And with my sister, who 60 years later ran a POW camp in Iraq. Two very different places, but an important testament to history."
The appearance of Buchenwald, near Weimar in the former East Germany, has been changed since the reunification of Germany. The large apartment buildings laid out in a semicircle near the entrance of the camp, for example, which once housed senior military personnel have been completely renovated.
The "concept" of the camp has also changed, Shannon, an American volunteer at the information center, said. During the Soviet occupation of East Germany, the Buchenwald camp was mostly remembered for being the place where the leader of the Communist Party of Germany, Ernst Thälmann, had been killed in 1944.
"There were no gas chambers here," Shannon said about the Nazi era. "This was a work camp." The prisoners were sent to hundreds of local factories and work sites, she said.
Asked about the Soviet prison camp that existed on the site from 1945 to 1950, she said she knew nothing.
My wife, educated as a teacher in Estonia in the former Soviet Union, had never been taught anything about Jews being killed in concentration camps in history lessons. Finding it odd that the Soviet Union would not have instructed its students about the genocidal crimes of Nazi Germany, she asked the Russian volunteer at Buchenwald if he had ever learned anything about the Jewish "holocaust" in Russian schools. He said he had not.
A U.S. Army Intelligence report, dated April 24, 1945, put the Buchenwald death toll at 32,705. A subsequent U.S. government report from June, 1945, put the total number of deaths at 33,462, with 20,000 of the deaths occurring in the chaotic final months of the war.
According to a U.S. Army report dated May 25, 1945, a total of 238,980 prisoners had been held at Buchenwald in the period from July 1937 to April 1945. Of this number 34,375 died. This report, which shows a mortality rate of some 14 percent, was based on camp records confiscated by the U.S. Army.
Shortly after the U.S. Army "liberated" Buchenwald, it was turned over to the Soviet Union and became the so-called Special Camp No. 2 from 1945 to 1950. As the guide book, written by Sabine and Harry Stein says, "Prisoners moved into the barracks again hardly four weeks after the last survivors had left the National Socialist concentration camp in Buchenwald. Buchenwald became a place of isolation and death for another four and a half years."
The German prisoners held in Special Camp No. 2, the Steins wrote, "suffered from overcrowding, vermin, and cold in the barracks. No clothing was issued to the prisoners. For long periods of time, it was not possible to replace worn out clothes or broken shoes. Bad sanitary conditions caused a large number of skin diseases and oedemae [edema] in addition to tuberculosis and dystrophy, which were mainly due to undernourishment.
"Soviet officials did not guarantee a minimum standard of detention, which would have included contact with relatives by letter or visits. Nothing was done to find out the guilt of individual prisoners, which might have allowed the liberation of many."
While prisoners held by the Nazis were forced to work, Soviet time prisoners were forced to be idle: "Complete isolation from the outside world, enforced idleness and a lack of any positive prospects caused frequent depressions and psychological diseases which accelerated physical decline," the guide says.
"Hunger and isolation seriously affected everyday life. Hunger was almost omnipresent. Mass deaths ensued when the restricted rations were cut temporarily.
"More than one third of the total number of 122,671 prisoners died in the course of being there," the guide says about the post-war Soviet prison camp. "The victims of Buchenwald Special Camp were buried in mass graves. Their relatives did not receive any official notification.
"The history of Special Camp No. 2 and the existence of mass graves was subject to taboo in the German Democratic Republic," the guide says.
The official mortality rate in the Soviet camps during the post-war period was more than twice that of Buchenwald during the war. According to camp records kept by the Soviet Union, the Soviet prison camp system in Germany held 122,671 prisoners between 1945 and 1950 of which 42,889 died. This is a death rate of nearly 35 percent. In addition, 756 persons were executed.
"This information has been questioned from various sides, requiring corroborative research," the guidebook says.
