The Liberation Of Buchenwald Concentration Camp, A Journey Through Horror
Updated: 21 hours ago
The clock on Buchenwald's gatehouse has been stuck at 3:15 for more than eighty years. It's the time that marks the camp's liberation on 11 April 1945, and if you assume it's the moment American tanks rolled through the entrance, you'd be wrong. At 3:15 that afternoon there wasn't a single American soldier inside the wire. The men who took the gate were prisoners, armed with rifles and pistols they'd hidden from the SS for months.
The first Americans didn't walk in until almost two hours later. What they found, and what happened over the following days, changed how the world understood the Nazi camp system. It's a story that usually gets told as a simple rescue. The real version is messier, braver and in places far more uncomfortable.
Quick Answers
● When was Buchenwald liberated? On 11 April 1945. Prisoners took control of the camp in the mid-afternoon and US troops arrived at around 5pm.
● Who liberated Buchenwald? An armed prisoner resistance seized the camp first, then a patrol from the US 6th Armored Division's 9th Armored Infantry Battalion, part of Patton's Third Army, entered it.
● How many prisoners were there at liberation? Around 21,000, including more than 900 children and teenagers.
● How many people died at Buchenwald? The Buchenwald Memorial puts the death toll at around 56,000.
● Why is the clock stopped at 3:15? It marks 3:15pm, the time the camp is counted as liberated, when the prisoners already controlled it.
Buchenwald Before the Liberation
Buchenwald sat on the Ettersberg hill, a few miles outside Weimar, the city of Goethe, Schiller and Germany's first democratic republic. The SS opened it in July 1937 and it grew into one of the biggest camps inside Germany's pre-war borders. Its commandant for the early years was Karl Otto Koch, whose wife Ilse became one of the most notorious women of the Third Reich. We've told her full story separately, including Ilse Koch's three trials and the lampshade myth.
The scale is hard to take in. According to the Buchenwald Memorial's own figures, around 277,800 people passed through the main camp and its 139 satellite camps, including roughly 28,000 women and 30,000 minors from more than 50 countries. The youngest prisoner was two years old. The oldest was 86. Around 56,000 of them died there, from execution, medical experiments, starvation, disease and overwork.
At its peak in early 1945 the camp held more than 112,000 prisoners, many of them survivors of death marches from camps in the east like Auschwitz, where 1,944 Buchenwald prisoners had earlier been sent to be murdered. Of around 9,000 SS guards and female wardens who served in the Buchenwald system, the Memorial says only 79 were ever convicted after the war.
The Death Marches of 7 to 10 April
As the US Third Army pushed east past Gotha, the SS tried to empty the camp. Between 7 and 10 April around 28,000 prisoners were forced out on foot and on trains towards camps like Dachau, Flossenbürg and Theresienstadt. The Memorial estimates that roughly a third of them died along the way, killed by exhaustion or shot by the SS, the Volkssturm militia and members of the Hitler Youth.
Inside the camp, the underground resistance did everything it could to slow the evacuations down. Prisoners hid in barracks, went missing from roll calls and conveniently lost paperwork. On 10 April alone, 9,280 prisoners were marched out. By the next morning, the SS was running out of time.
11 April 1945, Hour by Hour
The Memorial's detailed chronology of the liberation reads like a thriller, and it's worth walking through, because it's where most retellings get the story wrong.
● 10am: Commandant Hermann Pister tells the senior prisoner, a German communist called Hans Eiden, to take charge of the inmates. Then the camp siren sounds the enemy alarm and an order goes out over the speakers: "All members of the SS out of the camp immediately!"
● 10:30am: The illegal International Camp Committee hands out its hidden weapons to its resistance groups.
● 1pm: The first American tanks appear on the road from Hottelstedt.
● 2:30pm: US tanks overrun the SS barracks and command area outside the prisoners' compound. The SS guards scatter.
● 3pm: Armed prisoner groups led by Otto Roth occupy the gatehouse. Eiden raises a white flag and announces over the loudspeakers that the camp is in prisoners' hands.
● 4pm: The resistance controls the camp and has captured 76 SS men without a fight.
● 4:45pm: Representatives of ten nations set up a camp council to run food, medical care and security.
● Around 5pm: Two French scouts serving with the Americans, Lieutenant Emmanuel Desard and Sergeant Paul Bodot, pull up at the gate in a jeep.
● Around 5:10pm: A small reconnaissance patrol from the 6th Armored Division comes in from the northern end of the camp.
So the prisoners really did liberate themselves, in the sense that they had the camp before any American set foot in it. But they could only do it because US armour had just smashed the SS garrison outside. Both things are true, and which one you emphasise has turned into a political argument that's lasted decades. More on that shortly.
The First Americans Through the Fence
The first Americans in were Captain Frederic Keffer, Technical Sergeant Herbert Gottschalk, Sergeant Harry Ward and Private James Hoyt. According to the National WWII Museum, they came in through a hole in the 12-foot electric fence. Keffer was an intelligence officer who, like most GIs, had no real idea what a concentration camp was. He only headed for Buchenwald after escaped prisoners flagged down his patrol near Hottelstedt.
What happened next has become one of the most retold moments of the liberation. Thousands of men in striped uniforms rushed towards the four Americans, cheering. Then they grabbed Keffer and started throwing him into the air, again and again. A teenage prisoner called Louis Gros watched starving men who could barely stand find the strength to do it. Keffer later told the Warfare History Network's account what it felt like: "What an incredible greeting that was." He had to shout at them to stop because he was getting dizzy.
Keffer radioed for food and medical supplies and spent less than an hour on his first tour. His patrol had to push on with the war. It was the 80th Infantry Division that took over the camp properly in the days that followed.
What the Americans Found
The main camp was bad. The Little Camp, a fenced-off section of stables and barracks where the sickest and most recently arrived prisoners were dumped, was worse. Men lay five to a bunk on bare wooden shelves. The crematorium yard held piles of bodies the SS hadn't had time to burn. In the pathology block, investigators found tattooed human skin, preserved organs and shrunken heads, the grim leftovers of the camp's medical programme.
Liberation didn't stop people dying. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum notes that many survivors were simply too far gone. By 19 April, more than 400 prisoners had died since the Americans arrived. Army medics gave 70 blood transfusions on the first day of treatment alone.
Andrew Kiniry, who served with the 45th Evacuation Hospital, arrived at the camp between 28 April and 11 May, more than two weeks after liberation. Even then he struggled to take it in. Speaking to the National WWII Museum decades later, he said simply: "You couldn't grasp it all." He also described how many survivors refused to go into the showers at first, terrified of what showers had meant in other camps.
Murrow's Broadcast: "I Pray You to Believe"
Edward R. Murrow, CBS's star correspondent, visited Buchenwald on 12 April and broadcast what he'd seen to America three days later. It's still one of the most famous pieces of radio journalism ever made.
He described barracks where 242 men had died in a single month, and a courtyard where around 500 bodies were stacked like cordwood. Most of the dead had starved rather than been shot. The survivors, he said, kept blessing the name of President Roosevelt, who had died on 12 April, the day Murrow was there. And he ended with a line that's been quoted ever since, preserved in UPI's archive of the broadcast: "I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald."
Murrow was worried nobody would believe him, and he wasn't wrong to be. Newspaper readers in 1945 had been told about German atrocities in the First World War that turned out to be propaganda, and plenty of people assumed this was more of the same. That's exactly why the Allied commanders were so determined to get witnesses into the camps.
Photographers were part of that effort too. Margaret Bourke-White shot some of the most famous images of the camp for Life magazine, and Vogue's Lee Miller came through the camps that same month. We've covered Lee Miller's extraordinary war and her Buchenwald photographs in a separate piece.
Patton, Eisenhower and the Weimar Tour
General Eisenhower had already seen Ohrdruf, one of Buchenwald's subcamps, on 12 April, along with Bradley and Patton. Patton, a man not known for being squeamish, was reportedly sick behind a shed. Eisenhower ordered every American unit that wasn't on the front line to go and see the camps for themselves, and he asked for journalists and members of Congress to be flown out as witnesses.
Patton visited Buchenwald and found it even worse than Ohrdruf. His response was to make the people of Weimar see it too. Mayor Erich Kloss was ordered to round up 1,000 of the city's residents, and on 16 April they were marched up the hill to walk through the Little Camp, the pathology block and the crematorium, past the corpses still lying in the yard.
Many of them insisted they hadn't known. The survivors weren't having it. Buchenwald's prisoners had worked in factories alongside German civilians for years, and as the Memorial's account of that day records, their reply was blunt: "Side by side we worked with you in factories." Within days, Weimar's official representatives were already claiming the townspeople bore no responsibility.
The Boys of Block 66
One of the most remarkable stories to come out of Buchenwald belongs to a Czech communist called Antonín Kalina. He'd been a prisoner since 1939, and as the block elder of Block 66 in the Little Camp he turned it into a hiding place for Jewish children.
According to the Times of Israel's account of Kalina's story, he protected more than 900 boys, most of them aged between 12 and 16. He kept them off the roll calls and away from forced labour, scrounged extra food and blankets and banned the adult block staff from beating them. When the SS ordered the Jewish prisoners onto the death marches in April 1945, he swapped the boys' yellow badges for other markings so the guards couldn't pick them out.
When the Americans arrived, the boys reportedly lifted Kalina onto their shoulders. Among the young survivors of Buchenwald was a 16-year-old called Elie Wiesel, who appears in one of the most famous photographs taken after the liberation, staring out from a bunk in the Little Camp. Kalina went home to Czechoslovakia and died in 1990 without much fuss being made of him. It took until 2012 for Yad Vashem to recognise him as Righteous Among the Nations, after survivors and a documentary team pushed for it.
The Buchenwald Child and the Myth of Self-Liberation
Here's where the story gets uncomfortable. The prisoners who ran the camp's underground were mostly German communists, and after the war East Germany turned them into national heroes. The official line was that the antifascist prisoners had liberated Buchenwald on their own, with the Americans barely mentioned.
The centrepiece of that myth was Bruno Apitz's 1958 novel Naked Among Wolves, and its 1963 film, about communist prisoners who risk everything to hide a small Jewish boy. The boy was real. His name was Stefan Jerzy Zweig, he was born in Kraków in January 1941 and he arrived in Buchenwald aged three with his father.
But the real story, pieced together by Jugend im KZ, is darker than the novel. In September 1944 the SS put Stefan on a transport list for Auschwitz. His father, with help from political prisoners, got him into the typhus ward and had him injected to bring on a fever so he'd be unfit to travel. The SS still needed a body to fill the transport. They sent a 16-year-old Sinto boy called Willy Blum instead. He was murdered.
That swap was left out of the heroic East German version for decades. Historian William Niven's book The Buchenwald Child traces how the story was reshaped into propaganda and how uncomfortable questions about the communist prisoners' power inside the camp, including who they chose to protect and who ended up on transports instead, got buried. Stefan himself only discovered he'd been fictionalised after watching the film. He's lived in Vienna since 1972.
What Happened to Buchenwald Next
Most accounts end in April 1945. The camp didn't. In July 1945 Thuringia was handed over to the Soviet zone, and a month later the Soviet secret police reopened Buchenwald as Special Camp No. 2.
According to the Memorial's history of the Soviet camp, 28,494 people were held there between 1945 and 1950. Most were men aged 40 to 60, many of them low-level Nazi Party functionaries, alongside former police, Gestapo and SS members and people who'd simply been denounced. 7,113 of them died, more than three quarters during the hunger winter of 1946 to 1947. In February 1947, 1,086 prisoners were shipped 5,000 kilometres to Karaganda in Kazakhstan. The dead were buried in mass graves north of the camp, and their families were never told.
For decades, East Germany didn't talk about that part at all. It was only after reunification that the graves were properly marked. Today they're remembered with steel columns in the woods, a short walk from the old Nazi camp.
Local Germans visit the camp
The Oath of Buchenwald
On 19 April 1945, eight days after liberation, the survivors gathered on the roll call square for a memorial service. They swore what became known as the Oath of Buchenwald, pledging to keep fighting until every person responsible for the camp was brought to justice and to build a world of peace and freedom.
The first part of that promise was never really kept. Of the thousands of SS men and women who ran the Buchenwald system, only a tiny number ever faced a courtroom. Thirty-one of them, including Ilse Koch, went on trial at Dachau in 1947. Other liberated camps told similar stories, and we've written about Dirk Bogarde's experience at Bergen-Belsen, which haunted him for the rest of his life.
Today the clock over the gate still reads 3:15. It's a reminder that the first people to free Buchenwald were the prisoners themselves, and that liberation was only the start of an argument about who gets to tell the story.
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