In the summer of 1937, the Buchenwald concentration camp opened in the hilly woods just outside Weimar, a German city famous for its cultural heritage. The camp soon became a torture center.

Ilse Koch, the wife of camp commander Karl Koch, developed a morbid taste for tattooed skin stripped from the corpses of inmates. Another camp commander habitually unleashed vicious dogs against Gypsy prisoners who refused to undergo sterilization. The victims were torn to pieces. Homosexual prisoners underwent pseudoscientific experiments, in which they were injected with typhus bacillus. Tens of thousands perished at Buchenwald between 1937 and 1945--victims of disease from overcrowding and poor sanitation, hard labor, torture, medical experiments, and gassings.

The camp initially housed political prisoners, but was enlarged in 1938 to take in large numbers of Jews. In the wake of Kristallnacht, more than 10,000 Jews filled the barracks. During the war years, inmates were exploited as slave labor for the armament industry. By 1945 the evacuation of camps in Eastern Europe brought a tremendous influx of inmates into Buchenwald; at war's end in April 1945, more than 47,000 were imprisoned there.
Photo: Lorenz Schmuhl/United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archive