Foreign News: Buchenwald

• Share

From the camp at Buchenwald TIME Correspondent Percy Knauth reported: In Buchenwald today I saw death reduced to such a state of ordinariness that it just left me numb and feeling nothing, not even sickness at my stomach.

Propaganda is propaganda and in this war we have had more than our share of atrocity stories, but Buchenwald is not a story. It is acres of bare ground on a hill side in Thuringia where woods and fields are green under warm spring sun. It is miles and miles of barbed wire once charged with electricity and guarded by machine-gun towers built of creosoted pine logs. It is barracks after barracks crowded with 21,000 living, breathing human beings who stink like nothing else on earth and many of whom have lost the power of coherent speech. It is gallows standing in desolate courtyards, ropes still swinging from the hooks, pillories standing in the great parade ground just beneath the main gate, where men were tied down and beaten until they blubbered.

It is a place where prisoners, on seeing an SS man approaching from a distance, ducked for cover anywhere they could, because the young man in the clean black uniform might shoot them if he happened to feel like pulling out his gun. Buchenwald is a fact which has existed, on a small scale at first, for eleven years, and it is a fact which will stink through the years of history as long as generations of mankind have memories.

Half-Melted Skeletons. Buchenwald is something of a showplace now, nine days after it was liberated, and there are certain things you have to see. There were two ovens there, each with six openings. It was a clean room with no smell. At one end was a wash basin with soap still in the dish and a door leading to the "Büro or office. At the other was a plaque hung high on the wall, black with a symbolic flame painted on it and a quotation from some German poet: "Let not disgusting worms consume my body . . . give me the clean bright flame" etc.

The ovens were not clean. In some of them there were still charred remains, a grinning, blackened skull, a chest from which the flesh was still not fully burned away, skeletons half melted down. The ovens were cold now but in recent weeks before the Americans came their clean bright flame consumed between 150 and 200 people daily.

I went out to the little courtyard where the gallows stood, a stout wooden frame with several hooks and a stool on which men stood before an SS kick deprived them of their last grip on life.

Death in the Cellar. Down in a cellar on a clean, whitewashed wall were many hooks jutting out near the low ceiling. For the benefit of visitors a dummy had been strung up there, its stuffed toes just touching the floor. Before we came men were strung up similarly, pulled up till they choked. It took them a long time before they gave up the instinctive fight for breath, and there are scratches on the walls where they clawed vainly for support. Before they left the SS men had tried to eradicate these marks with paint and had also pulled out several of the hooks, but they left too quickly to do a thorough job.

Bodies Like Firewood. With other G.I. sightseers we came up from the cellar and passed into another yard fenced in by a high wooden wall. There was a pile of bodies there, stacked more or less the way I stack my firewood back home, not too carefully. There were men and some of them were naked. They looked strange.