During the Second World War, executions occurred inside concentration camps all across Germany
and the nazi occupied lands.
Many of these took place in public in front of hundreds of other inmates to strike fear
into the hearts of the prisoners.
But there were some attempts by the SS to conceal their crimes and to execute as many
people as they could in secret.
Concentration Camps often utilised the local landscapes and parts of these became used
for executions, for example in Mauthausen there was a huge stone quarry, with the stairs
of the death leading to the site where slave labour was used on a mass scale.
But the SS would also carry out executions throwing people off the cliff and playing
torturous games around this.
But inside of Buchenwald one of the largest concentration camps, there was a part of the
camp which was used to torture and execute prisoners in secret away from the eyes of
the other inmates.
Today we look at the executions of the forest of buchenwald, as always to support our channel,
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Buchenwald concentration camp was established on Ettersberg Hill near Weimar, and it was
a camp where 280,000 inmates were imoprisoned during its time in operation from 1937 to
1945.
It’s believed that over 56,000 prisoners never made it out of the camp alive as they
succumbed to the conditions of the evil camp.
Even the former commandant would become a victim of the site as he was executed at his
own camp.
The prisoners held at Buchenwald were those who Hitler believed had no place inside of
his Empire or Reich, and he believed that these people were subhuman, and deserved to
be exterminated.
But to ensure that he got what he could from them he would force them to conduct back breaking
labour often in the Buchenwald quarry, and the gates of Buchenwald told inmates what
was expected of them.
Jedem Das Seine was on the gates, and this translates as ‘to each his own,’ and to
the SS this phrase was interpreted to mean that they could do what they pleased to brutalise
the prisoners every single day.
The inmates would somehow at the end of the war communicate to the US Army through morse
code sending a desperate message saying, ‘To the allies, to the army of General Patton,
this is buchenwald concentration camp.
SOS, we request help.
They want to evacuate us.
The SS wants to destroy us.’
One of the biggest killers at Buchenwald was the camp conditions which were deliberately
poor.
The inmates were kept in a constant state of starvation and they were forced to conduct
back breaking labour, and many became very ill and the policy at the site was to exterminate
as many people as they could through working.
Many other prisoners who could not work were executed through shooting and hanging, but
inside the camp there were summary executions of at least 1000 men who were shot through
a gunshot to the neck inside of the neck shooting facility.
It’s believed also that up to 8000 Soviet POWs were executed in this way in the same
facility being tricked into thinking they were getting a medical exam.
The inmates were even subjected to terrible experiments to test the use of white phosphorus
and they were heavily burned by this.
Many argued that the doctors of Buchenwald were Nazi legally appointed executioners who
carried out huge killings.
The camp was completely colossal and it had around 136 sub camps that served it, and much
of the workforce directly contributed to the German war effort as they were involved in
the armaments production.
The SS guards also rented prisoners out to private firms to make money, but the guards
there were known for being evil.
They would often beat prisoners incredibly severely sometimes to death, and they were
encouraged by the commandants to brutalise inmates on a daily basis.
But Buchenwald was found inside of a Beech Forest, and this huge forest overlooks the
city of Weimar and within the forest was the camp.
The term Buchenwald is German for Beech Forest, but this place which was once peaceful would
become during the Second World War a brutal and tragic place, and like the Nazis would
do at Mauthausen, they utilised the local area and the forest to become part of their
plans for mass murder.
The forest would become a site where many prisoners would be buried, and at the end
of the Second World War and in the following decades it was learned that there were many
graveyards inside of the forests and these were then marked.
But the forest of buchenwald was to begin with used as a torture device, and there was
one brutal SS guard who became known as the Hangman of Buchenwald, and many of his crimes
were carried out inside of the forests.
Walter Gerhard Martin Sommer was an SS Hauptscharfuhrer who became infamous for his torture at Buchenwald
and he was considered a sadist who would execute many people.
He was a man who was even investigated by Heinrich Himmler for his brutality, and Sommer
was even thrown out of Buchenwald for his evil torture as Himmler believed that he went
too far.
He would take a number of prisoners into the forests of buchenwald, and these inmates would
have infringed on the camps rules.
They may have committed tiny crimes such as stealing a piece of fruit from a tree, as
they were starving, and this was sometimes considered a crime of necessity.
But Martin Sommer would then take these into the forest where he had a number of trees
which were prepared.
These inmates would then be strung up from the trees and they were suspended from their
arms which had been tied behind their back.
This special form of torture was conducted inside of the woods, and the screams of the
victims were so intense and loud that the inmates named this area of the site as ‘the
singing forest.’
This was medieval style torture and it was Summer’s speciality and the arms would become
dislocated and some prisoners were in so much agony that they were killed by this, and some
would faint and they were often left like this for some time.
Martin Sommer had a particular distaste for members of the clergy and inside of the forests
he would carry out two executions that were considered some of the most evil of the whole
Second World War.
Otto Neururer was a priest who had been initially send to Dachau before he was sent to Buchenwald
and he faced frequent torture there.
But he was locked up in the prison and he would share his food rations with the other
prisoners who were weaker.
But he suspected a trap as he had been asked to perform a banned baptism inside the camp,
and following this he was sent to the punishment block and was brutalised by Sommer.
But Sommer to then send a clear message took Otto Neururer and Matthaus Spannlang another
Austrian priest deep into the forest of Buchenwald.
He then forced the two men to take off their clothes, and the pair were then crucified
inside the forest being hanged upside down, and Otto Neureurer it’s believed managed
to stay alive for 34 agonising hours before he died.
This all happened inside of the singing forest, but then there were other executions that
took place inside of the forest.
At some point the SS ordered the prisoners to collect wood and inside of the forests
they built a gallows which they used to execute dozens of inmates often at the same time on
the wooden structure.
On the 26th April 1942, a polish forced labourer who worked in a courtyard at Buchenwald was
beaten to the point that he lost conciousness by a German policeman named Albin Gottwald.
Taking revenge, two polish inmates then stabbed Gottwald to death on a forest path, and these
two assassins then managed to flee.
One of them was then apprehended after his escape, but in reprisal for the death of one
of the guards, the SS went into overdrive ordering executions.
On the 11th May 1942, 19 prisoners from Buchenwald were taken to the place in the woods where
Gottwald’s body had been found.
The SS then ordered other prisoners to built three gallows, two of them had 10 hooks on
them and one of them was a single gallows.
The 19 polish prisoners were then positioned behind the gallows and the man who had been
apprehended was brought forward.
But shockingly the SS then gathered hundreds of Polish workers to watch what they did next.
The execution began at 10:50am, and one by one the inmates were executed slowly in front
of the crowd on the single gallows.
But then they were all hanged on the two group gallows and were displayed for some time.
But this was not a new thing.
Within the forests of buchenwald over the war years there were many more gallows that
were created to hang the inmates.
It was a common sight as inmates would be taken from the camp into the forests, and
they would never return again.
On the 4th April 1945, the US Infantry Division overran Ohrdruf a subcamp of Buchenwal.
It was partially evacuated over the following week, and when the Americans arrived at the
site they were given a hero’s welcome but they came across many different people who
were suffering.
One liberator described what he saw and said, ‘I asked to see one of the barracks.
It happened to be occupied by Czechoslovaks.
When I entered, men crowded around, tried to lift me to their shoulders.
They were too weak.
Many of them could not get out of bed.
I was told that this building had once stabled 80 horses.
There were 1,200 men in it, five to a bunk.
The stink was beyond all description.
They called the doctor.
We inspected his records.
There were only names in the little black book, nothing more.
Nothing about who these men were, what they had done, or hoped.
Behind the names of those who had died, there was a cross.
I counted them.
They totaled 242.
242 out of 1,200, in one month.
As we walked out into the courtyard, a man fell dead.
Two others, they must have been over 60, were crawling toward the latrine.
I saw it, but will not describe it.’
The Forests of Buchenwald were brutal and barbaric, and were it was known as the singing
forest as they were horrors conducted within the area.
It was a place where torture and execution took place, and the inmates knew that when
prisoners went into the forest, they probably wouldn’t come back.
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