 Slave laborers in the Buchenwald concentration camp ( Elie Wiesel is second row, seventh from left). Buchenwald was a Nazi concentration camp established on Ettersberg Hill near Weimar, Thuringia, Germany, in July 1937. The name "Buchenwald" means "beech forest" in German, such a forest surrounding the area where the camp stood.
The first commandant was Karl Otto Koch, whose second wife Ilse was known as "The Bitch of Buchenwald", one of the cruelest figures of the Holocaust.
Despite not technically being an extermination camp, mass killings of prisoners of war took place in the camp, and many inmates died during medical experiments, or fell victim to arbitrary acts perpetrated by the SS.
The camp was also the site of illegal large-scale testing of vaccines for epidemic typhus in 1942 and 1943, all in all testing 729 inmates, around 280 of whom died. Because of their long association in cramped quarters in Block 46, the virus in the inmates killed more and infected longer than normal typhus.
The camp was largely evacuated by the Nazis as Allied troops approached the area, and was finally occupied by the U.S. 3rd Army on April 11, 1945 with minimal resistance.
Female overseers
Ilse Koch served as head SS woman (Oberaufseherin) over twenty-three female guards and hundreds of women prisoners in the camp. Today twenty-one women SS are known by name; Maria Balkenhol, Elisabeth Baessler, Elli Ebert (who served at Buchenwald and Ravensbruck), Frieda Friedrichs (who served at Buchenwald, Magdeburg and Comthurey), Karoline Geulen, Elisabeth Hirsemann, Franziska Hoengesberg, Maria Isert, Frieda Jahnke, Elisabeth Max, Elfriede Motzkuhn, Louise Nauth, Else Purucker (who served in Buchenwald and Taucha), Charlotte Rafoth, Lieschen Rech, Wilhelmina Sadrinna, Martha Schaefer (who first served at Flossenburg then Buchenwald), Irmtraut Sell, Emma Theissen (who served at Buchenwald and then Essen subcamp), and Amalie Wilde1. Eventually, more than 530 women served as guards in the vast Buchenwald system across Germany. Only twenty-three women served in Buchenwald, compared to over 2,000 men.
Footnotes
Note 1: All the information on these female overseers came from Daniel Patrick Brown's book THE CAMP WOMEN The Female Auxiliaries Who Assisted the SS in Running the Concentration Camp System.
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