Existing comment:
ARMY AIR FORCES: VICTIMS OF THE HOLOCAUST:
Buchenwald, An Example:
Germans built Buchenwald in 1937 as a work camp for the "undesirables" of Nazi society, mostly Jews and political prisoners. It later became one of a number of German "death camps." At war's end, as many as 60,000 people had died there. Even more died at such larger camps as Dachau and Auschwitz, which were run with greater "efficiency."
In later summer and autumn of 1944, 82 AAF and 86 British Commonwealth aviators were captives at Buchenwald. Most had been shot down over France and had made connections with the French Resistance in their effort to return to their units, as they were expected to do. They had received French identification papers and were dressed as civilians to avoid capture. A traitor within the French Underground betrayed them to the Germans, and they were captured. As Allied forces prepared to enter Paris, they were evacuated with a large number of political prisoners to Buchenwald in Weimar, Germany. They arrived after a harrowing five-day train ride jammed in boxcars with little food or water. There they were shaved bare and spent the next three weeks without shoes or shelter, sleeping on paving stones. A Canadian aviator described the daily ration as "a little bowl of soup made from grass or cabbage leaves, and an inch of bread and three little potatoes." One pilot lost more than 65 pounds during his six weeks there.
Eventually, the POWs and other prisoners were placed in a barracks, 600 men to a building designed for 250. They slept on wooden shelves, five to a bunk, so crowded that no one could turn over until all did at the same time. P-47 pilot Lt. L.C. Beck Jr. and Royal Air Force Flying Officer P.D. Hemmens died before the airmen were transferred to a POW camp in October-November 1944. There they still faced the hardships of imprisonment, but at least they were free from the horrors of a death camp. |