Ohrdruf | |
---|---|
Concentration camp | |
![]() View of the camp including a watchtower, barracks, and barbed wire fencing | |
Coordinates | 50°50′1″N10°45′17″E / 50.83361°N 10.75472°E |
Location | Thuringia, Germany |
Operated by | German Army, later Schutzstaffel (SS) |
Original use | Prisoner of war camp |
Operational | 1944-1945 |
Number of gas chambers | none |
Liberated by | US Army, April 4, 1945 |
Ohrdruf was a German forced labor and concentration camp located near Ohrdruf, south of Gotha, in Thuringia, Germany. It was part of the Buchenwald concentration camp network.
Created in November 1944 near the town of Ohrdruf, south of Gotha, in Thuringia, Germany, Ohrdruf was initially a separate forced labour camp directly controlled by the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office (SS-WVHA) but then became a subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar. It made use of huts originally built in 1940 for Wehrmacht troops [1] using the Truppenübungsplatz nearby as well as other facilities. The camp, code-named Außenlager S III, consisted of a northern and a southern camp; later, a tent camp at Espenfeld and a camp at Crawinkel were added. The camp supplied forced labor in the form of concentration camp prisoners for a planned railway construction project for an immense communications center inside the basement of the Mühlberg castle in Ohrdruf. Inmates had to work to connect the castle to the main railroad line and to dig tunnels in the nearby mountains, which would be used as emergency shelter for the train that contained the "Führerhauptquartier". [2] The proposed communication centre was never completed due to the rapid American advance. [3] [4] [5]
By late 1944, around 10,000 prisoners were housed here; through March 1945, the total number sent here was around 20,000, mainly Russians, Poles, Hungarian Jews, some French, Czechs, Italians, Belgians, Greeks, Yugoslavians and Germans. Conditions were atrocious: in the huts there were no beds, "only blood-covered straw and lice". Despite the season, not all prisoners were housed in huts—some were accommodated in stables, tents and old bunkers. Work days were initially 10 to 11 hours long, then later 14 hours, involving strenuous physical labor building roads, railways and tunnels. In addition, inmates had to cope with long marches and musterings, total lack of sanitary equipment and medical facilities, and insufficient food and clothing. [6]
In January 1945, the SS guards were reinforced by units from Auschwitz. [6] Towards the end of the war, the prisoners were used to construct a subterranean headquarters for the government (Führerhauptquartier) to be used following a possible evacuation of Berlin. It was never completed. [7]
It is still not clear exactly what projects the prisoners of Ohrdruf were working on. Besides the temporary quarters for the Reich leadership, the extensive tunneling and other works at Jonastal point to an armament factory of some kind. There is a theory, advanced by Rainer Karlsch that the facility was intended as (and used as) a testing site for a German nuclear bomb. Other possibilities are an improved V-2 rocket or long-range jet-powered bombers, but all of this is speculative. [5]
Those unable to work were moved by the SS to Sterbelager: 4,300 sick inmates were moved to Bergen-Belsen, or the Kleines Lager at Buchenwald. In late March 1945, the camp had a prisoner population of some 11,700 to 13,000. As the American troops advanced towards Ohrdruf, the SS began evacuating almost all prisoners on death marches to Buchenwald on April 1. During these marches, SS, Volkssturm, and members of the Hitler Youth killed an estimated 1,000 prisoners. Mass graves were re-opened and SS men tried to burn the corpses. The SS guards killed many of the remaining prisoners in the Nordlager that were deemed too ill to walk to the railcars. After luring them to the parade ground, claiming that they were to be fed, the SS shot them and left their corpses lying in the open. [3] [8]
In addition to those killed on the death marches, an estimated 3,000 inmates died from exhaustion or were murdered inside the camp. [6] Together with those worked to death here but moved elsewhere to die, estimates of the total number of victims are around 7,000. [8]
Ohrdruf was liberated on April 4, 1945, by the 4th Armored Division, led by Brigadier General Joseph F. H. Cutrona, and the 89th Infantry Division. It was the first Nazi concentration camp liberated by the U.S. Army. [9] [10]
When the soldiers of the 4th Armored Division entered the camp, they discovered piles of bodies, some covered with lime, and others partially incinerated on pyres. The ghastly nature of their discovery led General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, to visit the camp on April 12, with Generals George S. Patton and Omar Bradley. After his visit, Eisenhower cabled General George C. Marshall, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, describing his trip to Ohrdruf: [3]
... the most interesting—although horrible—sight that I encountered during the trip was a visit to a German internment camp near Gotha. The things I saw beggar description. While I was touring the camp I encountered three men who had been inmates and by one ruse or another had made their escape. I interviewed them through an interpreter. The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where they were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said that he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to 'propaganda.'
At Ohrdruf concentration camp, 4th Armored Division soldier David Cohen said: "We walked into a shed and the bodies were piled up like wood. There are no words to describe it." [11] He said the smell was overpowering and unforgettable. [11]
Seeing the Nazi crimes committed at Ohrdruf made a powerful impact on Eisenhower, and he wanted the world to know what happened in the concentration camps. On April 19, 1945, he again cabled Marshall with a request to bring members of Congress and journalists to the newly liberated camps so that they could bring the horrible truth about German Nazi atrocities to the American public. That same day, Marshall received permission from the Secretary of War, Henry Lewis Stimson, and President Harry S. Truman for these delegations to visit the liberated camps. [3]
Ohrdruf had also made a powerful impression on Patton, who described it as "one of the most appalling sights that I have ever seen." He recounted in his diary that: [3]
In a shed ... was a pile of about 40 completely naked human bodies in the last stages of emaciation. These bodies were lightly sprinkled with lime, not for the purposes of destroying them, but for the purpose of removing the stench.
When the shed was full—I presume its capacity to be about 200, the bodies were taken to a pit a mile from the camp where they were buried. The inmates claimed that 3,000 men, who had been either shot in the head or who had died of starvation, had been so buried since the 1st of January.
When we began to approach with our troops, the Germans thought it expedient to remove the evidence of their crime. Therefore, they had some of the slaves exhume the bodies and place them on a mammoth griddle composed of 60-centimeter railway tracks laid on brick foundations. They poured pitch on the bodies and then built a fire of pinewood and coal under them. They were not very successful in their operations because there was a pile of human bones, skulls, charred torsos on or under the griddle which must have accounted for many hundreds.
The military training area of Truppenübungsplatz Ohrdruf was then taken over in July 1945 by the Red Army, since Thuringia became part of the Soviet occupation zone. The Nordlager was razed. Two memorials to the dead were erected at around this time. Since 1993, the Bundeswehr has been in charge of the area. [12] [13]
Today, the only structures remaining from the camp period are some of the munition bunkers that were also used to house prisoners. [5]
Buchenwald was a Nazi concentration camp established on Ettersberg hill near Weimar, Germany, in July 1937. It was one of the first and the largest of the concentration camps within Germany's 1937 borders. Many actual or suspected communists were among the first internees.
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Mauthausen was a Nazi concentration camp on a hill above the market town of Mauthausen, Upper Austria. It was the main camp of a group with nearly 100 further subcamps located throughout Austria and southern Germany. The three Gusen concentration camps in and around the village of St. Georgen/Gusen, just a few kilometres from Mauthausen, held a significant proportion of prisoners within the camp complex, at times exceeding the number of prisoners at the Mauthausen main camp.
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Sachsenhausen or Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg was a German Nazi concentration camp in Oranienburg, Germany, used from 1936 until April 1945, shortly before the defeat of Nazi Germany in May later that year. It mainly held political prisoners throughout World War II. Prominent prisoners included Joseph Stalin's oldest son, Yakov Dzhugashvili; assassin Herschel Grynszpan; Paul Reynaud, the penultimate prime minister of the French Third Republic; Francisco Largo Caballero, prime minister of the Second Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War; the wife and children of the crown prince of Bavaria; Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera; and several enemy soldiers and political dissidents.
Ohrdruf is a small town in the district of Gotha in the German state of Thuringia. It lies some 30 km southwest of Erfurt at the foot of the northern slope of the Thuringian Forest. The former municipalities Crawinkel, Gräfenhain and Wölfis were merged into Ohrdruf in January 2019.
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Charles Thomas Payne was an American veteran who served in the U.S. military during World War II as a member of the U.S. Army's 89th Infantry Division that liberated Ohrdruf, a sub-camp of the Buchenwald concentration camp when he was age 20. A brother of Madelyn Lee Payne Dunham, Payne was former President Barack Obama's granduncle and was mentioned in Obama's speeches, including the one given in 2009 commemorating the anniversary of D-Day.
During the Holocaust, death marches were massive forced transfers of prisoners from one Nazi camp to other locations, which involved walking long distances resulting in numerous deaths of weakened people. Most death marches took place toward the end of World War II, mostly after the summer/autumn of 1944. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners, mostly Jews, from Nazi camps near the Eastern Front were moved to camps inside Germany away from the Allied forces. Their purpose was to continue the use of prisoners' slave labour, to remove evidence of crimes against humanity, and to keep the prisoners to bargain with the Allies.
Ravensbrück was a Nazi concentration camp exclusively for women from 1939 to 1945, located in northern Germany, 90 km (56 mi) north of Berlin at a site near the village of Ravensbrück. The camp memorial's estimated figure of 132,000 women who were in the camp during the war includes about 48,500 from Poland, 28,000 from the Soviet Union, almost 24,000 from Germany and Austria, nearly 8,000 from France, and thousands from other countries including a few from the United Kingdom and the United States. More than 20,000 of the total were Jewish. Eighty-five percent were from other races and cultures. More than 80 percent were political prisoners. Many prisoners were employed as slave laborer by Siemens & Halske. From 1942 to 1945, the Nazis undertook medical experiments on Ravensbrück prisoners to test the effectiveness of sulfonamides.
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SS-Truppenübungsplatz Heidelager was a World War II SS military complex and Nazi concentration camp in Pustków and Pustków Osiedle, Occupied Poland. The Nazi facility was built to train collaborationist military units, including the Ukrainian 14th Waffen SS Division "Galician", and units from Estonia. This training included killing operations inside the concentration camps – most notably at the nearby Pustków and Szebnie camps – and Jewish ghettos in the vicinity of the 'Heidelager'. The military area was situated in the triangle of the Wisła and San rivers, dominated by large forest areas. The centre of the Heidelager was at Blizna, the location of the secret Nazi V-2 missile launch site, which was built and staffed by prisoners from the concentration camp at Pustków.
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David Cohen was a soldier in the United States Army and a schoolteacher. In World War II, Cohen was a liberator of the Ohrdruf concentration camp in Nazi Germany as a member of the 4th Armored Division as a radio operator.
The most massive and systematic attempt at genocide was believed to be an exaggeration until his reports came home.