The inscription on the gates of Buchenwald: "To each his own"

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:45

Weimar is a city in Germany where J. Goethe, F. Schiller, F. Liszt, J. Bach and other outstanding people of this country were born and lived. They turned a provincial town into a German center of culture. And in 1937, highly cultured Germans built a concentration camp nearby for their ideological opponents: communists, anti-fascists, socialists and others objectionable to the regime.

The inscription on the gates of Buchenwald, translated from German, meant "to each his own", and the word "Buchenwald" itself literally means "beech forest". The camp was built for especially dangerous criminals. Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, Slavs, mulattos and other racially "inferior" people, "subhumans", appeared later. The true Aryans put into the term "subhuman" that this is a likeness of a person, which is spiritually much lower than the beast. This is a source of unbridled passions, the desire to destroy everything around, primitive envy and meanness, not covered by anything. But the most important thing is that these are not individuals of some people, but entire peoples and even races. The Nazis believed that as a result of coming tothe Bolshevik authorities began to rule the country by the most degenerate people on Earth, and the communists are innate criminals. After the attack on the USSR, Soviet prisoners began to enter the camp, but almost all of them were shot.

Thus, in a few days in September 1941, 8483 people were killed. At first, there was no record of Soviet prisoners, so it is impossible to establish how many people were shot in total. The reason for the shootings is trivial. The International Red Cross could supply prisoners of war with parcels from home, but the USSR had to give lists of those who were captured, and no one needed the prisoners. Therefore, by the spring of 1942, 1.6 million Soviet prisoners remained, and in 1941 there were 3.9 million of them. The rest were killed, died of starvation, disease, froze in the cold.

At the Nuremberg trials, documents were announced according to which the Nazis were going to exterminate the population in the occupied territories: 50% in Ukraine, 60% in Belarus, up to 75% in Russia, the rest were supposed to work for the Nazis. In September 1941, Soviet prisoners of war appeared in Germany. They were immediately forced to work, including in military factories. Professional soldiers and patriots did not want to work for the enemy. Those who refused were sent to concentration camps. And for them the inscription on the gates of Buchenwald was intended. The weak and professionally unfit were destroyed, and the rest were forced to work.

You work - you are fed, you do not work - you are hungry. And so that the “nonhumans” would understand, the inscription on the gates of Buchenwald was made in such a way thatit was read from inside the camp. In the camp, the Nazis did what they wanted. For example, the wife of the head of the camp, Elsa Koch, selected newcomers with interesting tattoos and made lampshades, handbags, wallets, etc. from their skin, and gave written advice to her friends - the wives of the guards of other camps - on this procedure. The heads of some of the dead were dried to the size of folded fists. Doctors tested on people anti-frostbite, typhoid, tuberculosis and plague vaccines. They conducted medical experiments, organized epidemics and tested means of dealing with them. They pumped out blood for the wounded, and not 300 - 400 grams, but all at once. One cannot even raise a hand to describe even some of the horrors that the prisoners experienced.

The inscription on the gates of Buchenwald should be taken into account the highly educated German society. For him, only the Aryans were people, and all the rest were subhuman, “untermensch”, they were not even people, but only looked like people. Their fate with the complete victory of National Socialism is only slavery and life in the position of working cattle. And no democracy. This is the idea from which the inscription on the gates of Buchenwald was born. From the beginning of April 1945, under the leadership of an underground international resistance organization, the prisoners ceased to be subordinate to the camp administration. And two days later, having heard a cannonade from the west, the camp rose in revolt. Having broken the live barbed wire fences in many places, the prisoners seized the barracks of the SS guards and almost 800 guards. Most were shot or torn apart by hand, and 80man was taken prisoner. On April 11, at 3:15 pm, the self-liberated camp was occupied by a battalion of Americans. They restored the fence, herded the prisoners into the barracks and ordered them to hand over their weapons. Only a battalion of Soviet prisoners did not hand over their weapons. On April 13, the gates of Buchenwald opened wide open - Soviet troops entered the camp. This is the end of Hitler's history of Buchenwald. Of the 260,000 people who ended up in the camp, the Germans killed almost 60,000. In total, almost 12 million people were killed in German concentration camps during World War II.