Buchenwald

From the camp at Buchenwald TIME Correspondent Percy Knauth reported: In Buchenwald today I saw death reduced to such a state of ordinariness that it just left me numb and feeling nothing, not even sickness at my stomach.

Propaganda is propaganda and in this war we have had more than our share of atrocity stories, but Buchenwald is not a story. It is acres of bare ground on a hill side in Thuringia where woods and fields are green under warm spring sun. It is miles and miles of barbed wire once charged with electricity and guarded by machine-gun towers built of creosoted pine logs. It is barracks after barracks crowded with 21,000 living, breathing human beings who stink like nothing else on earth and many of whom have lost the power of coherent speech. It is gallows standing in desolate courtyards, ropes still swinging from the hooks, pillories standing in the great parade ground just beneath the main gate, where men were tied down and beaten until they blubbered.

It is a place where prisoners, on seeing an SS man approaching from a distance, ducked for cover anywhere they could, because the young man in the clean black uniform might shoot them if he happened to feel like pulling out his gun. Buchenwald is a fact which has existed, on a small scale at first, for eleven years, and it is a fact which will stink through the years of history as long as generations of mankind have memories.

Half-Melted Skeletons. Buchenwald is something of a showplace now, nine days after it was liberated, and there are certain things you have to see. There were two ovens there, each with six openings. It was a clean room with no smell. At one end was a wash basin with soap still in the dish and a door leading to the "Buero or office. At the other was a plaque hung high on the wall, black with a symbolic flame painted on it and a quotation from some German poet: "Let not disgusting worms consume my body . . . give me the clean bright flame" etc.

The ovens were not clean. In some of them there were still charred remains, a grinning, blackened skull, a chest from which the flesh was still not fully burned away, skeletons half melted down. The ovens were cold now but in recent weeks before the Americans came their clean bright flame consumed between 150 and 200 people daily.

I went out to the little courtyard where the gallows stood, a stout wooden frame with several hooks and a stool on which men stood before an SS kick deprived them of their last grip on life.

Death in the Cellar. Down in a cellar on a clean, whitewashed wall were many hooks jutting out near the low ceiling. For the benefit of visitors a dummy had been strung up there, its stuffed toes just touching the floor. Before we came men were strung up similarly, pulled up till they choked. It took them a long time before they gave up the instinctive fight for breath, and there are scratches on the walls where they clawed vainly for support. Before they left the SS men had tried to eradicate these marks with paint and had also pulled out several of the hooks, but they left too quickly to do a thorough job.

Bodies Like Firewood. With other G.I. sightseers we came up from the cellar and passed into another yard fenced in by a high wooden wall. There was a pile of bodies there, stacked more or less the way I stack my firewood back home, not too carefully. There were men and some of them were naked. They looked strange.

Their mouths were open as though in pain and little streaks of blood flowed from their noses. "Some kind of hemorrhage," said a medical corpsman. "Hell, those guys died of starvation," said another G.I.

He stared and stared and couldn't get that thought out of his mind, repeating it over and over: "Those guys just starved to death. They just starved." It was easy to see that they were starved. There was just nothing on them, nothing but yellowish or brownish skin stretched, tightly over bones and cavities and all their members hung down loosely, as they lie on men who throw themselves down exhausted to the ground. Some men who were not dead sat idly on a bench nearby. A Frenchman who had drifted up just smiled and smiled in that curious, almost hysterical way that you sometimes smile at overwhelming horror.

The Living Dead. We stopped in front of one barracks and looked inside while a Czech surgeon who had been there explained that 1,500 people lived and slept there.

It was a long dim room full of murmurs and movements of figures in all kinds of clothes, from the striped uniform of Buchenwald to just a sack draped over bony shoulders. The walls were lined with bunks built right up to the ceiling. The 1,500 slept four, six or eight or any number to a bunk. When it was really crowded, men slept on top of each other and the ones on the bottom, like as not, were dead of suffocation in the morning.

Awful and Unnatural. What it all boiled down to was that human life was here as nothing. Nobody gave a damn for it. Nobody gave a damn whether an inmate in Buchenwald lived or died. The SS men, if they felt like it--if they just felt like it--would kill men as they wouldn't kill an animal, they would snuff out his life as they might that of an insect which they happened to see on the road.

Buchenwald did not have a diet, really. There was a form of soup once a day and some bread. The amount doesn't matter; it was not enough to sustain life. I saw hundreds of Buchenwald's 21,000 (there had been 48,000 but more than half had been evacuated to the interior of Germany) who were as starved as the corpses in the crematorium yard. You cannot adequately describe starved men; they just look awful and unnatural. There was nothing but their bones beneath the tightly stretched skin, none of the roundedness, the curving and the flat places, the swelling muscles which men usually have. They walk or creep or lie around and seem about as animate as the barracks and fence posts and the stones on Buchenwald's bare, hard-packed earth, and when they are dead they are corpses and then gone.

It was only as we walked through and out of this barracks that I realized it was a hospital, or rather a place where inmates themselves did what they could to keep alive those who were too far gone to live.

At the far end it smelled a little of chlorine for a change, and there were white enamel bowls and a small kitchen. Since the Americans arrived, these people's chances to survive have increased slightly. On that day 200 died of malnutrition and disease. The day that I was there, 70 died.

Buchenwald is beyond all comprehension. You just can't understand it, even when you've seen it. It is terrible and beyond understanding to see human beings with brain and skillful hands and lives and destinies and thoughts reduced to a state where only blind instinct tries to keep them alive. It is beyond human anger or disgust to see in such a place the remnants of a sign put up by those who ran the place: "Honesty, Diligence, Pride, Ability . . . these are the milestones of your way through here."

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