Execution Room at Buchenwald

The photo above shows the morgue in the basement of the Buchenwald crematorium building. According to information given to visitors to the Buchenwald Memorial Site, this room was used to execute prisoners by hanging them by the neck from hooks near the ceiling until they were dead.

However, a different explanation for the hooks was given by one of the former Polish prisoners to Cpl. Norman W. Paschen when he toured the camp shortly after it was liberated by American troops.

The following quote is from a letter to his family, written by Cpl. Paschen:

We then went to the crematory, a cold, dismal building resembling a dungeon. A large chute similar to a coal chute had been used to convey the bodies to a cellar. On the walls of the cellar were many hooks which were used to hold the corpses until it came time for them to be elevated to the crematory upstairs. The hooks had been forced into the neck behind the ear. They were still blood-stained. In this room, also men were executed if they were deemed no longer useful to the Nazi. The methods of execution were varied. Sometimes a bullet was used, but our guide informed us that his captors had said many times that a bullet was too expensive a price to pay for the death of a slave. Poison gas or starvation was much cheaper.

The photograph above shows the ovens used at Buchenwald for cremation; a steel trolley cart used to shove the bodies inside. The bodies had to be perfectly straight in order to fit inside the ovens. In the right hand corner of the room, you can see the hand operated elevator used to bring the corpses up from the execution room in the basement.

To the left of the elevator door is the door into a small room which has a shower stall and a toilet for the use of the crematorium workers; it is shown in the photo below.

Buchenwald was one of the four main concentration camps in the Greater German Reich; the other three were Dachau, Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen. Dachau had a gas chamber, disguised as a shower room, that was only used a few times, according to the Dachau Museum. Sachsenhausen also had a gas chamber disguised as a shower room, which was blown up by the East German military in the 1950ies. Mauthausen had a gas chamber disguised as a fully functioning shower room, but the Nazis removed the gassing apparatus before they abandoned the camp, according to the Mauthausen Museum. Buchenwald had only a small shower stall in a room with a toilet next to the crematorium; there was no shower room near the ovens that was big enough for the mass gassing of prisoners at Buchenwald.

Instead of a gas chamber disguised as a shower room, the Buchenwald concentration camp had an "execution chamber" in the basement of the crematorium. In the execution chamber, the victims died a horrible death from suffocation after being hung from meat hooks near the ceiling, according to the camp guidebook. The execution room is shown in the photo at the top of this page.

Execution by suffocation was unique to the Buchenwald camp; in all the other concentration camps in the Greater German Reich, prisoners were executed by public hanging or shooting. The Nazis referred to the Buchenwald "execution chamber" as the Leichenkeller (corpse cellar) where bodies were supposed to be kept before they were burned, but according to the Buchenwald guidebook, the bodies were stored in a shed near the east gate into the camp, a long way from the cremation ovens.

As shown in the 1999 photograph at the top of this page, tourists today can see the reconstruction of the infamous meat hooks, which are about the size and shape of horseshoes, attached to the wall of the "execution room." There are now at least two dozen reconstructed hooks on the wall, some of which are in a section of the room that is not shown in the photograph.

The following quote is from the Buchenwald Report:

They removed the meat hooks used for hanging bodies, cemented in the holes, and covered up the blood-spattered walls with a fresh coat of white paint. In their haste, however, they did not completely finish the job of hiding the evidence: After liberation, an American medical officer reported seeing four hooks still in the wall and partially filled holes for forty-four more, as well as a bloodstained club.

The photo above shows a group of US Congressmen on a visit to Buchenwald on April 24, 1945. They are being shown the "bloodstained club" that was found by the American liberators in a corner of the execution room. On the right is what appears to be a dummy hanging from a hook on the wall; this was part of the exhibit shown to visitors after the liberation.

General George S. Patton, who toured Buchenwald on April 15, 1945, wrote the following in his autobiography regarding what he was told by the former prisoners:

If a sufficient number (of the Buchenwald prisoners) did not die of starvation or if, for other reasons, it was desirable to remove them without waiting for nature to take its course, they were dropped down a chute into a room which had a number of hooks like those on which one hangs meat in a butcher shop, about eight feet from the floor. From the execution room in the Buchenwald set-up there was an elevator, hand operated, which carried the corpses to an incinerator plant on the floor above.

The "chute" which Patton saw was identical to the "corpse slide" at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, which was used to roll dead bodies down into the morgue in the basement. Executions at Sachsenhausen were carried out at a firing range or in a gas chamber disguised as a shower room which was in the crematorium building. At the Buchenwald death factory, the basement room at the end of the chute was an execution room, not a morgue. There was apparently no morgue for storing the bodies before they were cremated.

According to the camp guidebook:

Approximately 1,100 people were strangled to death on wall hooks in the body storage cellar. Ivan Belevzev from Kharkov, 8 years old, was the youngest victim of the murderers.

Under German law in the Third Reich, no one under the age of 16 could be executed, but an exception was apparently made for the 8-year-old who was executed at Buchenwald.

According to the Buchenwald Memorial Site, the SS shot Ernst Thälmann, chairman of the German Communist Party and a member of the Reichstag, at the entrance of the crematorium "during the night from 17th to 18th August 1944." This was shortly before the Allied bombing raid on Buchenwald on August 24, 1944 in which the Memorial Site says that Dr. Rudolf Breitscheid, the chairman of the Social Democrats, was killed.

The Memorial Site at Sachsenhausen claims that both Breitscheid and Thälmann were executed at Sachsenhausen. The Nazis claimed that both were killed in the Allied bombing raid at Buchenwald on August 24, 1944.

No Buchenwald gas chamber?

Some Americans are surprised to find that there is no gas chamber shown to tourists in the former Buchenwald camp because in the first few years after the war, there were numerous claims that a gas chamber was part of the Buchenwald death factory.

At the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal in 1946, the French prosecutor submitted an official report which stated:

Everything had been provided for down to the smallest detail. In 1944, at Buchenwald, they had even lengthened a railway line so that the deportees might be led directly to the gas chamber. Certain [of the gas chambers] had a floor that tipped and immediately directed the bodies into the room with the crematory oven.

Sir Hartley Shawcross, the chief British prosecutor at the Nuremberg trial, stated in his closing speech that murder had been conducted "like some mass production industry in the gas chambers and the ovens" in Buchenwald and other Nazi concentration camps.

Jean-Paul Renard, a French priest who was an inmate at Buchenwald, wrote a book about his camp experiences in which he stated:

I saw thousands and thousands of persons going into the showers. Instead of liquid, asphyxiating gases poured out over them.

In a book published in 1947, Georges Henocque, another French priest and the former chaplain of the Saint-Cyr Military Academy, wrote a detailed description of the inside of the gas chamber in Buchenwald, which he claimed that he had visited.

In a book entitled "Black Book on the Martyrdom of Hungarian Jewry," published in Switzerland in 1948, Hungarian Jewish writer Eugene Levai wrote that the Nazis had killed tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews in the gas chambers at Buchenwald.

A book by Earl Raeb, entitled "The Anatomy of Nazism," which was distributed by the ADL in 1979, also mentions the gas chamber in Buchenwald.

Medical Experiments

Execution of Soviet POWs

Buchenwald Atrocities

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