Buchenwald Death Statistics

Only 8 days after the Buchenwald concentration camp was liberated, the political prisoners held a mourning ceremony near the gate house where they had constructed an obelisk in honor of the victims. At this ceremony, the number of dead prisoners was estimated at 51,000. The Jews who were held in the "Small Camp" at the bottom of the slope in the barracks that were the farthest away from the gate house were not invited to attend the ceremony, which was for Communist political prisoners only.

According to a U.S. Army report dated May 25, 1945, there was a total of 238,980 prisoners sent to Buchenwald during its 8-year history from July 1937 to April 11, 1945, and 34,375 of them died in the camp. This report was based on records confiscated from the camp after it was liberated by the Army.

According to an information booklet, which I obtained from the Buchenwald Memorial Site, records kept by the camp secretary show the number of deaths each year in Buchenwald, as follows:

The horrendous death toll during the first two months of 1945 was due to a typhus epidemic in the camp. During the same time period, there were also severe epidemics in all the other major concentration camps in Germany. Typhus is spread by lice and prisoners coming into Germany from the death camps in Poland were the carriers of the lice. The worst epidemic of all was at Bergen-Belsen where 35,000 prisoners died in March and the first two weeks of April 1945. The death statistics from Buchenwald indicate that the typhus epidemic was being brought under control there. The Nazis did not use DDT, which was an insecticide used to control lice in America at that time. To control the lice that spreads typhus, the Nazis used Zyklon-B, a poison gas which was also used to kill the Jews in the gas chambers in Poland.

The total number of prisoners registered in the Buchenwald camp was around 238,000 according to a guidebook for the city of Weimar. This book puts the death total at 65,000. Various other sources put the total number of people sent to the camp between 239,000 and 250,000. Soviet Prisoners of War that were sent to Buchenwald to be executed because they were Communist Commissars were not registered as inmates.

The total number of prisoners at Buchenwald was only 5,382 at the start of the war on September 1, 1939, but by the end of September 1939 the camp population had increased to 8,634 after Polish Resistance fighters were brought in. By December 1943, there were 37,319 prisoners in the camp, as more political prisoners from Poland were brought in, along with many Soviet Prisoners of War. There were 63,084 prisoners in the Buchenwald complex, including the sub-camps, in December 1944 and the population of the main camp and all the sub-camps reached 80,436 in late March 1945 after the death camps in Poland were closed and the Jewish survivors were brought to various camps in Germany, including Buchenwald.

According to a booklet that I obtained from the Buchenwald Memorial Site, which was written by Sabine and Harry Stein, "More than 8,000 Soviet prisoners of war were shot in the stable. An estimated number of 1,100 people were executed in the crematorium and an estimated number of between 12,000 and 15,000 people were dead upon arrival from the camps in the east or fell victim to the evacuation marches. This gives a total number of approximately 56,000 persons killed."

The booklet written by the Steins also states that "A total of 11,000 Jews lost their lives in Buchenwald. Out of the 13,969 inmates who died in 1945, there were 7,000 Jews." Most of the Jews who died in the last months of the war were prisoners who had been brought to Germany from the camps that were closed in Poland as the Germans retreated from the advancing Russian army. Under Article 7 of the 1929 Geneva Convention, Germany was obligated to move Prisoners of War away from the combat zone. Many concentration camp inmates died on enforced marches, including large numbers who were evacuated out of Buchenwald in April 1945.

According to the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, "on April 6, 1945, the Germans began evacuating the Jewish prisoners. The following day, thousands of prisoners of various nationalities were evacuated from the main camps and the satellite camps. Of the 28,250 prisoners evacuated from the main camp, 7,000 to 8,000 either were killed or died by other means in the course of the evacuation. The total number of prisoners from the satellite camps and the main camp who fell victim during the evacuation of Buchenwald is estimated at 25,500...."

A U.S. Army Intelligence report, dated April 24, 1945, put the Buchenwald death toll at 32,705. A later U.S. Government report in June, 1945 put the total deaths at 33,462 with 20,000 of the deaths in the final months of the war. The International Tracing Service of Arolsen, an affiliate of the Red Cross, released a report in 1984 which said that the number of documented deaths in Buchenwald was 20,671 plus an additional 7,463 at the notorious satellite camp called Dora, where prisoners were forced to work underground in the manufacturing of V-2 rockets for the German military. (In October 1944, Dora became an independent camp named Nordhausen.)

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This page was last updated on July 20, 2007