After the war, Pister was tried in the Nuremberg Trials, and was sentenced to death. However, in September 1948, before he could be executed, Pister died of a heart problem.
The Nazis sent prisoners from all over Europe and the Soviet Union to Buchenwald. These included:
Somewhere between 500 and 1,000 women prisoners were kept at Buchenwald. First, in 1941, twenty female political prisoners were brought to Buchenwald from Ravensbrück concentration camp. They were forced to work as sex slaves in the camp's brothel.
However, most of the female prisoners were sent to Buchenwald in 1944 and 1945 from other concentration camps. They were sent mainly from Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, and Bergen Belsen. Later, all the women prisoners were sent to Buchenwald's many female satellite camps (smaller camps around Buchenwald).
Ilse Koch was the head supervisor ("Oberaufseherin") of 22 other female guards and hundreds of women prisoners in the main camp. More than 530 other female guards worked in Buchenwald's many other, smaller camps ("subcamps"). Only 22 women served or trained in the main Buchenwald camp, compared to over 15,500 men.
When the Nazis captured soldiers from Western Allied countries, they almost always sent them to prisoner of war camps, not concentration camps. However, they did keep a group of 168 airmen (flyers) at Buchenwald for two months. These men were from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Jamaica. They got to Buchenwald on August 20, 1944.
These airmen's planes had crashed in France, which Nazi Germany controlled. The airmen were sent to Buchenwald, not a POW camp, because the Nazis said they were spies and "terror bombers."
After the war, one airman remembered arriving at Buchenwald:
The airmen were treated and abused in the same way as the other prisoners at Buchenwald. Two airmen died there. Then, in October 1944, the airmen were sent to Stalag Luft III, a regular POW camp. The airmen who were accused of being "terror bombers" were going to be executed at Buchenwald after October 24. They were saved by officers of the Luftwaffe (the German air force), who visited Buchenwald. When they got back to Berlin, these officers made sure the airmen were sent to a regular POW camp, and not executed.
The Nazis' goal for camps like Buchenwald was "Vernichtung durch Arbeit" ("extermination through labor"). This meant that prisoners were being sent to Buchenwald to be worked to death.
Because of the terrible living conditions in the camp, illness was very common and spread quickly. Prisoners were also starving. Because of this combination of illness and starvation, many prisoners were actually "worked to death" as the Nazis had planned. However, many other inmates died from executions, experiments by Nazi doctors, and other causes.
Summary executions of Soviet POWs (executions without a trial) were also done at Buchenwald. In 1941 and 1942, at least 1,000 men were chosen to be killed and were sent to Buchenwald, where they were immediately shot in the back of the head.
Nazi doctors also did experiments on prisoners at Buchenwald. For example, in 1942 and 1943, they used 729 prisoners to test a vaccine for typhus. This meant the prisoners were given the vaccine, and then given typhus on purpose. 154 of these prisoners died. In another experiment, Nazi doctors wanted to see how much of a certain poison was needed to kill a person. They gave four Russian POWs the poison. When the POWs did not die, they were "strangled in the crematorium" and then "dissected" (cut apart to study their bodies). Doctors also burned other prisoners very badly with white phosphorus to test whether a medicine would help similar wounds caused by bombs. After the war ended, at the Nuremberg Trials, one of these doctors defended himself by saying that while he was a doctor, he was also a "legally appointed executioner" (meaning the law allowed him to kill people).
The SS left behind records of how many prisoners came to the camp and how many left. They recorded how many prisoners were let go, sent to another camp, or died. These records say that 33,462 prisoners died at Buchenwald. However, these records may not be completely true. For example, before 1944, when the SS killed prisoners, they often wrote down that the prisoners were "transferred to the Gestapo," not that they were killed. Also, starting in 1941, many Soviet POWs were executed in mass killings. These POWs would be killed as soon as they got to the camp, and were never added to the camp's records. This means they were not listed among the 33,462 dead.
One former Buchenwald prisoner, Armin Walter, counted the number of people who were killed by being shot in the back of the head. Walter's job at Buchenwald was to set up and care for a radio system at the place where people were executed. He counted the number of people who were killed and hid the information. He says that 8,483 Soviet prisoners of war were shot and killed.
When all these deaths are added up, the total number of people who died at Buchenwald is about 56,545. This number includes:
This total of 56,545 deaths means that 24% of the prisoners who were sent to Buchenwald died.
On April 4, 1945, United States soldiers took over Ohrdruf, one of Buchenwald's smaller camps. Ohrdruf was the first Nazi camp liberated (taken over and freed) by U.S. soldiers.
Two days later, the Nazis started trying to evacuate (move everybody out of) Buchenwald. They made thousands of prisoners go on forced marches toward other camps that the Americans had not yet reached.
A Polish engineer named Gwidon Damazyn, who had been a prisoner since March 1941, had set up a secret short-wave radio. On April 8 at noon, Damazyn and Russian prisoner Konstantin Ivanovich Leonov sent a message in Morse code to the Allies. The message had been written by the leaders of the prisoners' underground resistance movement (a group of prisoners who tried to fight the Nazis in secret). It said:
The text was repeated several times in English, German, and Russian. Damazyn sent the English and German messages, and Leonov sent the Russian version. Three minutes after Damazyn sent the last message, the headquarters of the Third United States Army answered:
Damazyn fainted after getting the message.
After learning this news, Communist inmates attacked the camp's watchtowers and killed the guards who were still at the camp. They used guns they had been collecting since 1942 (one machine gun and 91 rifles).
United States soldiers arrived at Buchenwald on April 11, 1945 at 3:15 P.M. (The clock at the entrance gate is now permanently set to this time). The soldiers were given a hero's welcome.
Later that day, United States soldiers took over Langenstein, one of Buchenwald's smaller camps. There, they freed over 21,000 prisoners. They also ordered the mayor of Langenstein to send food and water to the camp, and rushed in medical supplies from an American field hospital.
On Thursday, April 12, 1945, some journalists arrived at Buchenwald. The journalists included Edward R. Murrow, whose radio report about seeing Buchenwald was broadcast on CBS and became one of his most famous:
Between 1945 and February 10, 1950, the camp was run by the Soviet Union. They used it as a prison camp called Special Camp Number 2.
The Soviet Union held 28,455 prisoners, including 1,000 women, at Special Camp Number 2. Soviet records say that 7,113 of these prisoners died. They were buried in mass graves in the woods around the camp. Their families were not told they had died.
Prisoners at Special Camp Number 2 included:
The NKVD (the Soviet police organization that ran the camp) would not let the prisoners talk to anyone outside the camp. The NKVD also did not try to figure out whether the prisoners were guilty.