page_title: Buchenwald concentration camp
section_title: Causes of death
hierarchical_section_title: Buchenwald concentration camp / Death toll / Causes of death
caption_attribution_description: English: Prisoners from Buchenwald awaiting execution in the forest near the camp.On April 26, 1942, a Polish forced laborer, who worked at Bauern Schmidt's courtyard was beaten to the point of unconsciousness by a German policeman, Albin Gottwald. Two Poles took revenge on Gottwald and stabbed him to death on a forest path between Poppenhausen and Einoed. The two Poles then escaped. One of the two Poles, Jan Sowka (b. 10/19/22 in Thayngen, Switzerland) was apprehended shortly after his escape. On May 11, 1942, nineteen prisoners from Buchenwald were taken to the place in the woods where Gottwald's body had been found. The Buchenwald SS built three gallows -- two consisted of ten hooks each, and one was a single gallows. The nineteen Polish prisoners were positioned behind the gallows, and Jan Sowka stood on the opposite side. The executions began at 10:50 where the prisoners and Jan Sowka were hanged one after another on the single gallows. At the end, they were all hanged from the two group gallows. Hundreds of Polish forced laborers from the surrounding area were rounded up and forced to watch the executions.
context_page_description: Buchenwald was a Nazi concentration camp established on Ettersberg hill near Weimar, Germany, in July 1937. It was one of the first and the largest of the concentration camps within Germany's 1937 borders. Many actual or suspected communists were among the first internees.
  Prisoners came from all over Europe and the Soviet Union—Jews, Poles and other Slavs, the mentally ill and physically disabled, political prisoners, Romani people, Freemasons, and prisoners of war. There were also ordinary criminals and sexual "deviants". All prisoners worked primarily as forced labor in local armaments factories. The insufficient food and poor conditions, as well as deliberate executions, led to 56,545 deaths at Buchenwald of the 280,000 prisoners who passed through the camp and its 139 subcamps. The camp gained notoriety when it was liberated by the United States Army in April 1945; Allied commander Dwight D. Eisenhower visited one of its subcamps.
  From August 1945 to March 1950, the camp was used by the Soviet occupation authorities as an internment camp, NKVD special camp Nr. 2, where 28,455 prisoners were held and 7,113 of whom died.
context_section_description: A primary cause of death was illness due to harsh camp conditions, with starvation—and its consequent illnesses—prevalent. Malnourished and suffering from disease, many were literally "worked to death" under the Vernichtung durch Arbeit policy (extermination through labor), as inmates only had the choice between slave labor or inevitable execution. Many inmates died as a result of human experimentation or fell victim to arbitrary acts perpetrated by the SS guards. Other prisoners were simply murdered, primarily by shooting and hanging.
  Walter Gerhard Martin Sommer was an SS-Hauptscharführer who served as a guard at the concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenwald. Known as the "Hangman of Buchenwald", he was considered a depraved sadist who reportedly ordered Otto Neururer and Mathias Spannlang, two Austrian priests, to be crucified upside-down. Sommer was especially infamous for hanging prisoners off of trees from their wrists, which had been tied behind their backs (a torture technique known as strappado) in the "singing forest", so named because of the screams which emanated from this wooded area.
  Summary executions of Soviet POWs were also carried out at Buchenwald. At least 1,000 men were selected in 1941–42 by a task force of three Dresden Gestapo officers and sent to the camp for immediate liquidation by a gunshot to the back of the neck, the infamous Genickschuss.
  The camp was also a site of large-scale trials for vaccines against epidemic typhus in 1942 and 1943. In all 729 inmates were used as test subjects, of whom 154 died. Other "experimentation" occurred at Buchenwald on a smaller scale. One such experiment aimed at determining the precise fatal dose of a poison of the alkaloid group; according to the testimony of one doctor, four Soviet POWs were administered the poison, and when it proved not to be fatal they were "strangled in the crematorium" and subsequently "dissected". Among various other experiments was one which, in order to test the effectiveness of a balm for wounds from incendiary bombs, involved inflicting "very severe" white phosphorus burns on inmates. When challenged at trial over the nature of this testing, and particularly over the fact that the testing was designed in some cases to cause death and only to measure the time which elapsed until death was caused, one Nazi doctor's defence was that, although a doctor, he was a "legally appointed executioner".
caption: On 26 April 1942, twenty Polish prisoners were hanged in retaliation for the killing of a German overseer. Pictured awaiting execution.
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