Buchenwald Experiments

The holocaust was a horrible period in time, lasting from 1933 to 1945 and killing over 11 million people, 6 million being Jewish. With 20,000 concentration camps each serving a different purpose, whether it was a transit camp, forced labor camp or extermination camp. On July 16, 1937 the camp Buchenwald was established and set up to be a forced labor camp where the prisoners would build the place in which they stayed and the fence that went around the camp. Buchenwald prisoners included Jews, criminals, Jehovah witnesses, gypsies, and homosexuals. Buchenwald was one of the first and largest concentration camp on German soil with 130 sub camps.

On July 16, 1937 the first group of prisoners came through, most of which were political detainees

The two main experiments they performed on the prisoners were medical experiments and an experiment to find a “cure” for homosexuals. The medical experiments took place in a chamber where they would take Jews, gypsies, and mentally ill prisoners and intentionally infused them with various infections, against their will, to test out vaccinations and to find treatments for contagious diseases. These tests resulted in hundreds of deaths. Buchenwald was also apart of the pink triangle, which was when any homosexuals entered the camp, they would put a pink upside-down triangle on their sleeve to indicate their “kind”. In 1944, Dr. Carl Vaernet, Danish physician, claimed he had found a “cure” for homosexual inmates by performing a series of experiments through hormonal transplants. If they were not “cured” they would be prosecuted or

Her name was Ilse Koch. Her husband Karl-otto Koch was the first commandant at the Buchenwald camp. She would order a prisoner to death for their tattoos, then she would take their marked skin and made things out of them like a lamp shade she had owned. She was just another thing the prisoners at the Buchenwald camp had to face and deal with. One week before liberation she was sentenced to death.

In the year 1985 they turned the Buchenwald camp into a museum where they have a monument filled with the ashes of prisoners from different camps. Elie Wiesel and Paul Argiewicz were one of the many people who had experienced Buchenwald camp grounds. Thankfully, thousands have lived and can share their stories about the awful experience of being apart of the