The Witch Of Buchenwald Essay

In 1937 hundreds of thousands of people were brought into the notorious Nazi

concentration camp Buchenwald, where thousands of families were torn apart. Buchenwald was

one of the many Nazi concentration camps where Jews and others were brought to work and die.

The camp was run by Karl­Otto Koch, who ran the camp from 1937 to July of 1941. The next

commandant was his second wife, Ilse Koch, who became notorious as Die Hexe von

Buchenwald, which meant “The witch of Buchenwald” for her cruelty and brutality (Karl Otto

Koch). Buchenwald was one of the most horrendous places during World War II. This camp held

thousands of inmates, ranging from political prisoners to the Jews; The way the inmates were

treated were horrible, from

“In 1978, President Jimmy Carter appointed Elie Wiesel as

Chairman of the President 's Commission on the Holocaust, he later in 1980, became the

Founding Chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council.” In 1986, Elie Wiesel

won the Nobel Prize for Peace (Elie Wiesel 2). Elie Wiesel was also there to depict the final days

in the camp before it was overrun by the inmates.

The camp met its final days in April of 1945. The U.S. forces were getting closer to the

camp so the staff of the camp decided to evacuate. In the beginning of April one of the inmates,

Elie Wiesel, depicted the final days in his book “Night”. It stated that during the final days that

the Lagerkommandant announced that the camp would be liquidated, which meant that the camp

was to be evacuated and destroyed. The camp began to evacuate ten blocks of inmates every day.

From then on there would be no distribution of bread and soup. “Every day, a few thousand

inmates passed the camp 's gate and did not return” (Wiesel 114). On April 10th, there were still

twenty thousand prisoners in the camp, among them a few hundred children. The camp staff

decided to evacuate all prisoners at once, and that once all prisoners were evacuated they