Newsgroups: alt.revisionism,soc.history
Subject: Holocaust Almanac: The Liberation of Buchenwald
Followup-To: alt.revisionism
Organization: The Nizkor Project http://www.nizkor.org
Keywords: buchenwald 

Archive/File: holocaust/germany/buchenwald buchenwald.02
Last-Modified: 1994/02/21

[Speaking of the liberation of Buchenwald, and the death of the American
president, Franklin Roosevelt, author Abram Sachar paints a surrealistic
picture of an American officer, who requests the freed prisoners at
Buchenwald to participate in a tribute/memorial to FDR...]

"The moment was most confusing for the Polish Jews. The tribute to the
President called up every reserve of remaining strength, but the plea for
`understanding and reconciliation,' at such a point, left them bewhildered.
Even as they attempted to raise their voices they must have remembered the
day when a train had arrived at Buchenwald from Poland with only 300 living
beings of the 4,000 who had been packed into the cars. Removing the
corpses had been unusually laborious since most of the bodies had been
frozen together; their arms and legs snapped off in the unloading.

Some of the Hungarian prisoners must have remembered the 2,000 Hungarian
girls aged between fifteen and twenty-five who had shared the miseries of
camp life since the Budapest mass deportations of 1944. More than five
hundred of them had been indentured as slave labor in the Krupp munitions
works in neaby Essen. Their heads shaven, garbed in burlap sacks, housed in
unheated barracks through the winter, set upon by dogs to prod them in
their work, they had performed like robots until the intensive Allied
bombardment began. They were forbidden access to the air-raid shelters and
huddled together in terror in open trenches. The plants destroyed, Krupp
officials herded the survivors into freight cars and returned them to
Buchenwald, for the girls had been merely `on loan.' The German camp
commandant could not accept them since he had already received thousands of
other prisoners from camps also under fire. The girls were not even
unloaded for bodily relief before being shipped on to dreded Bergen Belsen.
On the parade ground now, it would have been understandable if the
Hungarian prisoners let their attention lapse to wonder about the fate of
these exhausted girls. [Some of the women survived Belsen to give testimony
against the Krupps and the German armaments tycoons and their slave labor
practices.] 

Half listening ... was a solitary Dutchman, Max Nabig, the last of hundreds
of his countrymen who had been deported to Buchenwald. The others in the
Nabig group had perished in the Mauthausen death camp. He, a Jew from
Amsterdam, had been assigned to Dr. Hans Eysele, an SS `research' physician
who needed human bodies on which to test reactions to pain during
operations performed without anesthesia. Nabig had undergone stomach
resection under such conditions. After the operation he escaped being
discarded like a laboratory animal when a compassionate nurse substituted
some benign substance for the usual lethal injection. Other prisoners had
kept Nabig hidden and he lived to testify at the international trials <4>.
Nabig's thoughts, as he stood in tribute to Roosevelt, have not been
recorded. In his testimony, however, he implied that the American officer
who conducted the memorial appeared to regard the whole war effort as a
sports competition in which the winners, in a show of civilized chivalry,
were to shake hands with the losers.

Dr.  Eysele was arrested when the camp was captured, stood trial, and was
given the death penalty.  But the sentence was commuted to an eight-year
prison term, of which he served five.  Released in 1952, the province of
Bavaria loaned him, as a `homecomer,' 10,000 marks `for losses due to the
war.' He practiced medicine for a time in Munich.  He was about to be
rearrested in 1955 when fresh evidence of many other inhuman experiments
became available. Warned, perhaps by the police, he fled and was granted
asylum in Nasser's Egypt, where he settled down to a lucrative practice in
Cairo."

<4> Kogon, Eugene. "The Theory and Practice of Hell: The Concentration
    Camps and the Theory Behind Them" pp. 28-29

Extracted from--------------------------------------------------- 
"THE REDEMPTION OF THE UNWANTED", Abram L.  Sachar (New York: St.
Martin's/Marek, 1983.

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