1945 US Army report says commies ran Buchenwald | Winston Smith Ministry of Truth Archive

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1945 US Army report says commies ran Buchenwald

Not declassified until 1972, a U.S. Army intelligence document of April 24, 1945, entitled Buchenwald: A Preliminary Report, reveals the true story of who committed the atrocities at the Nazi concentration camp.

Alfred Toombs, a U.S. Army intelligence chief, wrote in its short preface that the secret report was "one of the most significant accounts yet written on an aspect of life in Nazi Germany" because it "tells how the [Buchenwald] prisoners themselves organized a deadly terror within the Nazi terror."

"The trustees had wide powers over their fellow inmates. At first they were drawn almost exclusively from the German criminals (German concentration camps were also used as jails for criminals). This period lasted until 1942. But gradually the Communists began to gain control of this organization. They were the oldest residents, with records of 10-12 years in the concentration camps... The Communists maintained excellent discipline and received a certain amount of direction from outside the camp. They had brains and technical qualifications for running the various industries established at the camp.

Their advances were not made without resistance from the criminals, but gradually the criminals were eliminated from power, partly by intimidation, partly with the aid of the SS. Numbers of the criminals were killed by beatings, hangings, or injections of phenol into the heart or of air or milk into the veins. The injections were a specialty of the camp doctor [Hoven], who became a partisan of the Communist faction.

Besides the top positions in the trusty organization, there were a number of key Communist strongholds in the administration of the camp. One was the food supply organization, through which favored groups received reasonable rations while others were brought to the starvation level. A second was the hospital, staffed almost exclusively by Communists. Its facilities were largely devoted to caring for members of their party.... Another Communist stronghold was the property room... Each German trusty obtained good clothing and numerous other valuables. The Communists of Buchenwald, after ten or twelve years in concentration camps, are dressed like prosperous business men."

As a result of all this, the report continued,

"...Instead of a heap of corpses or a disorderly mob of starving, leaderless men, the Americans [who liberated the camp] found a disciplined and efficient organization in Buchenwald. Credit is undoubtedly due to the self-appointed Camp Committee, an almost purely Communist group under the domination of the German politic leader.... The trusties, who in time became inmost exclusively Communist Germans, had the power of life and death over all other inmates. They could sentence a man or group to almost certain death.... The Communist trusties were directly responsible for a large part of the brutalities committed at Buchenwald."

sources:
Joel Hayward's MA thesis. Page 112
Buchenwald: Legend & Reality. By Mark Weber

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