Buchenwald concentration camp is built
From July 1937 the SS had prisoners build a camp on the Ettersberg, the wooded hill above the town. 277,800 people from more than fifty countries were held there; 56,000 did not survive.
The camp on the Ettersberg was built by the people it was built to hold, on the wooded ridge immediately above Weimar.
Built by the people it held
On 15 July 1937 the first prisoners were brought up the Ettersberg and set to constructing the camp that would then confine them.[1] That sequence is not incidental: the men who built the place were the men who would be held in it, and the work began before there was a finished camp to hold anyone.
Before the gates of the town
The memorial's own description places the camp "auf dem Ettersberg vor den Toren der Stadt Weimar"[1] — before the gates of the town. That phrase is doing real work. This was not remote country requisitioned at a distance; it was the wooded ridge immediately above Weimar, and the memorial chose that wording rather than a distance.
What the memorial counts
Between 15 July 1937 and 11 April 1945 the SS deported 277,800 people from more than fifty countries to Buchenwald and its 141 satellite camps: 249,570 men and 28,230 women, among them 30,000 who were not yet adults. 56,000 of them died.[2] These are the memorial's own figures.
How the town and the hill were tied together
Prisoners were worked in armaments production, and the Gustloff plant in the north of Weimar drew its labour from the camp. The relationship between town and hill was therefore not unlucky proximity but an arrangement — and it became visible on 9 February 1945, when bombs meant for the factory killed the prisoners working inside it.
Sources
- Chronologie: Konzentrationslager — Gedenkstätte Buchenwald, retrieved 29 August 2026
- Zahlen und Fakten — Gedenkstätte Buchenwald, retrieved 29 August 2026
Historical figures
Historical figures
1900–1979 • writer • communist • prisoner
One of the camp's early prisoners, arriving in its first year.
1928–2016 • writer • witness • Nobel laureate
One of the 277,800 the memorial counts, arriving in the last winter of the camp's existence.
1918–2005 • communist • block elder • Righteous Among the Nations
He was a prisoner of the camp from 1939 and became block elder of Block 8 at twenty-five.
1883–1942 • librettist • lyricist • prisoner
One of the camp's early prisoners, arriving barely a year after it was built.
1895–1959 • Social Democrat • lawyer • resistance organiser • politician
In the camp he formed the Volksfrontkomitee, a secret cross-party circle of political prisoners.
1888–1959 • pianist • composer • cabaret artist
A prisoner of the camp in its second year, when the Schutzhaftlagerführer ordered a camp song written.
1923–2011 • writer • resistance member • screenwriter
One of the 277,800 taken to the camp; he worked in its labour statistics office.
1877–1945 • sociologist • scholar
One of the 277,800 taken to the camp, and one of the 56,000 who did not leave it.
1891–1945 • veterinary surgeon • mayor • resistance member
One of the 277,800 deported to Buchenwald, from 17 January 1944 until his death.
1904–1992 • communist • resistance organiser • historian
Held in the camp from 1939, where he built the contacts between nationalities that became the camp committee.
Historic sites
Historic sites
Buchenwald, 99427 Weimar
The camp is the site the memorial preserves; the ground and the buildings are the same.
Period
1933–1945
The central fact of Weimar's years under National Socialism, on the hill directly above the town.
In Weimar's history
In Weimar's history
The party built itself an administrative quarter in the middle of Weimar, with a hall for twenty thousand — and used concentration camp prisoners to do it. Most of it is still standing.
Prisoners from the camp were used on the construction — the same year the camp itself was built.
On 24 May 1941 the SS put fifty Buchenwald prisoners into a carriage shed at Kranichfeld to rebuild a castle it had bought — and the point of the work was an insurance claim.
One of the 141 satellite camps the memorial counts; its prisoners came from and returned to the main camp.
On 18 August 1944 the leader of Germany's communists was killed inside the Buchenwald crematorium. Nine years later the first memorial plaque in the prisoners' camp marked the spot, and the GDR arranged its visits around it.
He was killed in the camp's own crematorium, seven years after the first prisoners built the place.
In January 1945 prisoners set up a second children's block at the far end of the Small Camp and kept the boys in it alive. 904 children and young people were in Buchenwald when it was liberated.
The block was improvised inside the camp built eight years earlier by its first prisoners.
A US Air Force raid aimed at the Gustloff armaments works north of Weimar. Eight of ten bombs fell in one tight cluster, killing concentration camp prisoners at their machines, and the Nationaltheater was destroyed the same day.
The dead at the Gustloff works were Buchenwald prisoners: the camp supplied the labour that the raid destroyed along with the plant.
On 11 April 1945, with armoured divisions of the US Third Army approaching, the SS were ordered out and armed prisoners took the camp gate.
The day that closed the camp opened seven years and nine months earlier on the same hill.
Bruno Apitz's novel appeared in 1958 and a DEFA film followed in 1963. For a decade afterwards it was easier to tell Buchenwald's story through a novel than to research it.
The camp whose history the novel came to stand in for.
By 1958 a monumental complex stood on the southern slope of the Ettersberg as the national monument of the GDR — a memorial to the dead that was also a platform for the state that built it.
The complex was built to commemorate the camp on the same hill.