The liberation of Buchenwald
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.
Buchenwald was liberated on 11 April 1945, and the part usually left out is who did the liberating. For the last six hours of the camp's existence, the prisoners held it.
The morning the guard broke
American armour was moving east through the country around Gotha from first light, and the SS on the Ettersberg could hear it coming. At about ten in the morning every SS man in the camp was ordered out.[1] That order is the hinge of the day: it left some fifty thousand people behind barbed wire[2] with nobody on the towers and no idea what would arrive first, the army or a unit sent back to finish the job.
The weapons that had been hidden
The International Camp Committee had been waiting years for precisely this gap. Its resistance groups were called out and the weapons the prisoners had hidden piece by piece were handed round. They took the gate, overpowered the SS men still inside, and by four in the afternoon the camp belonged to the people it had been built to hold.[1]
Twenty-one thousand
The memorial counts 21,000 people liberated on the Ettersberg that day, more than 900 of them children and young people.[1] Buchenwald had stood for seven years and nine months, and the memorial dates its own subject from the arrival of the first prisoners on 15 July 1937 to this afternoon.
The walk up the hill
Within days the residents of Weimar were brought up the Ettersberg and walked through the site, along a road many of them had taken on Sundays. What the town had been able not to know for seven years took an afternoon to show them.
Sources
- Chronologie: Befreiung — Gedenkstätte Buchenwald, retrieved 29 August 2026
- Chronologie: Konzentrationslager — Gedenkstätte Buchenwald, retrieved 29 August 2026
Historical figures
Historical figures
1918–2005 • communist • block elder • Righteous Among the Nations
More than 370 children and young people came through to the liberation in his block alone.
1895–1959 • Social Democrat • lawyer • resistance organiser • politician
He presented the committee's manifesto after the liberation.
1923–2011 • writer • resistance member • screenwriter
Liberated on 11 April 1945, and a member of the clandestine organisation that acted that day.
1904–1992 • communist • resistance organiser • historian
Active in the International Camp Committee until the liberation — the organisation that armed itself and took the gate on 11 April 1945.
Historic sites
Historic sites
Buchenwald, 99427 Weimar
The memorial marks 11 April as the day the camp it preserves was liberated.
Period
1933–1945
The end of the camp, and the end of the Nazi period in the district round Weimar.
In Weimar's history
In Weimar's history
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 day that closed the camp opened seven years and nine months earlier on the same hill.
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.
904 children and young people were in the camp on the day it was liberated.
Four months after the liberation, the Soviet occupation began interning people on the same ground. 28,494 were held there until 1950 and 7,113 of them died.
Four months separate the liberation of the concentration camp from the first transports into the special camp on the same site.
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.
Cremer's eleven figures depict the prisoners' self-liberation — the subject is the day the camp fell, not the day an army arrived.