Soviet Special Camp No. 2
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.
The same hill, four months later
The first transports arrived on 21 and 22 August 1945.[1] Buchenwald had been liberated in April; by late summer the Soviet occupation was using the site as one of its special camps, and it went on doing so until 1950. Whatever else is true of those five years, this is the fact a visitor should carry up the Ettersberg: the ground has two histories, and they are not the same history told twice.
What the memorial counts
28,494 people were interned in Special Camp No. 2 in all. 7,113 of them died.[1] More than three quarters of those deaths fell in the hunger winter of 1946/47 — which is to say that most of the dying here was not done by execution but by cold and starvation in a camp that its administration was failing to feed.
The site was chosen over an objection
Berlin ordered a Thuringian camp on 3 August 1945. The officer charged with it, Captain Matuskow, looked at several locations, preferred two building complexes in Erfurt, and argued against the Ettersberg because the former concentration camp was in poor condition and therefore insecure.[2] He was overruled. The site was fixed against his advice and he was told to run it — which is how the second camp came to stand on the ground of the first.
Who was sent there
The categories were not improvised. An NKVD order of April 1945 set out who the special camps in the Soviet zone were to take: spies, saboteurs and terrorists of the German intelligence services; members of organisations left behind to work against the Red Army's rear; operators of illegal radio stations, arms caches and printing presses; active members of the Nazi party; leaders of the fascist youth organisations at regional, city and district level; staff of the Gestapo and SD; and heads of regional, city and district administrations, along with newspaper editors and authors of anti-Soviet publications.[2]
Why this is difficult ground
The two camps have been argued over ever since, because each has been used to relativise the other — the GDR preferred not to discuss the second, and some later accounts have leaned on it to soften the first. The memorial holds both, in separate exhibitions and separate burial grounds, and that is the honest arrangement: two crimes on one hill, neither cancelling the other.
Sources
- Sowjetisches Speziallager — Gedenkstätte Buchenwald, retrieved 29 August 2026
- Die Einrichtung des Speziallagers (Bodo Ritscher) — Gedenkstätte Buchenwald, retrieved 29 August 2026
Historic sites
Historic sites
Buchenwald, 99427 Weimar
The memorial preserves the special camp's burial grounds alongside the concentration camp site, and its grounds are open daily.
Period
1945–1990
The occupation years that preceded the GDR, on ground the GDR would later make its national memorial.
In Weimar's history
In Weimar's history
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.
Four months separate the liberation of the concentration camp from the first transports into the special camp on the same site.