Walter Bartel
Biography
The prisoner who built the connections between nationalities that became Buchenwald's International Camp Committee — the organisation that took the camp on 11 April 1945.
A commercial apprentice sent to Moscow
He was born on 15 September 1904 at Fürstenberg an der Havel into a socialist working-class family. The memorial's biography has him committing early to the KPD while apprenticed in commerce, and the party promoting him — in 1929 it sent him to Moscow to study. He was arrested in Prague in 1939 and taken to Buchenwald.
The committee was made of contacts
"Die Kommunisten hier vertrauen ihm. Er knüpft Kontakte zwischen den verschiedenen Nationen und bildet so die Basis für das Internationale Lagerkomitee" — the communists in the camp trusted him, he made contacts between the different nationalities, and that became the basis of the International Camp Committee, in which he was active until the liberation. That sentence is the whole method: a camp deliberately organised to set nationalities against each other was resisted by the slow, dangerous work of introducing them to one another.
Afterwards, and the difficulty of afterwards
In the GDR he became a professor of contemporary history and one of the leading figures of the International Buchenwald Committee. The memorial notes, without elaborating here, that the party "took him back" later — a phrase that carries a history of its own. The committee he helped build was also the thing the GDR later made its founding myth from — so what he did is worth saying plainly, and the myth is left to the historians.
Connected Places in Weimar
Buchenwald, 99427 Weimar
A prisoner of the camp the memorial preserves, and afterwards one of the heads of the International Buchenwald Committee.
Historical Context
Arrested in Prague in 1939 and held at Buchenwald until the liberation.
The regime wanted Weimar for what its name meant, and it built a concentration camp on the hill above the town. Both facts belong to the same twelve years.
Read more about this period →Professor of contemporary history in the GDR, and a leading figure of the International Buchenwald Committee.
For forty-five years Weimar was a provincial town that the state could not afford to neglect, because the classics it kept were the pedigree East Germany wanted for itself.
Read more about this period →Quick Facts
1904
1992
German
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.
Held in the camp from 1939, where he built the contacts between nationalities that became the camp committee.
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.
Active in the International Camp Committee until the liberation — the organisation that armed itself and took the gate on 11 April 1945.