One of the most remarkable and important documents to emerge from the Holocaust and World War II, The Buchenwald Report is a deposition against the monstrous crimes of the Nazis--damning testimony provided by their victims in a final act of defiance. Maps. Glossary. FROM THE PUBLISHER In the closing weeks of World War II, advancing Allied armies uncovered the horror of the Nazi concentration camps. The first camp to be liberated in western Germany was Buchenwald, on April 11, 1945. Within days, a special team of German-speaking intelligence officers from the U.S. Army was dispatched to Buchenwald to interview the prisoners there. In the short time available to them before the inmates' final release from the camp, this team was to prepare a report to be used against the Nazis in future war crimes trials.
Nowhere else was such a systematic effort made to talk with prisoners and record their firsthand knowledge of the daily life, structure, and functioning of a concentration camp. The result was an important and unique document, The Buchenwald Report. Shockingly, not long after the war ended The Buchenwald Report was almost lost forever. Only selected portions were entered as evidence at the Nuremberg trials. Professor Eugen Kogon, a prisoner at Buchenwald who assisted the Army specialists in conducting their interviews and writing the report, made use of the material gathered as a background source for his classic book, The Theory and Practice of Hell, but subsequently his copy was accidently destroyed.
L Thus the complete report was never published, and both the original document and a precious handful of copies gradually disappeared. Recently - more than four decades later - a single, faded carbon copy was discovered, apparently the only one still in existence. It is translated from German and presented here in book form, as its authors intended, for the first time. FROM THE CRITICS Publishers Weekly After Buchenwald was liberated by the U.S. Third Army, U.S. intelligence officers were dispatched there to gather testimony for future war-crimes trials.
The wide variety of humanity whose voices are heard in this report-Jews, political prisoners, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, clergymen, Poles, Russians, slave laborers who worked outside the camp-collectively presents a detailed account of daily life at Buchenwald as well as specific methods of terror and control used by the SS guards, and conveys the power of ideology to distort human behavior. Much of the report concerns the catastrophic punishments administered for petty infractions, i.e., examples of individual sadism. The original German-language report was thought to have been lost, but the head of the U.S. interview team at Buchenwald, Albert Rosenberg, kept a copy, which is here edited and translated by Univ. of Texas historian Hackett.
This seminal document, published here in its entirety for the first time, is a report compiled for the Allied Army from interviews with the inmates of the Buchenwald concentration camp, located near Weimar, Germany in April 1945, shortly after the camp's liberation. It has been translated and provided with notes and annotations by Hackett (history, Univ. of Texas, El Paso) and a foreword by the late Frederick Praeger (the publisher), who describes the origins of the report and the fascinating story of how it was found after having lain neglected in U.S. government archives. Here are presented, in dispassionate yet moving prose, the accounts of those who witnessed the horrors of the Black Cell Block, the punishment detail, the medical experiments, the social order of the camp, how it was built, how it functioned before and during the war, and how it was liberated. It is immediate, direct, and, as the product of the testimony of many people, more inclusive and wide-ranging than any single individual's personal testament. A classic of Holocaust literature that should be in any library that covers Europe. PUblished at Thirty Dollars.
