Das war Buchenwald. Ein Tatsachenbericht - 'This is what Buchenwald was - a factual report', Leipzig [1945] Published by Verlag für Wissenschaft und Literatur - first edition. Testimony of former Buchenwald inmates from the city of Leipzig. Collected and edited by inmate No. 5495 - Rudi Jahn. From the early, hard, and detailed testimonies, about the atrocities of the Buchenwald death camp by the inmates themselves, accompanied by harsh photographs from the camp as well as diagrams and maps of the camp.
The book first revealed hard evidence of what was happened inside the Buchenwald death camp, beginning in the first months of its operation by the Nazis. The book opens with evidence of the horrible way in which the camp was built during the endless working hours of the prisoners, and without any aids. The large stones were carried on the shoulders of the prisoners, for a whole summer each prisoner was forced to haul stones from the quarry near the camp. If the stone had seemed too small to the camp commanders, the prisoner would have been punished at that moment with horrific beatings. As a result of the heavy weight of the stones, the prisoners' bones were broken, without any medical assistance. Even when the Germans used travel wagons, it was the prisoners who had to push them with unimaginable amounts of stones loaded on them. Further testimony tells of a surprisingly daily order in which the prisoners had to remove their hats and tell each one where he was coming from and where he was going. A stuttering prisoner was beaten and tortured. The prisoners tells that towards the end of the war, when the airstrikes on Germany intensified, the situation in the camp became unbearable, and the Germans vented their anger on the exhausted prisoners. There is detailed evidence about the structure of the crematorium and its daily operation, of the cruelty taken against Jews even more than the Soviet POWs who were often shot in the rear immediately after arriving at the camp, about collective punishments received by the inmates for blaming a lone inmate, about a tent camp set up in the camp's parade ground, where 3,000 Jews and Poles were crammed. The conditions in this area were particularly bad, as the prisoners in it were starved, tortured and neglected, about the harsh overcrowding conditions that led to the outbreak of epidemics, such as typhus and dysentery, and more. At the end of the book, evidence was presented about the liberation of the camp in April 1945, and of the atrocities of the Nazis in the last months of its existence - they began with the evacuation of the Buchenwald sub-camps, into the main camp; The evacuations were brutal, and many of the prisoners were killed during the evacuation, as well as about the entry of the Americans into the camp, and the miracle of those who survived.
130 [2] p. Very good condition.
