Doug and Kerry Hudson in Buchanwald concentration camp, Germany

World Trip >> Europe >> Germany >> Buchanwald

Our visit to the Buchanwald Memorial and Concentration Camp was an incredibly powerful experience.

First of all we visited the memorial, where there were three mass graves holding around 50,000 bodies between them. This was sobering enough on its own.

The concentration camp is surrounded by thick forest which in normal circumstances would have seemed attractive. However to us, as we walked through the trees, it seemed cold and haunted, as if the trees still shudder at the atrocities they had witnessed. The inmates had suffered humiliation, torture, slave labour, hunger, murder, medical experimentation and who knows what else in this terrible place.

We entered the gatehouse to the camp, where the clock was still stuck on 15:15. This was the time when, as American troops approached the hill, the surviving inmates liberated themselves. Not much remains of the original camp; much of it was destroyed to conceal the evidence. However, we learned about what the inmates had suffered there through an exhibition of art by surviving inmates. These images were very haunting indeed. We also listened to a broadcast by an American radio journalist who visited the camp soon after it was freed. His description of what he saw was so vivid that it chilled us. We also saw photos of the dead bodies stacked up like timber, all men, all completely naked and thoroughly degraded even in death.

We completed our tour with a visit to the crematorium. This left us choked with tears. Until the coal ran out in late 1944, this was where the dead were cremated. Their ashes were then swept all together and put in iron pots, until the pots ran out. Then the ashes were just spread over the ground outside. Under the crematorium we saw the morgue where the dead were disposed, just thrown in down a chute. There were still hooks on the wall where inmates were strangled. Even local villagers who did not tow the Nazi Party line were executed here too. Then the dead bodies were shovelled onto an electric lift up to the ovens for cremating. We were sickened by all of this. Perhaps the most sickening thing of all for Doug, was that the local German people were complicit in the atrocities that happened here and just stood by and let it happen. For example, the kilns in the crematorium were manufactured by a local company.

Before we had visited this place, we had always thought that war is a terrible thing and should always be avoided. However, what we saw here convinced us that to oppose Hitler and fight World War Two was utterly worthy. We are so grateful to all those soldiers, sailors and airmen who paid the ultimate price to win our freedom. Thank you so much.

World Trip >> Europe >> Germany >> Buchanwald

Last updated: Sunday August 27, 2006