| Original caption: “Starved maltreated prisoners at Buchenwald concentration camp now getting good care from Yank liberators. Emaciated man, foreground, Hungarian Jew, is so thin his backbone can be seen from the front. Many, past help, will die. Other can be saved.” War Correspondent Charles T. Haacker (November 9, 1916 – October 5, 1952) attached to the United States Army 4th Armored Division, 3rd Army, 1st shot photos at the Ohrdruf Konzentrationslager (KZ; “Concentration Camp”) before visiting Buchenwald. 6,115 Hungarian Jews were sent to Buchenwald during the Summer of 1944, when most were transported to Auschwitz for selection and extermination. A 2nd transport of 1,913 Hungarian Jews arrived on Christmas Day 1944. They joined Dutch, French, Czech, Belgian and Polish Jewish inmates. The Fascist elements in Hungary enjoyed broad popular support and Miklós Horthy’s (June 18, 1868 – February 9, 1957) dictatorial government concluded an alliance with Nazi Germany in the late 1930s. Antisemitic legislation was passed and more than 100,000 Jewish men were mobilized for forced labor; approximately 40,000 perished. When Hungary joined the war against the Allies, nearly 20,000 Jews from Kamenetz-Podolsk who held Polish or Soviet citizenship were turned over to the Germans and murdered. However, the extermination phase in Hungary only began later, after the Nazi invasion in March 1944. Until then Horthy refused to succumb to Hitler’s pressure to hand over the Jews. At this time there were more than 800,000 Jews living in Hungary, as a result of annexations of regions from Slovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia. In May 1944 the deportations to Auschwitz began. In just 8 weeks, some 424,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. After October 1944, when the Arrow Cross party came to power, thousands of Jews from Budapest were murdered on the banks of the Danube and tens of thousands were marched hundreds of miles towards the Austrian border. In all, some 565,000 Hungarian Jews were murdered. Haacker photographed orphans to try to located their parents in Displaced Persons (DP) camps across Europe after the war. | |
| Image Filename | wwii0580.jpg |
| Image Size | 643.33 KB |
| Image Dimensions | 3506 x 2646 |
| Photographer | Charles Haacker |
| Photographer Title | ACME |
| Caption Author | Written or Adapted by Jason McDonald |
| Date Photographed | April 29, 1945 |
| Location | Konzentrationslager Buchenwald |
| City | Weimar |
| State or Province | Thuringia |
| Country | Germany |
| Archive | National Gallery of Art |
| Record Number | 2018.177.365 |
| Status | Caption ©2026 MFA Productions LLC Please Do Not Duplicate or Distribute Without Permission; Image in the Public Domain |
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