| Original caption: “Two weakened prisoners of war lie on the ground behind barbed wire at the Buchenwald concentration camp.” By February 1945, there were 112,050 prisoners in Buchenwald; 28,000 inmates, mostly those too weak to resist, new prisoners, and those without connections, half of them Jews, were packed into overladed trains for the Flossenbürg, Theresienstadt, and Dachau concentration camps. Half of them died. But the camp was still massively overcrowded. Sergeant Howard Cwick (August 25, 1923 – April 25, 2006), a Jewish American soldier with the 281st Combat Engineer Battalion, began exploring the “Little Camp.” He smelled the enclosure’s 1 latrine before he saw it. Nearly overcome, he buried his nose in the crook of his arm. A stooped-over shell of a man came up to him, tugged at his sleeve, and began excitedly yelling in Polish or Russian. He motioned for Cwick to take a look inside the latrine, which he did. “The filth…was indescribable,” he recalled. Still the man kept gesturing and pointing downward. Cwick glanced down and nearly recoiled in abject horror. “At the top of that nearly filled pit of human waste lay an almost submerged rotting body of a man. That poor soul must have lost his balance and fallen off the two encrusted boards that served as the seat. Being far too weak, he must have been unable to claw his way back up, and so, down there, in that cesspool of human filth, he lost his fight for breath, and either suffocated or drowned.” In far too many instances, prisoners had been unable to even make it to the latrine. With their stomachs in severe turmoil, wracked by diarrhea and dysentery, many had no control over their bowels. “So, wherever we went,” Cwick said, “there was feces, feces, feces, the major cause of even more serious illnesses.” United States Army General George S. Patton (November 11, 1885 – December 21, 1945), commanding 3rd Army, came face to face with survivors of the “Little Camp,” some of whom tried to cheer him but were too weak to emit more than a few stilted cries. Civilian Egon W. Fleck (June 30, 1902 – July 26, 1982), and Lieutenant Edward Tenenbaum (November 10, 1921 – October 14, 1975), the analysts from 12th Army Group G-2 Intelligence, were the 1st Americans to visit this horrible place. “A trip through the ‘Little Camp’ is like a nightmare,” they wrote. In a matter of seconds, scores of skeletal, lice-ridden, diseased inmates converged on the 2 men “like magic, pouring out of doorways as if shot from a cannon. Almost all wear striped convict suits, covered with patches or grey-black remnants of Eastern clothing. The universal covering is a little black skull cap. They doff these ceremoniously to the visitors. Some are crying, others shouting with joy.” With bony hands they touched and hugged the Americans. In this crowd of degraded humanity, Fleck and Tenenbaum were especially saddened to see children, most of whom were probably between the ages of 20. The stench of the place was overpowering, as Fleck and Tenenbaum described: “The smell of death is thick in the air. In the main camp there are solid barracks, clean and well made. In the small camp there are twenty-seven low wooden barns. In these are three to five tiers of wide shelves running the length of the building. On them are sacks of rotten straw, covered with vermin. In the center of the camp are open sheds, covering deep concrete-concrete-lined pits. These are the latrines, from which pour an indescribable stench.” The terrible condition of the “Little Camp” inmates created a disturbing tendency to dehumanize them, even in the minds of these caring American visitors. Many other Allied soldiers would experience the same difficulty envisioning these survivors as full-fledged human beings similar to themselves. Perhaps this lends some insight as to how ideology-tainted guards could so regularly mistreat and brutalize their prisoners. | |
| Image Filename | wwii0579.jpg |
| Image Size | 426.96 KB |
| Image Dimensions | 1600 x 1368 |
| Photographer | Byron H. Rollins |
| Photographer Title | |
| Caption Author | Written or Adapted by Jason McDonald |
| Date Photographed | April 21, 1945 |
| Location | Konzentrationslager Buchenwald |
| City | Weimar |
| State or Province | Thuringia |
| Country | Germany |
| Archive | |
| Record Number | |
| Status | Caption ©2026 MFA Productions LLC Please Do Not Duplicate or Distribute Without Permission; Image in the Public Domain |
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