BUCHENWALD RELIEF

Manawatu Standard, Volume LXV, Issue 119, 19 April 1945, Page 5

BUCHENWALD RELIEF

AIDING NAZIS' VICTIMS

DEATH BOLT, STILL HIGH. LONDON, April 18. .Substantial help has' been sent to the 21,000 inmates since the Americans overran Buchenwald •Concentration Camp, but men are still dying at the rate of 40 a day because they are beyond help, says a correspondent of the Times.

Scores of first aid men and doctors have arrived, also two complete evacuation hospital camps. A hospital and; 18 barrack buildings have been taken ever for the sick, totalling 5000, more than half of whom are suffering seriously from dysentery, tuberculosis, typhus and starvation. The camp contains 900 children under the -age of 14, mostly orphans. They came in with their fathers, who are either dead or have since been removed. The children are not in such bad shape as the men, but with continuous starvation they resemble little old men with yellow faces and sunken cheeks. Escorted by American military police 1000 citizens of Weimar in batches of 100 were conducted on a tour of the camp in order to let them see the truth about their countrymen's brutality. They were shown the crematorium with the blackened frames of. bodies still in the ovens and two piles of emaciated dead in the yard outside. They were taken through the huts, where living skeletons too weak and too ill to rise lay packed in three-tier bunks', through the riding stables where thousands had been shot before even reaching the inner camp, and through the research block where doctors tried new serums on human beings with fatal consequences for 90 per cent, of them. was an experience they -will never forget. Most of the women and some of the men were in tears as they were conducted from block to block, many crying bitterly. Some of 1 the women <§ fainted and could be taken no further. FAMOUS INMATES. Among the inmates of the camp until April 4 were the former French Premier M. Leon Blum and his wife, M. Daladier (French Premier until the fall of France), General Gamelin (the Allied Commander-in-Chief on the Western Front at the start of the war), Dr. Sclmschnigg (former Austrian Chancellor), General Milch (former chief of the Luftwaffe), and Fritz Thyssen (the German magnate who helped to finance the Nazi Party, broke with Hitler early in the war, fled to Vichy Franco, and was subsequently arrested by the Germans). "Some of .the prisoners in the Buchenwald camp became as brutal as their Nazi oppressors, 1 ' says the Daily Express correspondent. "The Nazis gave some prisoners who had been in the camp nearly 12 years the' 'privilege' of beating their fellow sufferers. "Some thousands of ill-clad, diseased and deliriously happy men seen after the Americans liberated the camp were little above the level of beasts. It takes time to degrade man, but some of these prisoners have been here 10 to 12 years. They entered it as Communists and-anti-Nazi Germans, and they were humane, decent men. But today they are much the same bullies as the Nazis who put them there. The cold, calculating wickedness behind a camp like Buchenwald is something which paralyses the imagination."