'The truth about the Buchenwald concentration camp' - a rare and early testimony of a prisoner in the Buchenwald camp

'The truth about the Buchenwald concentration camp' - a rare and early testimony of a prisoner in the Buchenwald camp

DIE WAHRHEIT ÜBER DAS KONZENTRAIONS LAGER BUCHENWALD - The truth about the Buchenwald concentration camp: A factual report by a veteran political prisoner of the Hitler Gestapo, on the Buchenwald-Weimar concentration camp. Early and unknown testimony of a Buchenwald inmate Werner A. Beckert. Unnamed Publisher. German. July 1945 - Detailed and difficult testimony about the Nazi abuse and the methods of killing the Jews in the camp. The booklet is accompanied by 40 black-and-white photographs of the horrors of the camp - including rare photographs that were first published in this publication. Extremely rare.

Werner stayed in the Buchenwald camp for one of the longest periods an inmate in the Nazi death camps in general, - from September 12, 1938 to April 11, 1945, having already been held in the Dachau camp about a year earlier. On the first page is a portrait photograph of Beckert in an inmate uniform with his 986 inmate number. Werner, who witnessed the horrors of Buchenwald during all his years of operation by the Nazis, describes in detail the camp's horrors: how the mortality rate was high during the first months of the camp, and how the inmates themselves were forced to build the camp crematorium. At first there were two large incinerators in each of which three bodies were burned, later in these two furnaces about 10-12 bodies were burned in parallel. He goes on to describe the abuse of prisoners by the SS men who worked in the camp quarry, the severe heat, storms, and heavy rains, and how the prisoners who tried to escape were shot, as well as the speed with which within a few months, sturdy prisoners became skinny Terribly. "I have witnessed this abuse for months, and I have seen these horrific images, that horror, every day." Werner tells of an incident in which 400 Jews from the Netherlands were brought to the camp, and were soon transferred to the Gozen quarry and shot to death there. He also describes a 'special method of torture' that was introduced specifically against the Jewish prisoners in the Mauthausen camp - the Jews were loaded with heavy stones and forced to climb 100 steps in the quarry, many prisoners collapsed up the stairs, and stones in their hands fell and hit others. In the same quarry: two Jews were forced to fight a duel at the head of the quarry, the one who managed to push the other and stay at the head of the quarry survived. If the Jews refused to take part in the strange 'battle', they were both killed. And adds and describes severe abuse of Jews while mentioning their names, and many details about each and every event he witnessed. He also tells about the deportations of Jewish women and children to Auschwitz and Bergen - Belsen, as well as of deportations of Jews who came from the Compiegne camp in France to Buchenwald.

Werner further describes, among other things, a special event in which 34 English and Canadian pilots were executed in 1944 and taken captive, and after their deaths anatomical medical experiments were performed on their bodies. Towards the end of the testimony he details the number of prisoners left in the camp during his occupation by American forces, as well as the number of bodies, the elderly, and children left in it, as well as how when the first Allied tanks were observed, the prisoners were armed and showed General Patten the enter of the camp, and how the camp commanders  did not fire a single shot, and ends with a wish that things will be enacted and documented forever for future generations.

16 p. 27 cm. Very good condition.