The Dead of Buchenwald

1. Dead. In this number are included all those who died in camp, were beaten to death, or were shot from October 1, 1937, to April 10, 1945, in addition to the external work details (with the exception of women)..........................................................................................................34,566

2. Liquidations. Number of Russian prisoners of war murdered in the horse stable by a shot through the base of the skull estimated at .............................................................................7,200

Estimated number of executions based on the clothing of murder victims received in the Personal Property Room.......................................................................................................1,100

Precise figures are available only from the end of March 1944; before that there was no opportunity to gather information.

This number must be regarded as the minimum number of deaths brought about by Nazi barbarism in Buchenwald. Not included in these numbers are the many hundreds who froze or starved to death on transports to and from Buchenwald. Not Included in these numbers are the numbers of dead from transports to liquidation camps that did not leave Buchenwald solely as liquidation transports. That, too, would amount to several hundred victims. It is therefore certainly still too conservative to set the number of those who died or were murdered under the immediate influence of Buchenwald at 55,000 victims.^*

^*Leni Yahil estimates the actual number of deaths in Buchenwald at 70,000, or 30 percent of the total of all prisoners admitted there. She includes in this number the figures given here, plus the number of prisoners evacuated in the week before liberation in April 1945. Leni Yahil, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932-1945, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 536.