Berlin Trip : Topography of Terror Museum (Jewish Prisoners in Buchenwald Concentration Camp in 1938)

This is another photo that I hadn’t seen before and it’s an image of the Jewish prisoners at the Buchenwald Concentration Camp in late November 1938. They were arrested after Kristallnacht on 9/10 November 1938 and in this photo they were still waiting for their ‘uniforms’, but they had already had their heads forcibly shaved.

Buchenwald had been open for a year at this point, but this was its first major influx of people. There were tens of thousands of Jews who were imprisoned across the Reich, but 9,845 Jews were sent here and many had their financial assets and possessions taken away. Most of the Jews were male and wealthy, this was really a financial priority at the time for the Nazis, but it certainly wasn’t a safe place as the prison population grew to 11,028 by the end of the year and 771 people had already died. Then in February 1939 typhus broke out, with more deaths following that and the camp was put into quarantine. Some Jews were released in late 1938 and during 1939, particularly if they were teachers, they had sold their assets or they had confirmed plans to leave Germany.

It’s an interesting look at how the Nazi policies developed, as what they were hoping for at this stage were for plenty of Jews to emigrate whilst selling their houses, cars and belongings off cheap. The arrests were deliberately not of elderly or poorer Jews and they weren’t meant to be badly treated during the arrests, although many inevitably were given the anti-semitism which had been building up in Germany. It’s one of the locations that I’ve yet to visit and another that I would like to see at some point.