Touchin' my mind.

Today I visited the Buchenwald concentration camp complex. It was eerily calm there and the weather was very nice and sunny, in stark contrast to the events which had occurred there over 70 years ago. All of the prisoner barracks were bulldozed in the 1950s, but the block markers and layout of the original camp are still there. The parking lot is the former SS parade ground adjacent to the SS barracks. The main path took us to the front gate where so many Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Soviet POWs, Homosexuals, political prisoners, and other “enemies” of the Nazi state were brought. Buchenwald wasn’t built for extermination, but was a work camp built for the purpose of making war materials. I felt a great sense of sadness throughout the time I was there. The worst part was the crematorium. The entrance was the former medical room where doctors performed medical experiments on live and deceased inmates. The next room was a storage room for corpses, and the next room over were where the ovens were housed. Downstairs was another room for the storage of bodies and where prisoners were tortured by strangulation via hooks mounted on the walls. Another room was the room where unhealthy workers were brought en masse to be killed by gunshot I’ve never been to a more solemn, tragic place and its an experience I won’t soon forget.