Buchenwald

No historian has ever claimed or is currently claiming that any kind of systematic extermination of inmates by any technical means occurred at the Buchenwald Camp. Therefore, this camp would not have a place in an encyclopedia on the Holocaust, if it weren’t for some witnesses having made claims to the contrary, and if the U.S. forces who occupied the camp at the end of the war had not abused this camp as a staging ground for their atrocity propaganda.

Among the witnesses who falsely claimed to have seen people being killed in gas chambers at Buchenwald, we find the French priest Jean-Paul Renard, who retracted it as soon as he was confronted about it. The French priest Georges Hénocque claimed to have closely inspected the Buchenwald gas chamber. Other witnesses reported from hearsay, so they will not be cited here.

After U.S. troops entered the Buchenwald Camp, Eisenhower’s Psychological Warfare Division, tasked with recording material suited to reeducate the German population, set up a table inside the camp filled with various objects allegedly made of murdered inmates: soap, a table lamp, two shrunken heads, tattooed skin etc. Images of these objects are used for “educational” purposes to this day. All of these objects have since disappeared, and have never been subjected to forensic scrutiny as to their origin. (See Irebodd 2009, and the entry on lampshades, of human skin, for more details; see also Weber 1986.)