After the war began, some 8,500 men were sent to the Buchenwald Concentration Camp. Among them were hundreds of Czechs and Burgland Roma, over 2,000 Poles, and more than a thousand Viennese Jews. At the same time, the terror of the SS escalated. Random shootings increased. Over 3,000 Poles and Jews were crammed into a fenced-off special camp on the roll call square. Their treatment bore the traits of a planned mass murder. In early 1940, the SS murdered exhausted inmates for the first time by injection. Due to the increasing number of mortalities, the SS had a crematorium constructed next to the roll call square, which went into operation in the summer of 1940. Alone in this year, over 1,800 inmates died at the Buchenwald Concentration Camp.
