“Labour statistics” (Block 5) / Memorial stone for women inmates

Station 4: “Labour statistics” (Block 5) / Memorial stone for women inmates

The inmates assigned to the “labour statistics” department had to organize and manage the labour deployment of the camp inmates on orders from the SS. As the number of Buchenwald subcamps increased from the mid-war years onwards, labor statistics became ever more important. The department drew up lists for transports to the subcamps, which made up a dense network spreading from the Rhine and the Ruhr in the west to the Elbe in the east.

You can see a black typewriter, which was photographed from above. — 1/2

Typewriter from the labour statistics. Herbert Weidlich, who worked in the labour statistics department, took it with him after the camp was liberated.

©Buchenwald Memorial

On display is a collage of various files from the labour statistics of the Buchenwald concentration camp. — 2/2

Documents from the labour statistics of the Buchenwald concentration camp. Collage: Werkraum-Media

©Buchenwald Memorial

Whether or not an inmate was transferred to a subcamp, and if so which subcamp, was often a decisive factor in his chances of survival. The prospects of survival were greater in armaments production than on the construction sites of, for example, the “Dora”, “Laura” and Ohrdruf camps. For most inmates, transport to a subcamp meant a journey to the unknown which they faced with fear or, sometimes, hope. The Frenchman Robert Antelme, a Buchenwald inmate from August 1944 onwards, recalls:

“For two days we knew we were supposed to be leaving soon. […] A transport was always a bad thing; that much we knew. A transport was what everyone here was afraid of. But as soon as you were slated for it, you resigned yourself to it. After all, for those of us who were new, the fear of transport was abstract. We wondered what could be worse than this huge but overpopulated city where you suffocated and where you didn’t understand how it all worked. […]
The comrades who weren’t leaving looked at us abashedly. In that moment, some were tempted to envy us. We would be escaping the oppressive atmosphere, the incoherence of this city. But most of them seemed uneasy and embarrassed, the way you are towards someone who has just suffered a misfortune but doesn’t know it yet.”⁴

Starting in the autumn of 1944, the labour statistics inmates also oversaw the deployment of more than 27,000 women and girls forced to work for the German armaments industry in the Buchenwald women’s camps.

⁴ Robert Antelme, Das Menschengeschlecht (Munich, 1987 [Paris 1947]), pp. 17ff