©Musée de la Résistance et de la Déportation, Besançon.
©Musée de la Résistance et de la Déportation, Besançon.
©Musée de la Résistance et de la Déportation, Besançon
Every transport train could bring typhus or dysentery into Buchenwald. As a result, every new arrival had to go through the disinfection building. It was designed to process a capacity of 35 to 50 people at once. Exhausted from days of riding in a train or marching, starving, thirsty, and sick, inmates were forced to undergo this humiliating procedure: They had to remove their clothes and hand over all their remaining possessions. The hair on their bodies and heads was shaved off, and they were dipped in a stinging disinfectant. After passing through this gauntlet, they had to walk naked through an underground passage to the storage depot.
Many of the Jews, Sinti, and Roma delivered from Auschwitz feared for their lives upon entering the flat building—since in Auschwitz entering a "delousing" station meant sure death in the gas chambers. However, there were no gas chambers used for murdering people at Buchenwald. The disinfection rooms that have survived were merely used to disinfect clothing.
This renovated building has housed the
