Mass Arrests - Buchenwald Memorial

On the crowded Buchenwald roll call square, about a thousand men stand separately in groups of eight. They stand in rows in blocks of about five by 16, but between the blocks there are other people. In the background some barracks. — Jewish men arrested in the days after the pogrom night of November 9, 1938, have to stand roll call, November 1938. Photo: Recognition Service of Buchenwald Concentration Camp.

©Internationaler Strafgerichtshof, Den Haag

The number of prisoners steadily increased over the course of 1938. As part of the "Arbeitsscheu Reich" (ARS) initiative—targeting "work-shy" persons in the German Reich—the police sent more than 4,000 men to the Buchenwald Concentration Camp in April and June, where the SS registered them as "ASR" inmates. Under the guise such arrests, hundreds of Sinti and Roma and over a thousand Jews were deported to Buchenwald. In October 1938, the number of inmates surpassed 10,000 for the first time. After the November pogroms, an additional 9,845 Jewish men were deported to the half-finished camp by the Gestapo. The intention was to force them to leave the country through the use of terror and violence. As a result of overcrowding and a permanent lack of water, typhus broke out at the camp in late 1938. Due to inmate releases and deaths, the number of inmates sank to approximately 5,400 by the beginning of the war. Since the founding of the camp, over a thousand men had lost their lives in Buchenwald by this point in time.