Block 46 – from 1942 onwards, this block housed the typhus research station of the Waffen-SS Hygiene Institute. It was feared by the prisoners. In the autumn of 1944, however, this place of horror became the scene of a rescue operation.
In August 1944, the Gestapo had deported 37 agents of the British secret service to Buchenwald concentration camp. They had been arrested in France; in Buchenwald, they were to be murdered. Word of this intention spread throughout the camp. Long-serving prisoner-officials, led by the Catholic journalist Eugen Kogon, devised a plan to save at least three of the men.
Pretending to be suffering from typhus, they were to be taken to Block 46 and given the names of three prisoners who had previously died. One of those saved in this way was Stéphane Hessel, then 27 years old. He later recalled:
“We are housed on the first floor of Block 46. On the ground floor lie about 15 seriously ill young Frenchmen. Following the outbreak of a typhus epidemic in a forced-labour camp near Cologne, they were handed over to [the SS doctor] Ding in Buchenwald. It has been decided that we are to assume the identities of the first three who die. Their bodies are to be sent to the crematorium bearing our names and identification numbers. When the watchtower summons us to death by hanging, we will have ‘died of typhus’. […] My task was to gather as much information as possible about the young comrades whose identities we were to assume. To know their professions, the entries on their index cards, so as not to make any stupid mistakes. It was therefore my responsibility to speak to them, or worse still, to hope that their deaths would occur as soon as possible. A strange way to get to know one another!”[1]
The rescue of the three agents was successful. Using their new identities, fellow prisoners entered them into the work records for transport to satellite camps, where all three survived.
Resistance efforts such as this were only possible through cross-group cooperation among prisoner functionaries. However, they were unable to prevent the deaths of the remaining 34 agents. For under the conditions of the concentration camp, help and rescue were always limited and not possible for everyone.
[1] Stéphane Hessel, Dance with the Century, Zurich 1998, p. 105 ff.
