Due to the hard labour, the lack of food and water, and the violence of the SS, there were many sick and injured people in the camp from the very beginning. Nevertheless, the construction of the prison infirmary – also known as the ‘Revier’ – here in the north-western section of the prison camp took years to complete.
According to orders from the SS camp command, only prisoner nurses, and no prisoner doctors, were permitted to work in the infirmary during the early years. Most of them had no medical training whatsoever. The SS doctors in charge showed no interest in providing proper medical care.
Under these conditions, the prisoner nurses’ ability to help their fellow prisoners was very limited. They could not openly defy the SS doctors. All that remained for them was to help themselves and acquire specialist knowledge.
The German prisoner Willi Dehnert, a bricklayer by trade, was employed as a nurse in the infirmary until 1939. He later wrote of this period:
“The SS doctors in charge of the prisoners’ infirmary […], who were bound by their Hippocratic Oath to help those in distress, violated this […] in a criminal manner on countless occasions. We prisoner medics had taken over their actual, responsible duties and acted in accordance with the ethical demands of Hippocrates, without even really knowing who Hippocrates actually was. But we acted. Even against the orders of the SS. […] What were we paramedics by profession? Apart from those skilled in writing, who were employed in clerical work, […] we all came from a wide variety of trades. Without exaggeration, they all acquired extensive medical knowledge, whereby we trained one another. […] We learnt a great deal from the Jewish doctors from Vienna whom we consulted in secret. They gave us advice on what needed to be done in the various cases of illness and how it should be done.”[1]
Despite the organised self-help efforts of the prisoner functionaries, the situation in the prison infirmary remained precarious right up until the camp’s liberation.
[1] Memoir by Willi Dehnert, undated (Archive of the Buchenwald Memorial)
