Part of the SS’s methods of control involved creating conditions within the concentration camp where everyone fought against everyone else. Under these circumstances, resistance could also mean maintaining humanity and showing solidarity with others. One example of this is the assistance provided to Soviet prisoners of war, which took place here in the area of the former prisoner-of-war camp on 18 October 1941.
On that day, the Wehrmacht transferred 2,000 Soviet prisoners of war from Stalag 310 in Wietzendorf near Hamburg to Buchenwald concentration camp. Here, on this spot, stood the baracks fenced in with barbed wire, into which the SS herded the prisoners of war. The men who arrived were starving and ragged. The SS met them with brutal violence. The SS camp command had forbidden any contact with them on pain of punishment.
And yet political prisoners dared to come to the aid of the arriving Soviet prisoners of war with spontaneous help.
Aleksey Lysenko was among the men who arrived in Buchenwald that day. Years later, he recalled his first hours in Buchenwald:
“It was almost dark when people in strange striped clothes suddenly appeared at the perimeter fence. They were carrying bowls and flasks of soup. And what soup! Properly hot, seasoned […] I hadn’t seen anything like it for a hundred days! And to top it all off, there was a huge […] piece of meat floating in the bowl. Anyone who had finished their soup – we didn’t eat it, but greedily slurped it down from the bowls – was given a second helping. Where on earth had we ended up? […] It was all pure reality: soup, meat, second helpings, strangers in striped clothing.”[1]
The SS responded to this spontaneous act of solidarity with exemplary punishments and from then on prevented any further aid. Of the 2,000 men crammed into this place, almost one in three died of starvation and disease in the months that followed.
Many of the surviving prisoners of war later took on key roles in the camp resistance. The men from the Soviet prisoner-of-war camp also played a major role in protecting the young people in the neighbouring children’s block 8.
[1] Memoir by Alexei Lysenko, in: Buchenwaldheft 8 (1978), p. 5
