Block 61 - Buchenwald Memorial

View of Block 61 of the Small Camp. In the background, surviving prisoners in sleeping boxes 11 to 15. These are wooden shelves with four shelves, in which people lie close together with thin blankets. In front of them is an empty wooden table. A liberated prisoner in a long shirt stands next to it — 1/2

In Block 61 of the Small Camp after liberation, April 16, 1945. Photo: Rex L. Diveley.

©National Archives, Washington

Liberated prisoners talking with American soldiers of a wooden barrack. — 2/2

Liberated prisoners in conversation with soldiers of the U.S. Army in front of Block 61, mid-April 1945. Photo: Gérard Raphaël Algoet.

©Buchenwald Memorial

To reduce the number of people in the hopelessly overcrowded Little Camp, the SS began to kill sick, weak, and dying inmates with poisonous injections in January 1945. The order for these murders came from the SS headquarters in Berlin. The murders in Block 61 were carried out by the head SS medic, Friedrich Wilhelm. He forced other inmates to help him and to fill out death certificates with falsified information.

On one day alone, March 1, 1945, 135 deaths were registered at Block 61. Certainly, very many of these were sick inmates who were intentionally murdered. In mid-March the SS halted the systematic killings in the Little Camp. It is unknown, how many inmates were killed in the last targeted mass murder in the history of the camp.