Buchenwald anniversary a painful symbol

BERLIN -- Pavel Kohn survived a death march from Auschwitz and a winter train trip in open coal cars. He arrived at Buchenwald concentration camp a frostbitten, exhausted 15-year-old Jewish orphan, his parents and older brother already dead in the Nazi Holocaust.

Kohn was among the lucky ones rescued by American troops who freed Buchenwald 60 years ago Monday. Some 56,000 others -- Jews, Soviet POWs, non-Jewish political prisoners -- perished at the camp just outside the city of Weimar.

"It was close to a miracle that I was still alive," Kohn, a Prague native now living in southern Germany, told The Associated Press. "Although I was just a bit older than 15, nothing could surprise me anymore in terms of cruelty."

For many of the aging survivors, this is likely the last major remembrance event.

"The camp was packed, there was hunger, and the living conditions and hygiene were unbelievable," said Kohn.

But unlike Auschwitz, he noted, Buchenwald had no gas chambers. Here prisoners were mainly worked to death. Among the methods was forcing prisoners to carry enormous loads up a slope while singing. The SS guards called them "Singing Horses." It was also the camp where Ilse Koch, the commandant's wife, had lampshades made from dead prisoners' skin.

More than any other Nazi camp, Buchenwald stands for the contrast between the humane, cultured Germany and the nation that voted in 1933 for Adolf Hitler, started World War II and organized the killing of 6 million Jews.

Nazi prisoners began building the camp on the Ettersberg hill in the summer of 1937, clearing part of a forest where Goethe once sought inspiration.

The first inmates included criminals, homeless people, Jehovah's Witnesses and homosexuals. By late 1938, Buchenwald held more than 10,000 Jews, mainly from Germany and Austria.

After Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, more and more inmates from German-occupied areas were brought to Buchenwald. Soviet prisoners began arriving in 1941; the SS built a special chair in which to shoot them in the back of the head.

Though not built expressly for killing, like Auschwitz, Buchenwald was just as much part of Hitler's effort to wipe out those deemed un-German. Starvation, disease, overwork and medical experiments claimed many lives among the 240,000 prisoners brought to Buchenwald.

Meanwhile, the SS had a zoo, riding hall and brothel.

Kohn arrived on Feb. 10, 1945. In a twist of fate, he was sent to a camp section for young inmates where he was treated, he says, "almost humanely." Later, he got high fever and was treated at the camp infirmary.

When the 6th Armored Division of the U.S. 3rd Army reached Buchenwald on April 11, Kohn was among some 21,000 gaunt and sick inmates still alive.

The commandant, Karl Koch, had just been executed by the Nazis for corruption. His widow ended up serving life imprisonment and killed herself in jail in 1967. Weimar, a city of 64,000, became part of communist East Germany after World War II.

Pavel Kohn returned to his native Czechoslovakia, fled to Germany in 1967 to escape communist rule and is now a retired journalist living with his wife in Bavaria.

---

Associated Press writer Jochen Wiesigel contributed to this report.