Buchenwald
Buchenwald was a Nazi concentration camp established on Ettersberg Hill near Weimar, Thuringia, Germany, in July 1937. The name "Buchenwald" means "beech forest" in German, such a forest surrounding the area where the camp stood.
The first commandant was Karl Otto Koch, whose second wife Ilse was known as "The Witch of Buchenwald" (Die Hexe von Buchenwald)', one of the cruelest figures of the Holocaust.
Despite not technically being an extermination camp, mass killings of prisoners of war took place in the camp, and many inmates died during medical experiments, or fell victim to arbitrary acts perpetrated by the SS.
The camp was also the site of illegal large-scale testing of vaccines for epidemic typhus in 1942 and 1943, all in all testing 729 inmates, around 280 of whom died. Because of their long association in cramped quarters in Block 46, the virus in the inmates killed more and infected longer than normal typhus.
The camp was largely evacuated by the Nazis as Allied troops approached the area, and was finally occupied by the U.S. 3rd Army on April 11, 1945 with minimal resistance.
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