Description
Object description
Women inmates and Hungarian Jewish women and girls liberated from the Penig Concentration Camp on 17 April 1945, and taken to a Luftwaffe Hospital by US Red Cross Ambulance convoy, to be cared for by German staff under US control. Scenes of Buchenwald Concentration camp on 17 April 1945, six days after liberation, showing the layout, conditions under which thousands had died and the state of survivors.
Full description
JEWISH CONCENTRATION CAMP [Dope sheet title] Unedited record film. Liberated women and Hungarian-Jewish women inmates on stretchers are transferred from US Red Cross ambulances into the Luftschutz Sanitätsraum (German Air Force Hospital) by Luftwaffe personnel, under the direction of US medics, on 17 April 1945. Some women, smiling or wary, respond to the presence of the camera, others lie supine under blankets, in rows on the grass, waiting to be carried inside. Three German nurses watch with unreadable, serious expressions, and are seen tending the arrivals, who are now in clean beds, one with fluffy white hair sitting up smiling at the US doctor. At Penig camp the US medics remove a corpse from a hut in which the women are seen being hastily examined by the US Army doctor before dispatch to hospital. They are filthy, some have ulcerated wounds, tick and lice infestations, high fever or tuberculosis, all are emaciated and some are confused and frightened enough to resist the efficient, but not reassuring, manner of the helmeted US doctor as he briskly conducts intimate and humiliating diagnosis. They are carried or walked out to waiting ambulances where still and movie cameras record their condition before the ambulances move off in convoy led by one with two crossed cavalry swords on its radiator. The camp is seen to be in empty flat country and to have electric fencing.
Full description
BUCHENWALD CONCENTRATION CAMP [Dope sheet title] General scenes of Buchenwald Concentration camp near Weimar, Germany, on 17 April 1945, six days after its liberation by the US 4th Armored Division Combat Command B. Many ranked rows of single storey huts, with larger two storey buildings among them, stand in the vast camp compound with lines of trees in blossom and fields beyond. There are columns of US troops moving among the inmates. Many white flags fly on hut roofs. Inmates have drawn with coal a large portrait of Stalin on a hut gable-end and are saluting it enthusiastically for the camera. The exterior of the crematoria is shown. A convoy of white vehicles enters the camp adorned with crudely painted Red Cross and Switzerland labels in French and English. There are many children to be seen among the inmates. Emaciated naked corpses are unloaded from a metal framed handcart to form part of a large heap which is being casually sniffed by a loose German Shepherd dog whom the watching inmates touch idly as it strolls away. A large heap of partially shattered human bones lies outside a hut, nearby thin men sit eating bread, one weeps as he is filmed. Some lie so still beside the electric wire fence that they seem dead until a head is raised and the eyes watch the camera.
Physical description
35mm