On April 16, 1945, a strange procession formed on the road leading out of Weimar, Germany. Hundreds of well-dressed citizens walked under guard. Men wore expensive suits and fedoras. Women wore fur coats and high heels. They chatted and smiled, appearing as if they were heading to a garden party.
They were not going to a party. American soldiers flanked them with rifles at the ready. The soldiers escorted the citizens up a hill called the Ettersberg, five miles away. Their destination was a place the citizens claimed to know nothing about: Buchenwald.
The citizens complained during the walk. They called the march an outrage. They worried about their shoes getting dusty. They believed the Americans were staging a propaganda stunt.
General George S. Patton had a different view. He had visited the camp two days earlier. He had seen the ovens and the piles of bodies. He had also seen the zoo the SS built for their amusement while prisoners starved nearby. He decided the innocence of Weimar was a lie.
Weimar was not just any German city. It was considered the soul of Germany, the city of Goethe and Schiller, a place of libraries, theaters, and parks. Its residents saw themselves as the pinnacle of European culture. Just five miles away, however, stood a factory of death.
Buchenwald concentration camp was established in 1937. For eight years, it operated near the Weimar elite. SS officers lived in suburban homes. Their wives shopped in Weimar boutiques and attended the same concerts. Smoke from the crematorium drifted over the city, and ashes settled on windowsills.
When the Americans arrived, the citizens of Weimar repeated the same phrase: “We knew nothing.” They claimed the smoke came from a factory. They said the emaciated men working on the railroad were volunteers.
On April 11, 1945, the U.S. Third Army arrived. The SS fled, and surviving prisoners took control of the camp. Patton arrived a few days later. He had already seen the camp at Ohrdruf and thought he was prepared. He was not.
Buchenwald was massive. Twenty thousand prisoners remained, many of them walking skeletons. Men weighed as little as sixty pounds. Children had forgotten how to smile. Patton walked through the gates and saw piles of bodies in the courtyard, stacked like firewood.
Patton wrote in his diary that he had never felt so sick in his life. He called it madness, not war. He looked at German civilians in nearby fields, plowing and hanging laundry, ignoring the smell of death that made American soldiers vomit.
Patton asked the camp commander if the people in town knew about the camp. The commander replied that they claimed they did not. Patton slammed his riding crop against his boot. “They are lying,” he said. “And I am going to prove it.”
He called the provost marshal and gave an unusual order. He did not want just the mayor. He wanted the cream of the crop. He ordered MPs to find the richest people in Weimar: professors, lawyers, businessmen, and politicians’ wives. He wanted 1,000 of them rounded up.
The MPs knocked on the doors of grand villas and entered shops. They told civilians to put on their coats for a walk. Some were indignant. One doctor shouted that he could not be ordered around. The MP pointed his rifle and told him to start walking.
A column of 1,000 well-dressed civilians marched up the hill. American jeeps drove alongside to prevent escape. The mood was light at first. Women fixed their hair. Some smiled at cameras. They treated the march as an inconvenience.
The walk took about two hours. As they neared the top of the hill, the conversation stopped. The wind shifted, and the smell hit them. It was not just rotting flesh. It was the smell of old death, stale and greasy, sticking to the throat. Women stopped smiling and pulled out handkerchiefs.
The MPs pushed them forward. They reached the main gate, marked with the cruel Nazi inscription “Jedem das Seine,” or “To each his own.” The civilians walked through the gate and into hell.
The first thing they saw were the prisoners. Thousands stood behind barbed wire, silent, watching. These were the men the civilians claimed did not exist. The prisoners stared at the fur coats and suits with dead eyes. They did not scream or attack. They just stared.
American soldiers guided the civilians toward the crematorium. In the courtyard sat a trailer piled high with naked, emaciated bodies. One woman in a fur coat screamed and fainted. An MP nudged her and told her to get up. “You haven’t seen anything yet,” he said.
The soldiers forced the civilians to look at the bodies. If a man turned his head, a soldier grabbed his chin and turned it back. They were told to look at what was done.
Inside a building, they saw the pathology lab. The SS kept medical records and souvenirs. On a table were two shrunken heads of Polish prisoners. There were pieces of tattooed human skin. The commandant’s wife, Ilse Koch, the “Bitch of Buchenwald,” liked tattoos. She ordered prisoners with interesting tattoos to be killed so she could make lampshades from their skin.
Men in suits wept openly. Some vomited in the corner. An American officer spoke in perfect German. He asked how they could claim ignorance while these items were made in their backyard while they went to the theater and drank coffee. The civilians had no answer.
The tour continued to the “little camp,” the quarantine zone where prisoners were left to die of typhus. The stench was so strong that American soldiers wore masks. The civilians were not allowed masks. They had to breathe it in.
A former prisoner, a skeleton of a man, approached a well-dressed banker. He said he remembered him from the train station. He said the banker had seen him and looked away. The banker fell to his knees, sobbing that he did not know. No one believed him.
By the end of the tour, the 1,000 citizens of Weimar were destroyed. They walked out of the gate in silence. No one chatted. No one smiled. Women’s makeup was streaked with tears. Men’s suits were dusty. They walked back down the hill to their city of poets, but the city would never look the same.
When General Eisenhower heard about Patton’s tour, he did not reprimand him. He expanded the order. He sent a cable to Washington and London asking for the press, congressmen, parliament members, and newspaper editors to come and witness the camps. He wanted witnesses.
Eisenhower said the things he saw beggared description. He made the visit deliberately so he could give firsthand evidence if anyone later claimed the allegations were propaganda. He knew people would try to deny the Holocaust. He forced the Germans to be witnesses against themselves.
The impact was immediate. That night in Weimar, the shame was too much for some. Several prominent citizens who had been on the tour committed suicide in the following days. They could not live with what they had seen.
Patton was told about the suicides. He did not celebrate, but he did not mourn. He simply said, “Good. Maybe the rest of them will learn.”
The forced tour of Buchenwald raises a question still asked today: how much does the average citizen know about the crimes of their government? The people of Weimar did not pull the triggers or turn on the gas. But they looked away. They stayed silent.
Patton understood that silence is complicity. He understood that closing your eyes does not make you innocent. On that day in April 1945, he forced them to open their eyes. The citizens of Weimar walked up the hill as arrogant aristocrats. They walked down as broken accomplices. The ghost of Buchenwald followed them home.