Report of the English Parliamentary Delegation to the Buchenwald Death Camp. London, April 1945 - The earliest ...

Report of the English Parliamentary Delegation to the Buchenwald Death Camp. London, April 1945 - The earliest report ever made about Buchenwald

BUCHENWALD CAMP THE REPORT of a Parliamentary Delegation, presented by the Prime Minister, the First Minister of Finance and the Minister of Defense, to Parliament - by His Majesty. London, April 1945. The first and earliest report ever made on the Nazi crimes at the Buchenwald death camp. Findings are very difficult to read.

On April 11, 1945 in the morning hours,  most of the SS left the Buchenwald camp. The underground took over the camp, and managed to capture dozens of SS men. That same day, American soldiers from the Sixth Armored Division, commanded by George Patton, arrived at the camp. The soldiers found about 21,000 prisoners in the camp, and the members of the delegation immediately began documenting. The report was delivered by members of the English delegation sent to Buchenwald Earl Stanhope and Lord Addison and published in the same month [end of April] and includes a detailed report of what they saw throughout the camp area while surveying it. The delegation describes the various structures, the condition of the prisoners as they were found on the day of release, the piles of corpses, the terrible Health conditions that were revealed to them, and more. Among other things, the delegation reported on the horrible smell that surrounded the camp, and on many diseases that were noticed in the prisoners who were still alive - mainly tuberculosis and dysentery, on prisoners found with severe bruising marks, on thin cotton clothes in which the prisoners were dressed in extreme cold days. To such an extent the delegation encountered the difficult situation of the prisoners that in the report they write that in their opinion none of the prisoners left alive will survive them in a short time!. In one of the reports, the delegation told about a 14-year-old boy named Avraham Kirchenblatt from Radom, Poland, who impressed the members of the delegation with his high intelligence, and said that his 18-year-old brother was shot to death in front of his eyes, and his body was taken for cremation, and told them about prisoners hanged almost daily. The members of the delegation also provided an extensive description of the crematoria and its operation, of human skeletons found inside the crematoria, and of the terrible process that preceded the bringing of the prisoners to the crematoria, and more.

The report written in first person is ended by the members of the delegation by the words: "In preparing this report, we have endeavored to write with restraint and objectivity, and to refrain from expressing personal response or emotional comments. We conclude, however, from the evidence before us, that a policy of constant hunger and inhuman cruelty had been applied in Buchenwald for a long time. And that these camps are the lowest of the low point to which mankind has ever descended. The memory of what we saw and heard in Buchenwald will haunt us constantly for many years to come. "

7 p. 25 cm. Very Good Condition.