Obama Flunks History, Again

“Tomorrow, I will visit Buchenwald,” Obama said in Cairo, “which was part of a network of camps where Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death by the Third Reich. Six million Jews were killed – more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today.” Buchenwald was indeed part of the network of concentration camps established by Nazi Germany, both in Germany proper and the occupied territories. And it is indeed true that some Jews were interred at Buchenwald and that many of those that were died there. According to the estimate of the Buchwald Memorial, from 1937 when the camp was established until its liberation in 1945, altogether some 11,000 Jews died at Buchenwald. 11,000. That’s roughly the number of Jews that were killed at Auschwitz in a single week. In total, not 11,000, but over one million Jews are estimated to have been killed at Auschwitz.

What explains the huge discrepancy? What explains it is the fact that while Buchenwald was indeed a concentration camp, it was not one of those camps – like Auschwitz or Treblinka or Belzec – that was specifically devoted to exterminating Jews, as Obama’s remarks mistakenly imply. Some historians grasp this distinction by speaking of “normal” concentration camps, on the one hand, and “death camps,” on the other. This is not to say that hundreds of thousands of inmates did not also die in the “normal” concentration camps. They died from exhaustion, starvation, and disease or as the victims of medical experiments and sometimes they were simply executed. Murder and death were regular features of the “normal” camps. But, nonetheless, killing was not, so to say, their raison d’être. When it was a matter, for instance, of killing Jews interred at Buchenwald en masse, they were as rule shipped to Auschwitz.

Moreover, the majority of the inmates at Buchenwald, like in the other “normal” camps, were not Jewish. The Nazis liked to lock people up and they did so for all sorts of reasons, not only on “racial” grounds. The persons interred at Buchenwald included political prisoners, Jehovah’s Witnesses, “gypsies,” homosexuals, common criminals, and the so-called “asocial.” (The latter category was not precisely defined in Nazi law, but it included, for instance, vagrants and persons who were judged by the authorities to be “work-shy.”) Jews were treated as a subcategory of other categories. (These and other details on Buchenwald are discussed in Eugen Kogon’s classic study of the concentration camp system Der SS-Staat, which is available in English as The Theory and Practice of Hell.)

After the start of the War, foreign prisoners were shipped to Buchenwald from all over German-occupied Europe. They would later be joined by captured Red Army soldiers. The fate reserved for the latter was perhaps the most unequivocal of all: an estimated 8000 Soviet prisoners of war were summarily executed by gunshots to the back of the head. Altogether, again according to the estimate of the Buchenwald Memorial, some 56,000 of Buchenwald’s inmates would perish in the camp.

In short, Buchenwald is a highly fitting symbol of Nazi barbarism: which barbarism, as Buchenwald’s history shows, was by no means reserved for Jews. As a matter of fact, however, Buchenwald was not one of the principal sites of the Holocaust. Why, then, would Obama treat it as such?

Well, let us recall that during last year’s electoral campaign, then candidate Obama said that his “uncle” had helped to liberate “Auschwitz” as an American soldier during WWII. As it turned out, it was not his uncle, but rather a great-uncle and it was not Auschwitz, but rather Buchenwald. And in fact it was not quite Buchenwald either, but rather Ohrdruf: a satellite camp of Buchenwald some sixty kilometers away. By commemorating the Holocaust at Buchenwald, it is as if Obama was trying to make the historical reality conform to his own gaffes and misconceptions.

Analyzing the political purpose of Obama’s Buchenwald visit, Peter Frey of Germany’s ZDF television writes:

In Buchenwald, Obama wants to send a signal to the Jewish community in the USA and to the Israelis: we may be involved at the moment in a political conflict over the [Israeli] settlement policy, but we are well aware of the history of the Jewish people and of the origins of the Israeli state.

But in fact the Buchenwald visit demonstrates precisely the contrary. It shows that Obama knows precious little about the Holocaust and even less about the full scope of Nazi Germany’s crimes.