On this day in 1945, the United States liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany. Buchenwald was a concentration camp established in July 1937 and was one of the largest in Germany’s pre-World War II borders. Prior to the camp’s construction, it was the home of the Weimar Republic, also known as the German Reich, and the residence of noted German philosopher Jonan Wolfgang von Goethe. According to Holocaust historian James Young, the camp’s location was deliberately chosen for the purpose of erasing the area’s cultural legacy, allowing the Nazis’ to reframe the region how they saw fit. Over the next seven years, it would be the site of over 56,000 deaths and 250,000 prisoners. Many of Buchenwald’s first inmates were political prisoners. It was initially opened strictly for male prisoners in July 1937. Women were not admitted until 1943 when the war was well underway. Jews began arriving at Buchenwald in 1938 following Kristallnacht, Night of the Broken Glass. Over 250 Jews died from injuries incurred at the time of their arrests or from introductory abuse at the camp. As the camp developed, the SS would hold prisoners-of-war from various countries including resistance fighters, previously high-ranking officials in governments of countries now occupied by Nazi Germany, U.S. soldiers, and forced laborers from foreign countries. Buchenwald had 88 sub-camps under its operation. Scattered across Germany from Düsseldorf in the west to Moravia in the east some sub-camps were state-owned while others were privately owned. This is where much of the forced labor took place. SS officers and private executives forced their prisoners to various labor-related duties whether it be construction projects, the SS defense contractor Germany Equipment Works, or different camp workshops. Similar to death camp procedures, the SS would carry out selections in an effort to weed out the weaker and disabled laborers. Those who fell under this category were sent to facilities like Sonnenstein as well as other areas where euthanasia was conducted. At these facilities, euthanasia operatives gassed them as part of Action 14f13, the extension of euthanasia killing operations to ill and exhausted concentration camp prisoners. SS physicians or orderlies used phenol injections to kill other prisoners unable to work.As Soviet forces approached Poland, thousands of concentration camp prisoners were evacuated. SS men forced 10,000 prisoners onto death marches. They traveled by foot from Auschwitz and Gross-Rosen to Buchenwald where they arrived in January 1945. A month later, 112,000 prisoners were at Buchenwald. By April, the German SS began evacuating 28,000 prisoners from the main camp along with a couple thousand more from various sub-camps as the United States approached. For the evacuations that resulted in death, whether it be starvation, exhaustion, or murder, those conclusions remain unknown. In anticipation of the camp’s liberation, the remaining prisoners, battered and weak, took control of the camp. By the time the camp was liberated, Buchenwald had been home to prisoners from every European country. While precise totals remain unknown, of the 56,000 murdered, at least 11,000 were Jews.