M. DUBOST: Could the German people as a whole have been in ignorance of these atrocities, or were they bound to know of them?
DUPONT: As these camps had been in existence for years, it is impossible for them not to have known. Our transport stopped at Trèves on its way in. The prisoners in some vans were completely naked while in others they were clothed. There was a crowd of people around the station and they all saw the transport. Some of them excited the SS men patrolling the platform. But there were other channels through which information could reach the population. To begin with, there were squads working outside the camps. Labor squads went out from Buchenwald to Weimar, Erfurt, and Jena. They left in the morning and came back at night, and during the day they were among the civilian population. In the factories, too, the technical crew were not members of the armed forces. The “Meister” were not SS men. They went home every night after supervising the work of the prisoners all day. Certain factories even employed civilian labor—the Gustloff works in Weimar, for instance. During the work, the internees and civilians were together.
The civil authorities were responsible for victualling the camps and were allowed to enter them, and I have seen civilian trucks coming into the camp.
The railway authorities were necessarily informed on those matters. Numerous trains carried prisoners daily from one camp to another; or from France to Germany; and these trains were driven by railway men. Moreover, there was a regular daily train to Buchenwald as a terminal station. The railway administrative authorities must, therefore, have been well informed.
Orders were also given in the factories, and industrialists could not fail to be informed regarding the personnel they employed in their factories. I may add that visits took place; the German prisoners were sometimes visited. I knew certain German internees, and I know that on the occasion of those visits they talked to their relatives, which they could hardly do without informing their home circle of what was going on. It would appear that it is impossible to deny that the German people knew of the camps.
M. DUBOST: The Army?
DUPONT: The Army knew of the camps. At least, this is what I could observe. Every week so-called commissions came to Buchenwald, a group of officers who came to visit the camp. There were SS among these officers; but I very often saw members of the Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe, who came on those visits. Sometimes we were able to identify the personalities who visited the camp, rarely so far as I was concerned. On 22 March 1945 General Mrugowski came to visit the camp. In particular, he spent a long time in Block 61. He was accompanied on this visit by an SS general and the chief medical officer of the camp, Dr. Shiedlauski.
Another point, during the last few months, the Buchenwald guard, plus SS men . . .
M. DUBOST: Excuse me for interrupting you. Could you tell us about Block 61?
DUPONT: Block 61 was the extermination block for those suffering from cachexy—in other words, those arrived in such a state of exhaustion that they were totally unfit for work.