Survivors hold remembrance at WWII camp

WEIMAR, Germany – Elderly survivors of the Buchenwald concentration camp laid flowers Sunday and observed a moment of silence for victims of the Nazis, 60 years after U.S. troops liberated the camp.

Flags from some 30 nations hung in a cold drizzle to symbolize the nations from which the camp’s 240,000 prisoners came between 1937 and 1945. About 56,000 died – worked to death, shot or killed in medical experiments.

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and U.S. veterans came to the camp memorial outside Weimar for the commemoration, which kindled vivid memories for the survivors, most of them in their 70s and 80s.

Georg Sterner, a Hungarian Jew, recalled looking out from Barracks No. 37 when the first U.S. tank crashed through the barbed-wire perimeter fence on the morning of April 11, 1945.

“We were hanging out of the windows,” said Sterner, who was 17 then. “It came slowly, slowly. It stopped between the trees. It revved the engine … made a lunge and broke through.”

Inside, shocked soldiers from the U.S 3rd Army found some 21,000 starving survivors and piles of corpses as the Nazi SS and their helpers fled the camp.

“It was so incredible – stacks of bodies, the smell, the total shock and confusion, people walking around by the thousands,” said Jerry Hontas, who arrived as a 21-year-old Army medic.

On Sunday, some survivors came in wheelchairs. Others wore replicas of their striped inmate’s uniforms and their old prisoner numbers.

Sunday’s ceremony was meant as a remembrance of victims of Nazi camps in Germany, which were successively freed as Allied troops advanced before the Nazi surrender in World War II in May 1945.