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The Buchenwald Resistance was a resistance group of prisoners at Buchenwald concentration camp. It involved Communists, Social Democrats, and people affiliated with other political parties, unaffiliated people, and both Jews and Christians. Because Buchenwald prisoners came from a number of countries, the Resistance was also international. Members tried to sabotage Nazi efforts where they could, worked to save the lives of inmates who were children and in the last days of the camp, with many Nazis fleeing the approaching allied troops, they tried to gain control of the camp itself. After liberation, the prisoners created documents related to their experiences and formed an international committee to look after the welfare of survivors. == Forms of resistance == Certain administrative duties in the concentration camps were given by the SS to "prisoner functionaries". Originally, these tasks were assigned to criminal prisoners, but after 1939, political prisoners began to displace the criminal prisoners,〔Bill Niven, (''The Buchenwald child: truth, fiction, and propaganda'' ) Camden House (2007). ISBN 978-1-57113-339-7. Retrieved April 15, 2010〕 though criminals were preferred by the SS. Political prisoners took over important positions as "prisoner functionaries" until liberation. The criminal functionaries were known for their brutality, which they used in order to impress the SS guards and improve their own lot. They were hated by other prisoners, who were eventually able to bring them down by uncovering evidence of theft from camp warehouses.〔("Organized Resistance" ) ''Against the odds'', official website. Documentary about prisoner resistance in Nazi concentration camps. Retrieved May 6, 2010〕 After the German-Soviet non-aggression treaty of August 1939, the ideological antagonism between the Nazis and the Communists was temporarily mollified. The SS knew that Communists were able to organize people and that they had an international network, which, from the point of view of the concentration camp direction, was useful because after the start of the war, Buchenwald had a multilingual prisoner population. When Germany later invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the Communist prisoners at first lost these positions, but later managed to win them back. To strengthen camp cohesion, the Communist kapos made sure that prisoner functionaries were from every country. They also worked with Social Democrats and middle class politicians to set up the People's Front policy of the Comintern. The scope of the "red" (Communist) kapos was narrow. They were always under threat of being stripped of their responsibilities and of being killed. Nonetheless, as prisoner functionaries, they had a certain mobility and freedom of action, which they used, in whatever means possible, to preserve the lives of other prisoners. The main area of the red kapos' work was in the "office of the labor statistics", the camp infirmary and as camp guard surrogates. In the office of labor statistics, the prisoner work details were planned and lists were made as to which prisoners were in which outside work detail. They could, for example, place specific Resistance fighters on work details to infiltrate the notorious Dora-Mittelbau camp. A prisoner could hardly survive longer than 6 weeks in the camp's tunnels. Nonetheless, prisoners like Albert Kuntz managed to build a resistance organization that committed sabotage of the V-2 rockets. In the camp infirmary, kapos were able to briefly "hide" other prisoners from the SS. On occasion, they were able to send a prisoner there whose life was under immediate threat and have the records show the person as having died, then secretly give that prisoner the identity of another prisoner who had, in fact, recently died. One kapo, Robert Siewert, himself a bricklayer, was able to convince the SS to allow Polish children to be trained as bricklayers, of which the Nazis had need for their many construction projects, thus saving a number of boys from certain death.〔Gisela Karau, ''Der gute Stern des Janusz K.'' True story of a child inmate from Buchenwald, originally published in 1972. Pahl-Rugenstein Verlag, Bonn (2003) ISBN 3-89144-346-3 〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Buchenwald Resistance」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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