politicals. They arrived in June 1938 because of an action against "asocial" Jews.In the summer of 1938, 2,200 Austrian Jews were transferred from Dachau. Later that year, arrests after Kristallnacht more than doubled the amount of Jewish prisoners in Buchenwald. The newly arrived 10,000 Jews lived in recently built huts, and suffered far more than the non-Jews. Of the new-comers, 244 died in their first month of imprisonment. By spring 1939, most of the prisoners were released, deprived of their property and compelled to leave Germany.The vast majority of the thousands of prisoners died at Buchenwald each year died, soon after their arrival. They usually died of exhaustion, physical and psychological or due to their loss of desire to live. Their lives before the camp didn't prepare them for this type of exhaustion. A survivor of Buchenwald said, "It took a long time for a mind, torn from the anchorages of the outside world and thrust into life-and-death turmoil, to find a new inward center of gravity." The German soldiers were always especially cruel, mentally and physically, to the Jewish prisoners. At that time, the Germans considered Jewish human life not equal the worth of an animal. Mentally, they would try to depress the morale of the prisoners, preventing the development of fellow-feeling or cooperation among the victims. The "politically backward" "individualists" knew nothing of organized action so they couldn't survive long in Buchenwald. If hunger so demoralized a person to steal another man's bread, he wasn't reported to the SS. The room attendants took care of him, and if he didn't die from beating, they injured him so brutally that he was only fit for the crematorium. This was done to maintain morale and mutual trust. Some men used the typhus wards, which the SS would not go near, to hide men whose names had come up on the death lists.The Nazis physically abused the prisoners in many ways. Next to the shooting chambers, w...
