Those SS guards were such wits

“An intricate, awful world soon was revealed [at Buchenwald]: the cement cellar ‘strangling room,’ where the condemned were garroted and hung on forty-five wall hooks, those still struggling to be bashed with a wooden mallet; Block 46, where gruesome medical experiments were conducted; the dissecting room, where inmate tattoos were excised, tanned, and fashioned into lampshades, wall hangings, and a pair of gloves for the commandant’s wife. ‘Inmates were beaten with fists, sticks, clubs, dog whips, riding crops, rubber hoses, ox-tail whips, leather belts, rifle butts, shovels, spade handles, and rocks,’ an Army report noted. ‘Also they were bitten by dogs.’ Others were strung up by their hands for hours from tree boughs in a grove known to SS guards as the ‘singing forest’ because of the victims’ cries. Music blared from the loudspeakers to mask gunfire at the camp stables or rifle range by the execution squad, ‘Detail 99.’ The SS had murdered at least 56,000 inmates in Buchenwald and its subcamps. Many then were consigned to six brick ovens that could reduce a ‘charge’ of eighteen bodies to bone and ash in twenty minutes.” – Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light