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Hospital

The hospital was cordoned off from the rest of the camp by a fence. It was a zone of mass death.

A liberated prisoner from the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp lies in the infirmary. The person pictured is the Belgian Gilbert Demoulin, who died in the infirmary on April 28, 1945.
The Belgian Gilbert Demoulin shortly after the liberation in the former inmates' infirmary. He died on April 28, 1945 as a result of his imprisonment. Photo: Gerard Raphaël Algoet.

The isolation of the hospital was a response to the infectious diseases, such as typhus and tuberculosis, that spread through the camp in epidemics.

The hospital was outfitted in a way that mimicked the operations of a normal hospital. Inmate functionaries worked as "inmate doctors" and "inmate nurses" in various clinics, a dental station, a clinic for tuberculosis, a surgical department, and a department of internal medicine. Sick inmates were only treated if there was a possibility of them soon returning to work. They were often given a very brief period of relief from work in infirmary beds occupied by two or three inmates. Those no longer fit to work were either sent to other concentration camps to die or shunted off into so-called "rest blocks" in the camp, where they were left to fend for themselves.

In general, the hospital was not a place of healing but dying. Consequently, the camp crematorium was also located within this fenced-off area. In the final phase of the war, the SS also used the Boelcke Casern in Nordhausen as a central camp for the sick and dying of Mittelbau-Dora.

Today, visitors pass only the remnants of the hospital barracks on the way to the crematorium.


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