BUCHENWALD, Germany, April 10 (UPI) -- German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder presided Sunday at a ceremony marking the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp.
About 56,000 people are believed to have died in the camp in eastern Germany. U.S. soldiers entered the camp on April 11, 1945, freeing 21,000 prisoners, the BBC reports.
"They fell victim to hunger, sickness, the sadistic terror and systematic murder," Schroeder said in his speech. "I bow before you, the victims and their families."
Unlike Auschwitz and other death camps, Buchenwald had no gas chambers. But thousands of people were executed by shooting or lethal injection, and thousands more died of hunger, disease and exposure.
The camp housed homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Soviet prisoners of war, anti-Nazi activists, and Communists as well as Jews.
