Liberation from lies.

Later this month, former inmates from thirty-five nations will meet at the Buchenwald concentration camp to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of its liberation - or "self-liberation."

Located in eastern Germany - 150 miles south of Berlin and just a ten-minute ride from Weimar, prewar Germany's cultural capital - Buchenwald was the largest Arbeitslager (labor camp) in Nazi Germany. Technically speaking, it was not a Vernichtungslager (extermination camp). Unlike Auschwitz, Buchenwald had no gas chambers. Although thousands of prisoners died in gruesome SS medical experiments or were killed in torture cells such as the infamous "Bunker," many more inmates were worked to death. Manning excruciating sixteen-hour shifts in the stone quarry or in a nearby munitions factory, usually with meager rations, they perished of illness and malnutrition. More than 250,000 men and women suffered imprisonment at Buchenwald between 1937 and 1945; 56,545 died there.

Historians are uncertain whether to speak of the camp's liberation or "self-liberation." On April 11, 1945, with the Third U.S. Army commanded by George S. Patton only a few kilometers away, more than 5,000 SS soldiers fled Buchenwald, leaving a mere handful of watchtower guards (perhaps no more than a half-dozen) to police the prisoners.

Apparently aware of the SS flight in the face of the American advance, hundreds of the 21,000 inmates stormed the watchtowers at 2:45 p.m., and overwhelmed the guards. At 3:15 p.m., a Communist inmate proclaimed from atop the main portal: "The camp is free!" Minutes later, an advance unit from the Third Army entered the camp gates. Upon entering Buchenwald, the top American officer from the advance unit, Captain Fred Kieffer, did not have the impression that any battle had taken place to overcome the SS guards.

And yet, until 1990-throughout the Communist era of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) - East German officials had always spoken of the heroic, Communist-led uprising on April 11. The GDR exploited the story of Buchenwald to legitimate the Communist state. The role of the Third U.S. Army in the camp's "self-liberation" was not mentioned in the camp museum set up by GDR authorities after the war; GDR exhibits stressed instead the role of the Soviet occupation army in the months following the camp's dismantling.

So the fiftieth anniversary memorial of Buchenwald will also mark another kind of liberation: the unfettering of the Buchenwald camp from the agitprop circulated for forty-five years by the GDR government.

"We care about history here now, not about arousing and exploiting emotions," Director Volkhard Knigge told me. "That was the task before: to use - and often misuse - those emotions. We want now an attitude of sobriety and empathy, not passion, toward these horrors of history."

An eleven-member historical commission has designed a new Buchenwald museum, whose exhibits tell the true story of not only the camp's liberation, but also the two phases of its postwar history, about which GDR officials had kept a total silence: Buchenwald's reopening as an internment camp by Soviet occupation authorities during 1945-50, and the GDR's propagandistic use of the camp during 1950-89.

Historians estimate that 32,000 to 40,000 Germans were imprisoned in the Soviet internment camp. Unlike Buchenwald under the Nazis, the Soviets did not torture the German inmates. But conditions were harsh, rations meager. Families were not notified of inmates' whereabouts. Nor were the prisoners permitted to write letters or receive visitors, which sometimes happened under the Nazis. Inmates had no contact whatsoever with the outside world.

Under these conditions, up to 13,000 German prisoners - among them hundreds of anti-Stalinist critics, along with thousands of low- and mid-level Nazi officials - died of starvation and disease. Estimates are uncertain because the victims were buried in unmarked mass graves and Soviet authorities kept sketchy records. Some outspoken Germans - such as Duke Joachim-Ernst von Anhalt - experienced the nightmare of all nightmares: incarceration for anti-Fascist opposition under the Nazis, and then re-imprisonment by the Soviets for anti-Stalinist criticism.

And then came the GDR cover-up. Visitors were never told about the Stalinist camp, or much about the non-Communist inmates under the Nazis. For example, the camp museum scarcely mentioned the 11,000 murdered Jews - the major group of Nazi victims. Instead, the stress was laid on the fallen Communist heroes, such as Ernst Thaelmann, the head of the German Communist party who was assassinated in Buchenwald on August 18, 1944.

Because he wants the Buchenwald Memorial to serve history, not ideology - Right or Left - Director Knigge says he has no interest in promoting "Heldengeschichten" (stories of heroes). In the new Germany of 1995, he says, a rigorously historical Buchenwald Memorial can contribute to understanding the crimes committed in this century by both the Right and the Left. However, he cautions against "simplistically equating" the crimes of the Nazis and Communists at Buchenwald, since part of the task of understanding the camp's past entails sensitivity to the historical details and their particular differences.

Before leaving the camp, I watched the film O Buchenwald! Although the film was produced under the GDR regime and emphasizes the role of German capitalism in the rise of fascism, the film is relatively nonideological and is still shown to camp visitors. Included in the film is the concentration camp "hymn," known as "The Buchenwald Song," which the inmates themselves wrote and were forced to sing as a work brigade song by the Nazi guards. It includes these lines:

Despite all we shall say "Yes" to Life For sure the day will come When we are free.

To the Nazis, the day of freedom for the inmates meant an ignominious death; but for many prisoners, "The Buchenwald Song" represented a defiant "We Shall Overcome."

To commemorate their liberation a half-century ago, some camp returnees, in a gesture of mourning and solidarity, will again sing "The Buchenwald Song" on April 11.