GERMANY-BUCHENWALD/ANNIVERSARY Germany marks 70 years since liberation of Buchenwald concentration camp

Record ID: 160017

  • Title: GERMANY-BUCHENWALD/ANNIVERSARY Germany marks 70 years since liberation of Buchenwald concentration camp
  • Date: 12th April 2015
  • Summary: WEIMAR, GERMANY (APRIL 12, 2015) (REUTERS) GATE TO FORMER BUCHENWALD CONCENTRATION CAMP PEOPLE WALKING THROUGH GATE CLOCK ON GATE WREATHS LAID ON GROUND (SOUNDBITE) (German) DIRECTOR OF MEMORIALS FOUNDATION BUCHENWALD AND MITTELBAU-DORA, PROFESSOR DR VOLKHARD KNIGGE, READING OUT A SPEECH PREPARED BY BUCHENWALD SURVIVOR, NOVELIST IVAN IVAJI, SAYING: "We can in no way be sat
  • Embargoed: 27th April 2015 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Germany
  • Country: Germany
  • Topics: General
  • Reuters ID: LVA5D5HNS9A7YR7K727G8IXFPPAW
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Story Text: Survivors on Sunday (April 12) laid wreaths to commemorate 70 years since the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp.
    Dignitaries and former inmates laid wreaths on the ground in the former complex, liberated in 1945.
    Buchenwald, near the city of Weimar, was the biggest concentration camp on German soil. Set up by Hitler's SS in 1937, it held more than 250,000 Jews, Roma, homosexuals and other people not tolerated by the Nazis. More than 56,000 people died there from torture, medical experiments and starvation.
    Some 80 camp survivors travelled to Weimar from Europe, the United States and Israel, joining U.S. army veterans who helped free Buchenwald on April 11, 1945. On Saturday they held a minute's silence at 3.15 pm, the time of liberation, and laid red carnations at the mustering point.
    Fears are growing about anti-Semitism in Europe, underscored by the January attacks in France on Charlie Hebdo magazine and a Jewish supermarket, at a time when immigration has shot to the top of Germany's political agenda.
    Though he was unable to attend, survivor and writer Ivan Ivanji sent a speech to be read out that said that neither complacency nor despair were options in the modern world.
    "We can in no way be satisfied with the conditions we are living in. We must in no way fall into despair when the world of peace and freedom has only been established in just a few countries in a rudimentary form, and even there has been unexpectedly threatened recently," the director of the Memorials Foundation Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora, Professor Dr Volkhard Knigge, read.
    Unlike Auschwitz in Poland, Buchenwald was not one of the death camps where the Nazis set about their "Final Solution" -- the systematic extermination of European Jews. Nonetheless, it was equipped with crematoria and gas chambers and 56,000 perished, 11,000 of them Jewish.
    Many were summarily executed by SS guards, subjected to horrific medical experiments or forced to work in armaments factories. Starvation and disease also claimed thousands.
    Named after the surrounding beech trees, Buchenwald was set up in 1937, close to the picturesque eastern city of Weimar, home to the poets Goethe and Schiller and one of the great centres of classical German culture.
    The camp housed Jews, Sinti and Roma -- targeted by the Nazis on racial grounds as well as groups ranging from Soviet prisoners of war to Scandinavian and French resistance fighters. So-called enemies of the state including Communists, homosexuals and Jehovah's Witnesses were also held there.
    The contrast with the surroundings has always symbolised one of the great paradoxes of German history -- the co-existence of its rich humanist culture and the barbarity of the Nazis.
    In February 1945, a month after the liberation of Auschwitz, Buchenwald was the largest remaining camp, with 112,000 inmates, a third of whom were Jewish. But by the time the Americans arrived on April 11 only 21,000 were left. In the three previous days alone the SS sent 28,000 predominantly Jewish inmates on death marches to other camps further from the front.
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