Andy's Germany Adventure: Day 4, Part 1

Thursday, 13 January 2011.

I went to the memorial to the Buchenwald concentration camp just North of Weimar. It is incredible to be on the spot where such indescribable acts took place during WW2; it is in an ordinary forest on an ordinary hill only 7km outside one of the major cultural cities of Germany since the middle ages. Expecting to find a large stone or something I was amazed that the whole camp has been turned into a memorial site. Many of the buildings have been restored, and the area where the inmates sheds were is now cleared, stony ground. The place where they collected prisoners belongings is a museum and art gallery. The crematorium is there, with six boilers neatly arranged in a row, connected to a large chimney. There are rooms for conducting medical experiments, and a prisoner's latrine based on a design for a horse stable. There is a visitor's centre, cafe and memorials all over the place.

One of the museums at Buchenwald is about the history of the camp after it's use by the Nazis until 1945. It was liberated by the Americans, who used the publicity to gain support for the war back home. It was then handed over to Stalin, who used it as a concentration camp until 1950! The GDR then took over and eradicated much of it. They were keen to tell the tale of the communists martyred at the camp, but conveniently forgot about the Soviet bit. Only in 1991, after German reunification, did the memorial take on its current form in which the dead of all the other groups: jews, homosexuals, gypsies, German deserters etc., and the range of countries from which they came, is commemorated. The only problem with such as memorial is that it tends to take on a static and sanitised character. I wonder to what extent the parties of school kids were really 'getting' the horror - and the fact that it was perpetrated by apparently ordinary people like us? Perhaps visiting it in mid-winter under grey skies with snow on the ground is appropriate.