Buchenwald: A warning against the dangers of extremism

The buildings stand in a place that seems to have been lifted up out of the surrounding landscape. The densely wooded Ettersberg, a hill located not far from the cultural hub of Weimar in the eastern German state of Thuringia, can be seen from far off. It seems like an idyllic area.

The Buchenwald concentration camp was one of the largest on German soil. It was liberated on April 11, 1945 by US soldiers.

Concentration camp survivors were among several hundred guests attending theBuchenwald commemoration event on Sunday, April 6.

In the run-up a conflict emerged between the organizers and the Israeli embassy. Bowing to pressure from the Israeli ambassador, the organizers revoked the invitation of German-Israeli philosopher Omri Boehm to speak at the event. Boehm, the grandson of Holocaust survivors, has been critical of the Israeli government.

The final part of Sunday's commemoration event saw a young participant from a youth project speak about the lessons to be learned from Buchenwald — and about the need to speak out about injustice today, going on to say "what are we waiting for? People are dying in Ukraine in a war, people are dying in Palestine in a genocide."

Memorial director Jens-Christian Wagner responded that should be possible to mourn those who were innocently killed there — but that in his view to speak of a “genocide”, especially at a commemoration in Buchenwald, was not appropriate.

Buchenwald was more than just one camp

The picturesque scenery surrounding it belies the fact that Buchenweld was once a place of horror. The plateau of the hill was the site of one of the biggest Nazi concentration camps in Germany. From 1937 to 1945, the Nazis imprisoned hundreds of thousands of people here in the Buchenwald concentration camp, including political opponents, communists, homosexuals, foreign prisoners, Jews, Roma and Sinti, Jehovah's Witnesses and undesired clergy.

Buchenwald was a hell, one of the many hells created by the Nazi machinery of persecution and killing. Some 280,000 prisoners suffered within the Buchenwald system, which included the camp on the Ettersberg and more than 50 small subcamps, mostly near factories producing key wartime commodities.

By April 1945, around 56,000 people, mainly Jews, had been killed in Buchenwald. It was not until World War II was nearing its end in Europe that liberation finally arrived. When the first US Army tanks approached the concentration camp on April 11, 1945, determined prisoners began to rebel and stopped many soldiers from the SS guard detail from fleeing.

After the end of the war, Thuringia became part of the Soviet-occupied part of Germany. The Soviets soon started using the Buchenwald site as one of their "special camps," where they mostly held local Nazi leaders, police personnel or owners of businesses that had used forced labor. It is believed that 7,000 more people had died there by 1950.

Ever fewer concentration camp survivors as time marches on

The atrocities committed by the Nazis in Buchenwald now lie eight decades in the past. There are only a few people still alive who experienced and survived them. But painful eyewitness memories can serve to teach about history, and digital methods of historical education are becoming more important.

"Now there will probably still be 15 survivors as guests — a maximum of 15," the historian Jens-Christian Wagner told DW.

He recalls events in 2005 marking the 60th anniversary of the camp's liberation, which were attended by some 500 survivors.

Wagner is the director of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation.

"We all are responsible for remembering: every single citizen," he said, stressing the importance of taking a stand and speaking out against racism, far-right extremism and antisemitism.

Wagner also spoke about the current political situation. Thuringia surrounding Weimar is one of the German states where the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is particularly popular. In federal elections in February 2025, the party received 38.6% of the vote here, more than in any other German state.

Right-wing authoritarian and far-right movements are gaining in strength worldwide, including in Germany, Wagner says.

"In Thuringia, we are at the center of the storm," he said, describing the situation as "extremely worrying." 

"For a long time, we thought that people had learned their lesson from the Nazi era," he said, noting that the insights gained were now in danger of fading.

Wagner pointed out that in the AfD milieu, Nazism and its crimes are often "systemically downplayed" and Nazi ideology is even glorified. He warned that there was a diminishing awareness that addressing the Nazi dictatorship was of fundamental importance for democratic structures in Germany.

Criminal damage and threats against Buchenwald memorial staff

Remembrance sites outside the Buchenwald memorial have been vandalized several times. In 2024, Wagner himself received direct threats.

He said that his colleagues at the memorial site are occasionally worried about their personal safety. "We shouldn't let ourselves be intimidated but still be careful," he said.

The extensive memorial in Buchenwald includes several sites that serve as warnings — the crematorium where Nazis burnt the bodies of their victims, the field where their ashes were deposited, the parade ground, the "Children's Block" and the "Hygiene Institute of the Waffen-SS," where many inmates were misused as test subjects for vaccine research.

A picture of the camp gate with the cynical inscription "Jedem das seine" ("to each his own") has often been shown by the media. The clock on the small tower above it always shows a quarter past three: It was at 3.15 p.m. on April 11, 1945, that the hell ended and freedom began for all the people that the Nazis had imprisoned here.

Is there a site here that has a special importance for Jens-Christian Wagner? After reflecting for a moment, he named the so-called Little Camp.

This camp within a camp was a place where many people died. Originally, inmates were set apart here for forced labor. In early 1945, around 6,000 people died in the Little Camp in fewer than 100 days before the liberation of the entire concentration camp.

Soon after 1945, these barracks, originally horse stalls, were demolished. Wagner said that the site of the Little Camp became overgrown during the time when the area formed part of East Germany and did not play a great role in remembrance.

Now, the foundations have been laid bare and are now clearly visible in a clearing as "a site of suffering and grief," Wagner said.

This article was originally written in German.

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