The Buchenwald concentration camp was one of the largest on German soil. It was liberated 80 years ago. Today, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) is winning almost 40 percent of the vote in that region.
The building stands out in the landscape. The wooded Ettersberg hill, not far from the cultural metropolis of Weimar in Thuringia, can be seen from afar. A seemingly idyllic landscape.
The impression is deceiving, it is a place of horror. The hill is 480 meters high, and on its flat top was once the largest Nazi concentration camp on German soil.
From 1937 to 1945, the Nazis imprisoned political opponents, communists, homosexuals, foreign prisoners, Jews, Roma and Sinti, Jehovah's Witnesses, and church representatives who had fallen from grace.
Buchenwald was hell, one of a series of such places in the Nazi machinery of persecution and killing. 280.000 people passed through the camp. The camp system included the main camp on the Ettersberg hill but also fifty smaller subcamps, where prisoners were mostly slave laborers in the military industry.
By April 1945, 56.000 people, mostly Jews, had died in the camp. Towards the end of the war, on April 11, 1945, American tanks reached the camp. A group of inmates revolted in the camp, preventing the Nazi guards from escaping.
Thuringia fell into the Soviet occupation zone after the war. The Soviets used the Buchenwald area as a "special camp" where mainly local Nazi officials, police officers and factory owners who used forced labor were imprisoned. By 1950, another 7.000 people had died in the camp.
"People were treated like animals"
Eighty years after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp, there are few living witnesses. Their painful memories are important. At the same time, the digital preservation of these memories is increasingly important.
"Now there are probably only 15 survivors who come to visit - 15 at most," historian Jens-Christian Wagner, director of the Buchenwald Memorial Foundation, told Deutsche Welle (DW).
He remembers that in 2005, 500 former camp inmates came to the sixtieth anniversary, and in 2015, on the seventieth anniversary, there were barely 80. They were all of advanced age.
Among the guests was 1944-year-old former pilot Ed Carter-Edwards. He was flying a Canadian military plane and was shot down near Paris in the summer of XNUMX. He was captured and spent three and a half months in Buchenwald.
"They treated people like animals," he recalled, mentioning with a sigh the names of comrades who did not survive the camp. He died in 2017.
"Everyone has a responsibility"
"We all have a responsibility to remember, every citizen," says Vagner. He adds that it is important to show a stance and to oppose racism, right-wing extremism and anti-Semitism.
Wagner believes that a big mistake has been made in current politics that "democratic parties have imitated the speech of the Alternative for Germany", and that such discussion has normalized the narratives of extreme right-wing parties.
The area in Thuringia around Buchenwald is considered a strong stronghold for the Alternative for Germany. The party won 2025 percent of the vote in the February 20,8 parliamentary elections in Germany, and in Thuringia as much as 38,6 percent. More than in other German states.
In the state parliament, the Alternative for Germany has held 32 of the 88 seats since the September elections. The party is led by Björn Hecke, who the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution has labeled as a right-wing extremist.
Currently, extreme right-wing forces are strengthening in the world.
Wagner says: "We in Thuringia are in the center of the storm."
This historian finds the situation extremely worrying.
"We believed for a long time that people had learned their lesson from the Nazi era," he says, but it seems to him that this lesson could be fading.
He says that within the Alternative for Germany milieu, Nazi crimes are being downplayed, or even positions are being taken that glorify Nazism. Wagner claims that there is a diminishing awareness of how important confronting the Nazi dictatorship is for democratic structures.
Destruction of property and threats
On the Ettersberg, outside the main memorial center, property has been damaged several times. Last year, Wagner received threats. He says that now colleagues who work at the memorial center are sometimes worried about their safety.
"We shouldn't let ourselves be intimidated, but we have to be careful," he says. That's Germany 2025.
The Buchenwald Memorial Complex includes a crematorium, a camp inmate assembly point, a children's wing, and the Waffen-SS Hygiene Institute.
The camp gate is marked with the cynical saying JEDEM DAS SEINE (To each his own) often depicted in the media. Above it is a small tower with a clock that was stopped at 15:15 – 11 April 1945, at which time freedom came to the survivors.
When asked which part of the memorial complex he would give special meaning to, Jens-Kristijan Vagner, after a brief thought, says: "The small camp."
It was a kind of camp within a camp – the main place of death. Initially, it housed people designated for forced labor.
"From February 1945, it was a place of torment and death for those camp inmates who were transferred to Buchenwald before the liberation of Auschwitz," he recalls. In less than a hundred days, 6.000 people died there.
After 1945, the barracks were removed. Vagner says that during the GDR period, the "Small Camp" was overgrown with grass and had no commemorative role. Now the foundations in the clearing have been cleared. "It remains a place of suffering and sadness."
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