Death Camp Anniversary
July 15, 2007
Attempts to honor the victims of Nazi crimes were being overshadowed by the global spread of wars, nationalism and racism, said the president of the international Buchenwald committee, Bertrand Herz.
He was speaking at a ceremony to mark the 70th anniversary of the construction of the largest concentration camp in Hitler's Germany, where 56,000 people lost their lives. Elderly survivors, one of them a former Ukrainian prisoner who came dressed in a striped blue and white concentration camp uniform, laid wreaths at the former camp outside the east German city.
"In 1945, we never dreamed that today in Germany there would again be right-wing forces that would be allowed to demonstrate in our cities," former inmate Ottomar Rothmann said.
Democratically guaranteed constitutional rights should not be seen as a license for rallies by fascist groups, Rothmann said, who spent two years in Buchenwald as a political prisoner.
Survivors call for NPD to be banned
Rothmann urged German politicians to do all they can "to ban the neo-Nazi NPD," a reference to the extreme right wing political party that is represented in two regional parliaments in eastern Germany.
A potential ban has been supported by several political leaders, including Berlin's social-democratic mayor, Klaus Wowereit, but legal hurdles remain.
The last attempt to ban the NPD was dismissed by Germany's constitutional court in 2003.
The speeches denouncing the far-right at the ceremony followed a statement issued by the survivors themselves on Saturday. "Who will speak of the Nazi crimes, who will oppose the neo-Nazis and all those who trample on democracy and human dignity? Who will speak up when we are no longer there?" the statement said.
A quarter-million inmates
Buchenwald was founded by the Nazis on July 15, 1937 for the internment of Jews, Roma, political opponents and homosexuals. Some 250,000 people from 36 countries were incarcerated in the camp until it was liberated by the US Army on April 11, 1945.
Prisoners perished in the cold or starved to death and thousands were murdered. A large percentage of the victims remain nameless, while the identities of many others were only established in the past decade.
Located near the cultural city of Weimar, the camp is now a memorial site visited by around 600,000 people annually, many of which at least a quarter of them are foreigners. The authorities who manage the site say a large number of the visitors are young people.