Nordhausen/Weimar (dpa/th) - The head of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation, Jens-Christian Wagner, sees another sawed-off memorial tree for concentration camp victims as an attack on the German culture of remembrance. "I don't think it was simple vandalism," Wagner said on Monday when asked. On Sunday it was discovered in the memorial grove for the victims of Nazi terror in the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp in Nordhausen that one of the birch trees planted there had been sawn down.
A few days ago, trees commemorating concentration camp victims in Buchenwald near Weimar were cut down. That caused outrage across the country.
"I see a substantive connection between the two acts," said Wagner. He fears a possible copycat act. On the trees in Nordhausen and Buchenwald there are commemorative plaques with information about the prisoners who are remembered. "Anyone sawing off these trees knows what they're doing."
In the short message service Twitter, Wagner referred to other incidents with an alleged right-wing extremist background in the past few days in Thuringia. His tweet reads, "a teacher at a school at
A total of 53 birch trees were planted in the memorial grove for the concentration camp victims in Mittelbau-Dora in 2011 to keep the memory of the prisoners alive. The Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, set up by the National Socialists in 1943, was notorious for the forced labor in tunnels where the prisoners had to produce rockets and other armaments under inhumane conditions. One in three of the approximately 60,000 prisoners did not survive.
Just a few days ago, seven memorial trees for concentration camp victims were cut down by unknown persons at the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial in Weimar. Shortly thereafter, near Schöndorf, a district of Weimar near the camp, two trees were snapped down and parts of the bark were removed from three other trees.
