Stones now commemorate Jewish youths who were deported by the National Socialists from the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar to the Auschwitz extermination camp in 1944. The 111 memorial stones with their names were dedicated to them on Sunday near the railway line over which the transports with thousands of people who were abducted from all over Europe ran.
Before that, a commemorative march formed from the main station in Weimar, in which Thuringia's Prime Minister Bodo Ramelow (left) also took part. The procession was accompanied by musicians from the Yiddish Summer Weimar.
Attack on memory trees
He stopped at the spot where seven memorial trees for concentration camp victims had been cut down in July. The crime had caused outrage nationwide - not just among prisoner organizations that suspected a political background.
For him, the attack on the memorial trees revealed the same mental attitude as that of the perpetrators during the Nazi era - not just those who committed crimes against people, "but also those who kept the wheels turning," said Ramelow. "It's up to us that we make it clear that we're looking, we're not looking away."
According to the memorial, in 1944 the SS sent more than 2,000 sick and weak Jewish men, women and children from Buchenwald to Auschwitz for extermination. One such transport left Buchenwald station in October. Among the 1,188 Jews on this train were 111 minors. The memorial stones now commemorate them.
By the end of World War II, the Nazis had deported 280,000 people to the concentration camp. About 56,000 of them were murdered or died from starvation, disease and medical experiments. On April 11, 1945, US troops liberated the camp.
Project memorial stones Buchenwaldbahn
