Relocation plan of ex- Nazi sausage museum scrapped

Berlin: A German sausage museum has scrapped controversial plans to move to an annexe of the former Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald in a decision welcomed by the Jewish community Tuesday.

The Friends of the Thuringian Bratwurst association sparked an outcry last week when it announced plans to move the Bratwurst Museum to the site in the town of Muehlhausen and to also build a hotel there.

“I welcome the fact that it has been decided to look for a new location for the museum,” the head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Josef Schuster, told Berlin’s Tagesspiegel daily. Rikola- Gunnar Luettgenau

of the Buchenwald memorial foundation had said the redevelopment plan showed a “lack of sensitivity” and of “historical awareness”.

The museum apologised on its website for the earlier announcement to build

a tourist attraction on a site linked to “this dark chapter of German history”.

“We apologise to all those who saw our actions as trivialising or relativising the crimes of National Socialism and whose ideological

and religious feelings were hurt,” it said in a statement.

Some 50,000 people a year now visit the “Bratwurstmuseum”, currently located at nearby Holzhausen, where it is marked by a giant wooden sculpture of a sausage in a bun, and another of a sausage in a cannon. The Muehlhausen site in Thuringia state was once part of the Buchenwald camp, where the Nazis imprisoned almost a quarter of a million people between 1937 and 1945.

Around 700 Jewish women were held in the outlying location to work in a weapons factory nearby. An estimated 56,000 people died at Buchenwald. They were either killed by the Nazis or perished through illness, cold or starvation.

Thousands of Jews were among the dead, but also Roma and political opponents of the Nazis, gays and Soviet prisoners of war. — AFP