Society cancels death camp sausage tribute

A PLAN to build a pork sausage museum on land that housed an annex of the Buchenwald concentration camp has been shelved, with local Jewish community representatives saying they were “shocked by the lack of sensitivity” about the plans.

The city council in Mühlhausen, central Germany, last week approved the re-zoning of the site to become the new home of the German Sausage Museum,

reported. During the Second World War, the site housed a sub-camp of Buchenwald, where hundreds of women, most of them Jewish, worked as forced labourers.

It was closed in March 1945 when the Nazis transferred most inmates to the Bergen Belsen camp, where many died of starvation or illness. More than 56,000 people were killed in

Buchenwald itself.

Reinhard Schramm, head of the Jewish community in the state of Thuringia, which includes the former camp, described local Jews as “shocked and irritated by the total lack of sensitivity”.

Rikola-Gunnar Lüttgenau, a spokesman for the Buchenwald and MittelbauDora memorial sites, said the council’s actions betrayed a “lack of sensitivity and a lack of historical awareness.

“There is research about this camp; and its existence is beyond doubt.”

Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, added: “Although I understand the desire to create tourist attractions, such an insensitive and historically ignorant decision is simply incomprehensible.”

But a day after the application was approved, the chairman of the sponsor, the Friends of the Thuringian Sausage, said they would “definitely not” build there, saying they had not been made aware of the origins of the site.

Benjamin-Immanuel Hoff, Minister of Culture for Thuringia, said that the city was looking for an alternative location because “the site in question — an outer camp of Buchenwald — is unsuitable.” He also said that authorities would work to “raise awareness” of the

site’s history.