Buchenwald remembrance
WEIMAR, Germany — Germany’s president Sunday marked the 76th anniversary of the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp by reminding his compatriots of the inconceivable atrocities the Nazis committed there during the Third Reich.
“Communists and democrats, homosexuals and socalled asocials were incarcerated at Buchenwald. Jews, Sinti and Roma were brought here and murdered,” President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said in a speech in the nearby town of Weimar, 76 years to the day after U.S. forces liberated the camp.
Holocaust survivors and their families were not allowed to gather for anniversary observances this year because of the coronavirus pandemic. Survivors from different parts of the world instead attended Sunday’s memorial ceremony online. Large-scale commemorations for last year’s 75th anniversary were put on hold.
The Buchenwald concentration camp was established in 1937. More than 56,000 of the 280,000 inmates held at Buchenwald and its satellite camps were killed by the Nazis or died as a result of hunger, illness or medical experiments before the camp’s liberation on April 11, 1945.