German investor plans sausage museum at former Nazi concentration camp
A private developer announced plans Wednesday to move the German Bratwurst Museum from its current location in Holzhausen to nearby Mühlhausen in Thuringia. The museum’s website claimed: “After looking intensely for a new home throughout the whole of Thuringia, we have found the perfect symbiosis of location, investor and community. The combination offers potential for a quick start and almost limitless growth.”
The developer also plans to open a theater, a hotel and various other event locations. The eastern German state of Thiringia is known all over Germany for its Thüringer Bratwurst (Thuringia sausage).
Location, location, location
There is, however, one massive problem with the plan. The new complex is to be built at an annex to the former Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald. The camp was built by the Nazis in July 1937. By the time it was liberated by the Allies in April 1945, more than 56,000 of the 280,000 people that had been imprisoned in the camp had been murdered or died as a result of starvation, illness or medical experiments.
Read more: Germany probes neo-Nazi photo taken inside Buchenwald
The building set to house the sausage museum was an annex of the camp, a site where some 700 Jewish women, brought there from the Auschwitz death camp, lived while being forced to work at a nearby munitions factory. The women were informed that they would be returned to Auschwitz when they could no longer work.
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‘Never Again’: Memorials of terror
Wannsee House
The villa on Berlin’s Wannsee lake was pivotal in planning the Holocaust. Fifteen members of the Nazi government and the SS Schutzstaffel met here on January 20, 1942 to plan what became known as the “Final Solution,” the deportation and extermination of all Jews in German-occupied territory. In 1992, the villa where the Wannsee Conference was held was turned into a memorial and museum.
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‘Never Again’: Memorials of terror
Dachau
The Nazi regime opened the first concentration camp in Dauchau, not far from Munich. Just a few weeks after Adolf Hitler came to power it was used by the paramilitary SS “Schutzstaffel” to imprison, torture and kill political opponents to the regime. Dachau also served as a prototype and model for the other Nazi camps that followed.
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‘Never Again’: Memorials of terror
Nazi party rally grounds
Nuremberg hosted the biggest Nazi party propaganda rallies from 1933 until the start of the Second World War. The annual Nazi party congress as well as rallies with as many as 200,000 participants took place on the 11-km² (4.25 square miles) area. Today, the unfinished Congress Hall building serves as a documentation center and a museum.
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‘Never Again’: Memorials of terror
Bergen-Belsen
The Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Lower Saxony was initially established as a prisoner of war camp before becoming a concentration camp. Prisoners too sick to work were brought here from other concentration camps, so many also died of disease. One of the 50,000 killed here was Anne Frank, a Jewish girl who gained international fame posthumously after her diary was published.
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‘Never Again’: Memorials of terror
Buchenwald Memorial
Buchenwald near the Thuringian town of Weimar was one of the largest concentration camps in Germany. From 1937 to April 1945, the National Socialists deported about 270,000 people from all over Europe here and murdered 64,000 of them.
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‘Never Again’: Memorials of terror
Memorial to the German Resistance
The Bendlerblock building in Berlin was the headquarters of a military resistance group. On July 20, 1944, a group of Wehrmacht officers around Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg carried out an assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler that failed. The leaders of the conspiracy were summarily shot the same night in the courtyard of the Bendlerblock, which is today the German Resistance Memorial Center.
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‘Never Again’: Memorials of terror
Hadamar Euthanasia Center
From 1941 people with physical and mental disabilities were killed at a psychiatric hospital in Hadamar in Hesse. Declared “undesirables” by the Nazis, some 15,000 people were murdered here by asphyxiation with carbon monoxide or by being injected with lethal drug overdoses. Across Germany some 70,000 were killed as part of the Nazi euthanasia program. Today Hadamar is a memorial to those victims.
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‘Never Again’: Memorials of terror
Holocaust Memorial
Located next to the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was inaugurated sixty years after the end of World War II on May 10, 2005, and opened to the public two days later. Architect Peter Eisenman created a field with 2,711 concrete slabs. An attached underground “Place of Information” holds the names of all known Jewish Holocaust victims.
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‘Never Again’: Memorials of terror
Memorial to persecuted homosexuals
Not too far from the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, another concrete memorial honors the thousands of homosexuals persecuted by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945. The four-meter high monument, which has a window showing alternately a film of two men or two women kissing, was inaugurated in Berlin’s Tiergarten on May 27, 2008.
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‘Never Again’: Memorials of terror
Sinti and Roma Memorial
Opposite the Reichstag parliament building in Berlin, a park inaugurated in 2012 serves as a memorial to the 500,000 Sinti and Roma people killed by the Nazi regime. Around a memorial pool the poem “Auschwitz” by Roma poet Santino Spinelli is written in English, Germany and Romani: “gaunt face, dead eyes, cold lips, quiet, a broken heart, out of breath, without words, no tears.”
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‘Never Again’: Memorials of terror
‘Stolpersteine’ – stumbling blocks as memorials
In the 1990s, the artist Gunther Demnig began a project to confront Germany’s Nazi past. Brass-covered concrete cubes placed in front of the former houses of Nazi victims, provide details about the people and their date of deportation and death, if known. More than 45,000 “Stolpersteine” have been laid in 18 countries in Europe – it’s the world’s largest decentralized Holocaust memorial.
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‘Never Again’: Memorials of terror
Brown House in Munich
Right next to the “Führerbau” where Adolf Hitler had his office, was the headquarters of the Nazi Party in Germany, in the “Brown House” in Munich. A white cube now occupies its former location. A new “Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism” opened on April 30, 2015, 70 years after the liberation from the Nazi regime, uncovering further dark chapters of history.
‘Lack of sensitivity and social awareness’
News of the plan has caused consternation. Rikola-Gunnar Lüttgenau of the Buchenwald Memorials Foundation told Germany’s dpa press agency that the plan exhibited a “lack of sensitivity and historical awareness.” Lüttgenau said that he was not necessarily against redeveloping the site, but added, “It depends on what is to be done there.”
Reinhard Schramm, president of the Jewish Community of Thuringia, was clearer in his opposition, saying, “a location on the site of a former barracks for Jewish forced laborers is inacceptable.”
Left party state parliamentarian Katharina König-Preuss said, “The former annex must not be used in this form. Such sites remind us of our responsibility to actively deal with our history and current forms of anti-Semitism. I find the museum funny and relevant, but please don’t put it here.”
Read more: Opinion: Germany’s historical obligation continues
City council doesn’t see a problem
On Thursday evening, however, Mühlhausen city council approved the plan without any mention of the historical significance of the site. One member did vote against the plan, but he objected to the Bratwurst Museum because he said it glorified the meat industry.
Article source: https://www.dw.com/en/german-investor-plans-sausage-museum-at-former-nazi-concentration-camp/a-47317803