16 July 2007
Holocaust survivors have marked the 70th anniversary of the establishment of the Buchenwald Nazi concentration camp, near the city of Weimar. More than 38,000 victims whose identities had previously been unknown were honored in a ceremony. Researchers spent the past decade scouring archives from the United States, Israel and Germany in an attempt to identify tens of thousands of the estimated 56,000 prisoners who lost their lives at Buchenwald between 1937 and 1945, but had been known only by their camp-assigned numbers. Archivists were able to identify 38,049 victims and enter their names into a memorial book.
"The Nazis tried to reduce humans to numbers, to rob them of their identity," said Jens Göbel, culture minister of the state of Thuringia, upon handing copies of the book to representatives of survivor groups. "That should not be the last word." About 8,000 Soviet prisoners of war, as well as some 9,000 who died in death marches as the Nazis tried to evacuate the camp late in World War II, remain unknown.
Most of the early inmates at Buchenwald were political prisoners. But following the “Kristallnacht” in 1938, some 10,000 Jews were sent to the camp. Over the course of World War II, criminals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Romany Gypsies and German military deserters were also interned at the main camp and its many satellite camps.
