Survivors gather for 60th anniversary of Buchenwald liberation

Survivors of the Buchenwald concentration camp have remembered its horrors as they commemorated the 60th anniversary of its liberation by US troops on 11 April 1945. In what many agreed would be their last such gathering, 500 survivors mourned the thousands killed by the Nazis and urged the young to remember and to be vigilant against anti-Semitism and far-right violence. Buchenwald was not one of the death camps where the Nazis set about the systematic extermination of European Jews. Nonetheless, it was equipped with crematoriums and gas chambers and 56,000 people were murdered there, 11,000 of them Jewish. Named after the surrounding beech trees, Buchenwald was set up in 1937, close to the picturesque eastern city of Weimar, home to the poets Goethe and Schiller and one of the great centers of classical German culture. The camp housed Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals, but was also the Nazis' main internment facility for political prisoners, including Communists, Socialists and Christians resistance fighters. "In a certain sense the cycle of active memory is closing, with the vow not only to cast our eyes back upon the past but also to look forward to the future," said Spanish writer and former culture minister Jorge Semprun, himself a former Buchenwald inmate.