Weimar/Nordhausen (dpa/th) – Two summer camps run by the Action Reconciliation Service for Peace and the organization Service Civil International (SCI) end in the Buchenwald and Mittelbau Dora concentration camp memorials on Saturday. For 14 days, volunteers in Weimar and Nordhausen helped with restoration and maintenance work in the memorial sites. At the Buchenwald memorial, the focus was on work on the Buchenwaldbahn memorial trail, in the restoration workshop and on memorial stones for children and young people deported from the concentration camp. In Mittelbau-Dora, the remains of foundations and the outlines of former barracks were to be made visible.
During the National Socialist regime of terror, people from all over Europe were deported to Buchenwald. According to the memorial, a total of almost 280,000 people were imprisoned in the Ettersberg concentration camp and its 139 satellite camps. The SS forced them to work for the German armaments industry. Over 56,000 people died from torture, medical experimentation and wasting.
The Mittelbau Dora concentration camp, set up in 1943, was notorious for the forced labor in tunnels where the prisoners had to produce rockets and other armaments under the most inhumane conditions. One in three of the approximately 60,000 prisoners did not survive.
