Weimar (dpa/th) – Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth (Greens) and Prime Minister Bodo Ramelow (Left) planted two new memorial trees for prisoners of the Buchenwald Nazi concentration camp on Friday. This is intended to set an example against the repeated destruction of memorial trees.
Most recently, in July, memorial trees for concentration camp victims were willfully bent, broken and sawed down. The crime caused outrage across the country. Trees were also damaged at the planting site in Weimar in 2019.
An attack on a memorial tree is “also an attack on a victim,” said Minister of State for Culture Roth – “an attempt to get rid of history, to suppress history”. She will not allow memory to be made impossible and victims to be made victims a second time. A living memorial trail with trees is to be gradually created along the former marching route of the prisoners of the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar. “168 trees have been planted and will continue to grow until we reach 1,000 trees,” Roth said. Prime Minister Bodo Ramelow (left) also took on another sponsorship for a tree.
By the end of the Second World War, the Nazis had deported 280,000 people to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Around 56,000 of them were murdered or died of starvation, disease and medical experiments. On April 11, 1945, US troops liberated the camp. In the last few days before that, concentration camp prisoners were being sent from Buchenwald to the Bavarian concentration camp in Flossenbürg. It was a death march for many. The Lebenshilfe-Werk started the project along this path in 1999.
