Seven trees commemorating people who died in Buchenwald during the Holocaust were cut down Tuesday near the former concentration camp outside Weimar, Germany, in what the Buchenwald Dora International Committee called a “terrible act of vandalism.”
The foundation that manages the Buchenwald memorial complex announced the news on Twitter. The trees were part of the 1,000 Beeches Project, an effort to plant trees along the 118-mile route that prisoners from Buchenwald had to march in April 1945 when the Nazis attempted to evacuate the camp when American troops entered, according to the charity responsible for the project. “Buchenwald” is the German word for “beech forest”.
One of the trees honored the 1,600 children who died in Buchenwald, the foundation said. The other trees that were cut each honored a former inmate and were planted in 2015 by relatives of those inmates. In a statement, Buchenwald Dora’s International Committee condemned the vandalism and said it was “deeply outraged”.
“Only education can defeat ideology,” the statement said.
The city of Weimar, about 170 miles southwest of Berlin, has offered a reward of 10,000 euros or about $10,200 for information about the vandals.
Buchenwald was one of the largest concentration camps in Germany and was one of the first camps to be established before the start of World War II. From July 1937, when it opened, to April 1945, about 250,000 people were incarcerated, at least 56,000 of whom were killed, according to Sara J. Bloomfield, the director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
“This is an attack on the real truth of the Holocaust because it is where some of these crimes took place,” Ms Bloomfield said. “It’s a form of vandalism that is of a different order in a world where the truth is so under attack.”
According to the museum, on April 11, 1945, as American troops approached, Buchenwald inmates stormed the watchtowers and overtook the guards, allowing them to take control of the camp. American soldiers arrived later that day to find 21,000 people at the camp, including Elie Wiesel, who later won the Nobel Peace Prize for speaking out against the world’s forgetfulness about the Holocaust. Mr Wiesel’s father died in Buchenwald.
Gene. Dwight D. Eisenhower, then the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe, visited a Buchenwald subcamp called Ohrdruf on April 12, 1945, according to the Holocaust Memorial Museum.
“I made the visit on purpose, in order to provide first-hand evidence of these things in the future, if ever there is a tendency to make these allegations purely ‘propaganda’,” Mr Eisenhower said at the time. , referring to the atrocities committed by the Nazis during the Holocaust.
President Barack Obama visited Buchenwald with Mr. Wiesel in June 2009. Mr. Obama recalled that his great-uncle, Charles T. Payne, was one of the liberators of the Ohrdruf subcamp, and underlined Buchenwald’s role in ensuring that the horrors of the Holocaust would never be forgotten.
“To this day, there are those who maintain that the Holocaust never happened — a denial of facts and truth that is baseless, ignorant and hateful,” Obama said. “This place is the ultimate rebuke of such thoughts, a reminder of our duty to confront those who would tell lies about our history.”
Clay Risen reporting contributed.
