Gedenkweg Buchenwaldbahn

The path follows the former track of the Buchenwaldbahn. Buchenwald was not an extermination camp like Auschwitz, it was a labor camp. It was six years since the SS decided in 1943 to build a railway line to the Gustloff armaments factory, which was located next to the concentration camp. Prisoners had to build a ten-kilometer-long route between the village of Schöndorf and Buchenwald in the north of Weimar, at full speed, with simple tools and bare hands, many died under these strains. From 1944 prisoners were then transported to the concentration camp on the railway line and deported to forced labor in external camps. "When the train leaves, the rumbling and dying of death is drowned out by the rattle of the wheels," writes the Austrian inmate Fred Wander, "open wagons crammed with men writhing in the cold. Only when they die do they stretch out to their full length. "
A freight car on a blue and white striped ground is the sign of the "access" to the former concentration camp. There are milestones on the roadside, some are overturned and lie on the forest floor. In many places, gravel comes out, marks the path and makes the track bed under the soles of the shoes felt. In the last hundred meters of the way more and more thresholds are visible, their wood is faded, splintered, sometimes overgrown and covered by moss. They meet us as silent witnesses and lead us into the camp. At the station, whose building was demolished in GDR times, a few thresholds have been renewed to make the station recognizable as a place, otherwise is not built, restored, restored. The station is a void, as is the former barracks camp - a vast area that confronts us with ourselves. 280000 people were imprisoned in Buchenwald between 1937 and 1945, 56,000 people were killed, were killed arbitrarily, died of hunger, illness or medical experiments. More than 8,000 Soviet prisoners were deliberately killed by the SS.