Don’t go sledging in grounds of Nazi Buchenwald camp, visitors warned
Memorial criticises ‘disrespectful’ daytrippers for disturbing mass graves
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Your support makes all the difference.The Buchenwald Nazi concentration camp memorial has criticised “disrespectful” visitors who have been spotted sledging between its mass graves.
The camp, which extends across a large woods at Ettersberg Hill in east Germany, was the site of more than 56,000 deaths during the Second World War, including thousands of Jews, Roma, gypsies and Soviet prisoners of war.
Jens-Christian Wagner, director of the Buchenwald Memorials Foundation, said “masses” of daytrippers had gathered at the site over the weekend.
“All parking spaces were occupied - not by visitors to the memorial, but by winter sports enthusiasts. Some of the sledge tracks ended at the graves,” Mr Wagner told Der Spiegel.
Though he acknowledged families were keener than usual to get outside during a nationwide coronavirus lockdown, Mr Wagner insisted appropriate behaviour was still expected.
“The historical sensitivity decreases with the passage of time,” he said.
The foundation said in a statement that sporting activities there were a “violation of visitor rules and disturb the peace of the dead”. It warned security staff would step up patrols and trespassers reported to police.
Buchenwald was liberated in April 1945 by US troops who discovered piles of corpses and thousands of starving prisoners.
“Nothing has ever shocked me as much as that night,” future US president Dwight D Eisenhower would later say of the concentration camp.
Much of Buchenwald was destroyed but the remains are used as a museum and memorial visited by hundreds of thousands of people every year.
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