Buchenwald concentration camp (German: Konzentrationslager (KZ) Buchenwald, (eng: Beechwood forest)) was a German Nazi concentration camp established on the Ettersberg (Etter Mountain) near Weimar, Germany, in July 1937, one of the first and the largest of the concentration camps on German soil.
Camp prisoners from all over Europe and the Soviet Union—Jews, non-Jewish Poles and Slovenes, religious and political prisoners, Roma and Sinti, Freemasons, Jehovah's Witnesses, criminals, homosexuals, and prisoners of war— worked primarily as forced labor in local armament factories. From 1945 to 1950, the camp was used by the Soviet occupation authorities as an internment camp, known as NKVD special camp number 2.
Today the remains of Buchenwald serves as a memorial and permanent exhibition and museum.
Read more about Buchenwald Concentration Camp: History, Liberation From Nazi Germany, Soviet Special Camp 2, Demolition of The Camp, Notorious Nazi Personnel, Well-known Inmates, Royalty, Modern Times, Photo Gallery
Famous quotes containing the words concentration camp and/or camp:
“We have our difficulties, true; but we are a wiser and a tougher nation than we were in 1932. Never have there been six years of such far flung internal preparedness in all of history. And this has been done without any dictator’s power to command, without conscription of labor or confiscation of capital, without concentration camps and without a scratch on freedom of speech, freedom of the press or the rest of the Bill of Rights.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“Detachment is the prerogative of an elite; and as the dandy is the nineteenth century’s surrogate for the aristocrat in matters of culture, so Camp is the modern dandyism. Camp is the answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)