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)
“A healthy man, with steady employment, as wood-chopping at fifty cents a cord, and a camp in the woods, will not be a good subject for Christianity. The New Testament may be a choice book to him on some, but not on all or most of his days. He will rather go a-fishing in his leisure hours. The Apostles, though they were fishers too, were of the solemn race of sea-fishers, and never trolled for pickerel on inland streams.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)