The story of this place
On the Ettersberg hill above Weimar — the city of Goethe and Schiller — the SS built Buchenwald in 1937, one of the largest camps in the Reich. Its gate bears the sardonic slogan 'Jedem das Seine', 'to each what he deserves', legible only from inside. Over 56,000 of the 280,000 people imprisoned here died from starvation, disease, execution and medical experiments. The camp was deliberately built around an oak said to have been Goethe's favourite, a grotesque juxtaposition of culture and barbarism. When US troops approached in April 1945, the prisoners rose and seized control themselves before liberation. Later the Soviets ran it as an internment camp. The site is now a memorial to both eras of terror.