A private developer has faced a backlash after announcing plans to move the German Bratwurst Museum to a site near Mühlhausen, Thuringia, where an annex to the former Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald was situated.

The building set to house the sausage museum was an external annex of Buchenwald codenamed Martha II where some 700 Polish and Hungarian Jewish women lived from September 1944 to February 1945 while being forced to work at a nearby munitions factory.

Most of the women were brought there from the Auschwitz death camp, where many were returned when no longer able to work.

The developer, Jan Kratochwil, head of a local air conditioning company, won Mühlhausen's bid to develop the new museum at the site, having bought the 16-hectare property in 2008. He also planned to open a theater, a hotel, and other event locations.

The eastern German state of Thuringia is known for its Bratwurst sausage, and local authorities said the current museum in Holzhausen was too small for the 50,000 visitors it receives every year.

Mühlhausen's marketing chief Christian Fröhlich downplayed the historical significance of the site on Thursday. "Our city archive checked everything very carefully," he told the Bild newspaper. "There was no annex of Buchenwald here. The inmates might have stayed there overnight, but did not work there."

The current museum is too small for its 50,000 annual visitors, the city said

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Vanished history

That statement puzzled Rikola-Gunnar Lüttgenau of the Buchenwald Memorial Foundation, not least because the city had not been in touch before the decision was made. "I cannot explain how one could come to such a statement," he told DW. "There is research about this camp, and its existence is beyond doubt. The history of this place has not been taken into account in any way at all up until now."

Nazi Germany's concentration camp system was vast and complicated, with hundreds of buildings and barracks used temporarily to house inmates outside the main camps. According to Lüttgenau, Buchenwald alone had 139 external annexes.

"Unfortunately it is part of the history of post-war Germany that these places were often made invisible," Lüttgenau said. "That often even applies to the main camps, not just the annexes."

But the negative press that developed this week appears to have prompted a re-think at the museum, and in Mühlhausen town hall. Uwe Keith, chairman of Freunde der Thüringer Bratwurst, ("Friends of the Thuringian Sausage"), the organization that runs the museum, said they had not been aware of the site's history until this week.

"Based on the facts that have come to light, we will investigate the historical background in the coming days, and, involving everyone responsible and taking into account public opinion, will carry out a completely new assessment," Keith told DW in an email. "Our association is an internationally-networked organization for whom the principles of human rights and international understanding are of the highest concern."

Lüttgenau also said that the mayor of Mühlhausen, Johannes Bruns, had since been in touch with the Buchenwald Memorial Foundation. "They are clearly interested in talking, but it remains to be seen whether any future use for the site will incorporate how this historical layer from its time as an annex of Buchenwald is to be remembered," he said.

Bruns' office was not reachable for comment on Friday, though local authorities are now meeting to consider alternative locations. Bruns is also due to meet with Thuringia's Culture Minister and anti-Semitism commissioner Benjamin-Immanuel Hoff to discuss the plans.

'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust Dachau The Nazi regime opened the first concentration camp in Dauchau, not far from Munich. Just a few weeks after Adolf Hitler came to power it was used by the paramilitary SS "Schutzstaffel" to imprison, torture and kill political opponents to the regime. Dachau also served as a prototype and model for the other Nazi camps that followed.

'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust Wannsee House The villa on Berlin's Wannsee lake was pivotal in planning the Holocaust. Fifteen members of the Nazi government and the SS Schutzstaffel met here on January 20, 1942 to plan what became known as the "Final Solution," the deportation and extermination of all Jews in German-occupied territory. In 1992, the villa where the Wannsee Conference was held was turned into a memorial and museum.

'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust Bergen-Belsen The Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Lower Saxony was initially established as a prisoner of war camp before becoming a concentration camp. Prisoners too sick to work were brought here from other concentration camps, so many also died of disease. One of the 50,000 killed here was Anne Frank, a Jewish girl who gained international fame posthumously after her diary was published.

'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust Buchenwald Memorial Buchenwald near the Thuringian town of Weimar was one of the largest concentration camps in Germany. From 1937 to April 1945, the National Socialists deported about 270,000 people from all over Europe here and murdered 64,000 of them.

'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust Nazi party rally grounds Nuremberg hosted the biggest Nazi party propaganda rallies from 1933 until the start of the Second World War. The annual Nazi party congress as well as rallies with as many as 200,000 participants took place on the 11-km² (4.25 square miles) area. Today, the unfinished Congress Hall building serves as a documentation center and a museum.

'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust Memorial to the German Resistance The Bendlerblock building in Berlin was the headquarters of a military resistance group. On July 20, 1944, a group of Wehrmacht officers around Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg carried out an assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler that failed. The leaders of the conspiracy were summarily shot the same night in the courtyard of the Bendlerblock, which is today the German Resistance Memorial Center.

'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust Hadamar Euthanasia Center From 1941 people with physical and mental disabilities were killed at a psychiatric hospital in Hadamar in Hesse. Declared "undesirables" by the Nazis, some 15,000 people were murdered here by asphyxiation with carbon monoxide or by being injected with lethal drug overdoses. Across Germany some 70,000 were killed as part of the Nazi euthanasia program. Today Hadamar is a memorial to those victims.

'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust Holocaust Memorial Located next to the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was inaugurated sixty years after the end of World War II on May 10, 2005, and opened to the public two days later. Architect Peter Eisenman created a field with 2,711 concrete slabs. An attached underground "Place of Information" holds the names of all known Jewish Holocaust victims.

'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust Memorial to persecuted homosexuals Not too far from the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, another concrete memorial honors the thousands of homosexuals persecuted by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945. The four-meter high monument, which has a window showing alternately a film of two men or two women kissing, was inaugurated in Berlin's Tiergarten on May 27, 2008.

'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust Sinti and Roma Memorial Opposite the Reichstag parliament building in Berlin, a park inaugurated in 2012 serves as a memorial to the 500,000 Sinti and Roma people killed by the Nazi regime. Around a memorial pool the poem "Auschwitz" by Roma poet Santino Spinelli is written in English, Germany and Romani: "gaunt face, dead eyes, cold lips, quiet, a broken heart, out of breath, without words, no tears."

'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust 'Stolpersteine' - stumbling blocks as memorials In the 1990s, the artist Gunther Demnig began a project to confront Germany's Nazi past. Brass-covered concrete cubes placed in front of the former houses of Nazi victims, provide details about the people and their date of deportation and death, if known. More than 45,000 "Stolpersteine" have been laid in 18 countries in Europe - it's the world's largest decentralized Holocaust memorial.

'Never Again': Memorials of the Holocaust Brown House in Munich Right next to the "Führerbau" where Adolf Hitler had his office, was the headquarters of the Nazi Party in Germany, in the "Brown House" in Munich. A white cube now occupies its former location. A new "Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism" opened on April 30, 2015, 70 years after the liberation from the Nazi regime, uncovering further dark chapters of history. Author: Max Zander, Ille Simon



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'Unacceptable'

By the time Buchenwald was liberated by the Allies in April 1945, more than 56,000 of the 280,000 people that had been imprisoned in the camp had been murdered or died as a result of starvation, illness or medical experiments.

Reinhard Schramm, president of the Jewish Community of Thuringia, was clearer in his opposition to the museum, telling the MDR public broadcaster, "a location on the site of a former barracks for Jewish forced laborers is unacceptable."

The developed has already created political repercussions. Three Thuringia state parliamentarians released a statement demanding that "all those involved" distance themselves from any further plans to build the museum at the site.

"It is and remains all our responsibility to use these sites to commemorate and actively confront the destruction of Jewish life in Germany and the new forms of anti-Semitism today," read the statement from the Left party's Katharina König-Preuss, Social Democrat Birgit Pelke, and the Green party's Madeleine Henfling.