Jewish community welcomes decision not to move museum to annexe of Buchenwald camp

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

A German sausage museum has scrapped plans to move to an annexe of the former Nazi concentration camp of Buchenwald, a decision welcomed by the Jewish community.

The Friends of the Thuringian Bratwurst association sparked an outcry last week when it announced plans to move the Bratwurst Museum to the site in the town of Mühlhausen and to also build a hotel there.

“I welcome the fact that it has been decided to look for a new location,” the head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Josef Schuster, told Berlin’s Tagesspiegel newspaper.

Rikola-Gunnar Lüttgenau of the Buchenwald memorial foundation had said the redevelopment plan showed a lack of sensitivity and historical awareness.

The museum apologised on its website for the earlier announcement to build a tourist attraction on a site linked to “this dark chapter of German history”.

In a statement it said: “We apologise to all those who saw our actions as trivialising or relativising the crimes of National Socialism and whose ideological and religious feelings were hurt.”

About 50,000 people a year now visit the Bratwurstmuseum in Holzhausen, where it is marked by a giant wooden sculpture of a sausage in a bun, and another of a sausage in a cannon.

The Mühlhausen site was once part of the Buchenwald camp, where the Nazis imprisoned almost 250,000 people between 1937 and 1945.

About 700 Jewish women were held in the outlying location to work in a weapons factory nearby. An estimated 56,000 people died at Buchenwald. They were either killed or died through illness, cold or starvation.

Thousands of Jews were among the dead, but also Roma and political opponents of the Nazis, gay people and Soviet prisoners of war.