Seven trees have been cut down near the Buchenwald memorial to commemorate the victims of the Nazi concentration camp near Weimar. It is not yet clear who is responsible for the crime. The trees were dedicated to the children killed in Buchenwald and six prisoners named, as the spokesman for the memorial, Rikola-Gunnar Lüttgenau, announced on Wednesday.
“We are appalled by the targeted attack on the commemoration,” wrote the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation on Twitter. Lüttgenau said there had always been damage to commemorative plaques or information signs or daubed swastikas at the memorial in the past.
According to him, the memorial trees that have now been cut down stood on the route of the former Buchenwald railway, which the National Socialists used to take people from all over Europe to the concentration camp. It is a little outside of the actual memorial site. It was not the first destruction of trees at this point, said the spokesman. Planting had to be replaced a few years ago.
In addition, it was discovered on Wednesday that unknown persons had scratched a signpost in the memorial to an ash grave where the Nazis dumped the cremation cremation from the crematorium in 1944/45.
