Germany marked the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazis’ Buchenwald concentration camp on Sunday as one of the country’s former presidents warned against “radicalisation and a worldwide shift to the right”.
The governor of the state of Thuringia, Mario Voigt, and former German President Christian Wulff spoke at a ceremony in the city of Weimar, near Buchenwald, attended by scores of people, including several Holocaust survivors from across Europe.
Voigt, whose state includes Buchenwald, called it “a place of systematic dehumanisation” and said that everything that happened at the death camp “was designed to break the human spirit and its dignity.”
The Buchenwald concentration camp was established in 1937. More than 56,000 of the 280,000 inmates held at Buchenwald and its satellite camps were killed by the Nazis or died as a result of hunger, illness or medical experiments before the camp’s liberation on April 11, 1945.
Voigt also said the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel showed that “the intention to exterminate Jews is not a thing of the past”.
In his speech, Wulff issued a stark warning about the current global political situation.
