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In 1937, the SS (Schutzstaffel, a major paramilitary organization under the Nazi Party), had a concentration camp built on the Ettersberg hill, near Weimar. After Dachau and Sachsenhausen, which was near Berlin, this site became the third major internment camp in the Third Reich. It was used to imprison people who were marginalized and persecuted for their political or religious views, based on Nazi racial ideology, or because they did not conform to the notions of what was “moral” or the social “norm” at the time. The camp complex was divided into several areas. The actual internment camp, which occupied about 40 hectares, was surrounded by barbed wire and an electric fence. There were about 50 barracks there to house prisoners. The SS area was next to this part. It was where the camp commander’s offices were located, along with military barracks, garages, and a training area. There was also an adjacent production area where prisoners were forced to work, consisting of a quarry, a plant operated by the SS’s own German Equipment Works (Deutsche Ausrüstungswerke) and then, starting in 1942 to 1943, a weapons factory operated by Gustloff-Werke, a Nazi company.

By the end of the war, the main camp grounds had expanded to 190 hectares, with well over 100 buildings. With its 139 satellite camps, Buchenwald was one of the largest concentration camp complexes in the Third Reich. The SS imprisoned almost 280,000 people there between 1937 and 1945. More than 56,000 of them were killed outright or died from abuse, medical experiments, or physical exhaustion. U.S. troops liberated the camp on April 11, 1945. Most of the SS guards had fled, and a secret resistance organization made up mainly of communist prisoners that had existed for some time before took over shortly before the Americans arrived.

In keeping with the division of the occupied zones, the camp was turned over to the Soviet military in late July 1945. The Soviets immediately put the grounds to use as a “special camp” (Speziallager) for former Nazis and actual or presumed opponents of their occupation policies. Nearly 30,000 people were imprisoned there between the end of the war and February 1950, when the camp was dissolved. More than 7,000 of them died, chiefly due to the miserable living conditions at the camp.

Since the camp itself was not accessible, the prisoners’ graves on the south side of the hill were the initial focus of people’s efforts toward remembrance. The first memorial service was held there in 1947, and a memorial site, known as the Gedenkstätte Ehrenhain, was officially established in September 1949.

After the special camp was dissolved and the grounds turned over to the authorities in what was now East Germany, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (the East German Communist Party) ordered the demolition of most buildings in the camp and the SS area. All of the prisoners’ barracks were razed in the process. Only in a few spots was it still visible where they had been, as piles of rock were placed on the site with informational signs around the former camp grounds. In line with the government’s wishes, though, the site was meant as a memorial not to the suffering of the victims, but rather to how it was overcome through the heroic and ultimately successful communist resistance struggle, which had led to the victory of socialism and the founding of the East German state – or so the government’s view of history would have it. This “anti-fascist” founding myth also lay at the heart of the first exhibition held on the camp’s history, which took place at the former prisoners’ canteen in 1954. It informed the construction of a memorial site to German communist leader Ernst Thälmann, who was killed at the camp, at the former crematorium, and most especially of a monumental memorial, visible from afar, on the hillside some 1.5 kilometers from the camp itself. Three mass graves located there were redesigned. Linked together by what was called a Straße der Nationen, or “Avenue of Nations,” they became part of the memorial site. The National Buchenwald Memorial of the GDR was dedicated in September 1958 and subsequently became the central site of remembrance of the communist resistance to Nazism. It was later expanded to become what was then Germany’s largest concentration camp memorial complex. Alongside an archive and library, a second, larger permanent exhibition was added in 1964. Located in the Effektenbau building, it was dedicated primarily to the camp’s history. But this exhibition, too, continued to overemphasize the communist resistance as a product of the state’s need for legitimacy.

In West Germany, where the process of coming to grips with the Nazi past went through much more dramatic shifts over the years than in the east, the first concentration camp memorial site with a documentary exhibition was not erected until 1965, when the Dachau memorial opened. In the west, widespread desire to draw a veil of silence over the crimes of the Nazi era was a major obstacle to remembrance. In Dachau, too, the prisoners’ barracks had all been demolished in the meantime, with only a few original buildings remaining. Two barracks were reconstructed for the site.

In Buchenwald, the memorial complex underwent a major overhaul in the early 1990s, after German reunification. The new permanent exhibition opened in 1995, following heated debate surrounding the politics of history and remembrance. It presented the camp’s history in detail, based on current historical knowledge. In particular, the new exhibition now included all of the groups of victims who had been imprisoned at the camp, a first for the site. In addition to the depiction of the role of communist prisoners at the camp, the inclusion of the former Soviet special camp in the memorial was a particularly controversial point. A separate exhibition was opened in memory of the special camp in 1997. A youth center opened a year before that in one of the buildings of the former SS barracks, which had been used as an administration building during the East German era. Most of the original buildings that were still present were restored, and the former barrack of the prisoners’ infirmary was rebuilt in 1994. Dismantled in the early 1950s and reassembled in a small town in the East German state of Thuringia, it had withstood the course of time. Following a practice accepted by then by nearly all memorial sites in reunified Germany, no further reconstruction was performed in an effort to keep the buildings’ remains as authentic as possible.

Like at many other concentration camp memorials, this means very few of the buildings that once stood there can be seen at Buchenwald today. The most striking of them is the several-story gatehouse, which also appears in some of Jung’s drawings. One of Jung’s aims in his drawings is also to point to the impossibility of showing the demolished prisoners’ barracks.

There is recurring discussion at the memorial sites of how best to respond to the frequent complaints from visitors that they can’t really imagine what the camp was like due to the lack of buildings. In the past, site plans and scale models were used, and extensive considerations regarding augmented reality are now under way.

By Andreas Eichmüller, research associate at the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism