Buchenwald Memorial

In order to urge the international community to take the “Never again” seriously and to stop the ongoing “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia and Herzegovina, several activities were organized at the Memorial of the former Buchenwald concentration camp by the Society for Threatened Peoples.

On November 14, 1993, the German Memorial Day (Volkstrauertag), an international demonstration took place in Buchenwald, with 3.000 participants. Among the speakers were Vytautas Landsbergis, the former Prime Minister of Lithuania, the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, and Marek Edelman, the last surviving commander of the Jewsih resistance in the Warsaw ghetto. The latter stated at this occasion: “Europe has learned nothing from the Holocaust. Nothing has been done to put an end to this slaughter. What is happening in Bosnia and Herzegovina is a posthumous triumph for Hitler.”

One and half years later, on July 27, 1995, shortly after the fall of Srebrenica, activists of the Society for Threatened Peoples and former Bosnian prisoners of the Prijedor camps symbolically occupied a part of the Buchenwald Memorial for three days. In an open letter to German chancellor Helmut Kohl, the group once more demanded international intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the lifting of the arms embargo in order to allow the Bosnian victims to defend themselves. The director of the Buchenwald Memorial declared that he supported the protest.