Commemoration with staged reading at the historic site of the special camp on 9 November 2023 at 1.30 p.m.
"Suddenly a man shouted: 'I fought for Germany. I was at the front for over four years. I am a German Jew. They have been persecuting us for 2,000 years and you want to be a cultural people!' They dragged him to the side. He was given special treatment straight away. Twenty-five strokes of the cane on his bare bottom. The man screamed, you could really hear the SS man lashing out, cutting the air with the cane so that it just whistled [...] I thought of Weimar, Buchenwald, Goethe. I no longer understood anything."
This is how Julius Katz recalls the open anti-Semitism, insults and physical violence to which he and the other Jewish men were subjected in Buchenwald concentration camp.
In the early hours of 10 November, synagogues burn all over Germany. Jews are dragged from their homes, rounded up, beaten or murdered. As the day dawns, onlookers stand in front of charred remains of buildings in many places - watch as the SA throws the furniture into the street and loots shops. Some join in, many are paralysed. Once again, but as never before publicly, the National Socialists demonstrate that they don't just talk about bloody violence. After the pogrom, the Gestapo has over 26,000 Jewish Germans arrested and taken to concentration camps. They are to experience - according to the SS's order - the fear of death. Everything is aimed at taking away their dignity and plundering them.
Word spreads in Weimar that the SS is chasing Jews across the railway station grounds and taking them to the Ettersberg. They deport 9,845 men from all over Germany to the Buchenwald concentration camp there alone. The SS imprisoned them in five barn-like barracks in a zone fenced off with barbed wire to the west of the roll call square. No one comes here to rest for days. The living conditions are inhumane, there are hardly any sanitary facilities.
State authorities and the SS extort from the men here the surrender of their possessions and the obligation to leave Germany. In the hundred days of the existence of the Jewish special camp, 250 people are deprived of their lives.
A memorial stone marks the site of the Jewish special camp today.
The memorial service for the 9,845 Jewish men who were deported to Buchenwald in November 1938 will take place on Wednesday, 9 November 2023 at 1.30 pm at the memorial stone for the victims of the pogrom and the Jewish special camp.
