Chancellor Angela Merkel

Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen. Here in this place a concentration camp was established in 1937. Not far from here lies Weimar, a place where Germans created wonderful works of art...

U.S. President Barack Obama

Chancellor Merkel and I have just finished our tour here at Buchenwald. I want to thank Dr. Volkhard Knigge, who gave an outstanding account of what we were witnessing...

Elie Wiesel

Mr. President, Chancellor Merkel, Bertrand, ladies and gentlemen. As I came here today it was actually a way of coming and visit my father's grave -- but he had no grave...

Reaction to the Visit from U.S. President Barack Obama

Statement by Bertrand Herz, President of the International Committee of Buchenwald-Dora and Subcamps (Internationales Komitee Buchenwald-Dora und Kommandos; IKBD), on his encounter with U.S. President Barack Obama in the former Buchenwald Concentration Camp on 5 June 2009

Young People's Reaction to the Visit from U.S. President Barack Obama

Statement by students of the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität in Jena and the international volunteers at Buchenwald Memorial on the encounter with U.S. President Barack Obama in the former Buchenwald Concentration Camp on 5 June 2009

1 - The Camp Gate

The camp gate was one of the first buildings the inmates were forced to construct in 1937. It served as the main watchtower of altogether twenty-two, and as a stand for a machine gun which could be aimed at any spot on the muster ground...

2 - The Commemorative Plaque on the Muster Ground

The muster ground is the first area reached upon entering the camp. Today it is no more than one part of a much larger open space affording a view of the mountain ranges in the Harz foreland. It was formerly a self-contained zone...

3 - The Inmates’ Camp - The Grounds

Behind the camp gate, the so-called “protective custody camp” spread out, built by inmates under duress in terraces cut into the north slope of Ettersberg Mountain. The incline of some 70 m (230’) determined the layout of the entire facility...

4 - The “Little Camp”

Following the defeat in Stalingrad in early 1943, the SS decided to expand the practise of leasing out the inmates in their concentration camps to the German armament industry and also put them to work in new construction projects of their own, for example in Dora and Ohrdruf Subcamps...

5 - The Crematorium

With its high chimney, the crematorium towered over everything else in the area. More than the chimney, however, it was the smoke that remained in the inmates’ memories. Until 1940, the SS had dead inmates cremated in the municipal crematorium of Weimar...

Floréal Barrier

Chairman of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation inmates' advisory board on Buchenwald Concentration Camp

Bertrand Herz

President of the International Committee of Buchenwald-Dora and Subcamps

Elie Wiesel

Author, Nobel Prize laureate