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Former Inmates' Canteen

Also, the former market of the concentration camp was slated for demolition in the 1950s. However, because it was being used as a gym by the Soviet military still situated in the nearby casern, the demolition was postponed.

View of the single-story building that was formerly the prisoners' canteen. The two identical wings of the building are separated in the middle by an entrance area with a pointed roof.
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Former prisoner canteen from the west side of the camp, 2022. Photo: Lukas Severin Damm.

©Buchenwald Memorial
An employee of the memorial points to a model of the concentration camp filling the seminar room. Around the model stand young seminar participants, 5 of whom can be seen in the frame.
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Today, seminar rooms have been set up in the former inmates' canteen, 2022. Photo: Lukas Severin Damm.

©Buchenwald Memorial

In 1953, the "Museum für Deutsche Geschichte" in East Berlin, which was responsible for the site, decided to install a "Museum of the Resistance Movement" in the large building—not focussing on the history of the camp but only dedicated to the German communist resistance movement beginning in the Weimar Republic. Protests by both national and international visitors caused the exhibition to soon be shut down and reworked.

In 1963 a cinema and lecture hall were installed in the left wing of the building. An artistically designed "Honorary Room of Nations" was created in the central portion of the building, in which individual fighters belonging to the camp resistance were honoured.

Construction began in 1985 on a bomb-proof depot for the "protection of cultural patrimony in case of armed conflict."

Today in the right wing, one finds rooms with models that are used for tours of the site.

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