The renaming was controversial in the city council, as it equated the victims of the concentration camp with those of Soviet Special Camp No. 2, which included a number of Nazi criminals. The Thälmann statue itself also caused debate: it did not represent the dead of Buchenwald, but rather hierarchised them by referring only to the communists under the symbolic leadership of Ernst Thälmann as a group of victims and resisters. At the same time, there were still supporters of the bronze, who continued to associate it with the struggle for a "better socialism" beyond the GDR.
Nevertheless, most MPs considered the removal of the statue to be necessary: Buchenwald Square should be remodelled and a new memorial created that represented Buchenwald as both a "synonym for National Socialist [and] Stalinist tyranny", according to Weimar mayor Hans-Werner Martin (SPD). He went on to postulate that the new memorial was intended to correct the "distortions of history".
In the end, however, it was decided not to remove the Thälmann bronze and merely to reduce its plinth height. The square dedicated in his name to the dead of Buchenwald and the statue disappeared more and more from public view in the following years. The victims of National Socialism and Ernst Thälmann himself continued to be commemorated here sporadically, but this increasingly became a minority tradition.
