A plan to build a pork sausage museum on land that housed an annex of the Buchenwald concentration camp has been shelved, with local Jewish community representatives saying they were “shocked by the lack of sensitivity” about the plans.
On Thursday, as reported by Deutsche Welle, the city council of Muhlhausen in Germany approved the rezoning of a site known as “Martha II” to be the new home of the German Sausage Museum, after an application by the “Friends of the Thuringian Sausage” group.
During the Second World War, the Martha II site housed a sub-camp of Buchenwald, where hundreds of women, most of them Jewish, worked as forced labourers.
The sub-camp was closed in March 1945, when the Nazis transferred most inmates to the Bergen Belsen camp, where many died of starvation or illness.
More than 56,000 people were killed in Buchenwald itself.
Reinhard Schramm, head of the Jewish community in Thuringia which numbers around 800, described local Jews as “shocked and irritated by the total lack of sensitivity”.
Rikola-Gunnar Lüttgenau, a spokesman for the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora memorial sites, told Deutsche Welle that the council’s actions betrayed a “lack of sensitivity and a lack of historical awareness.
"There is research about this camp; and its existence is beyond doubt.”
Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, told the German DPA news agency: "Although I understand the desire to create tourist attractions, such an insensitive and historically ignorant decision is simply incomprehensible."
On Friday evening, Uwe Keith, chairman of Friends of the Thuringian Sausage, told the Bild newspaper that the organisation would “definitely not” build there, saying they had not been made aware of the origins of the site.
Soon afterwards, Benjamin-Immanuel Hoff, Minister of Culture for the German province of Thuringia, tweeted that “the city is looking for an alternative location for the museum”, saying that he and the mayor had agreed that “the site in question – an outer camp of Buchenwald – is unsuitable.”
He also said that the city, the provincial government and the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora memorial sites would work to “raise awareness” of the site of the former satellite camp.
