By Shira Li Bartov
As pro-Palestinian activists were shut out of the former Buchenwald concentration camp last weekend, a timeworn fight about the site’s history resurfaced.
That dispute, which dates back to the camp’s liberation in 1945, centers on how the victims of Buchenwald wanted to be remembered. The activists, a group called Kufiyas in Buchenwald, said their fight upheld a pledge made by thousands of Buchenwald survivors days after they were freed.
The inmates swore to punish the guilty, destroy Nazism and create a new world of peace. That promise, known as the “Oath of Buchenwald,” has been invoked by varying regimes and political movements ever since it was uttered.
Kufiyas in Buchenwald was blocked from holding a vigil at the Buchenwald memorial on April 12 after a court in the nearby city of Weimar upheld a police ban.
The planned event would have marked the 81st anniversary of Buchenwald’s liberation by US troops — and the day before Yom HaShoah, Holocaust memorial day.
Judges decided that the rally would likely “violate the dignity of victims” of the Nazis. The activists were offered the alternative of protesting in downtown Weimar, which they refused.
Buchenwald was one of the largest concentration camps on German soil, holding Jews along with political prisoners, Roma, homosexuals and prisoners of war. Roughly 56,000 people were killed there, among them some 11,000 Jews.
By not addressing “the genocide in Gaza,” Kufiyehs in Buchenwald said the memorial became “a place of historical revisionism and genocide denial.” The group maintains that what the Nazis did to the Jews, Israel is doing to Palestinians, and therefore an anti-Israel protest at Buchenwald is appropriate.
Said Rikola-Gunnar Lüttgenau, a spokesperson for the memorial foundation, of Kufiyehs in Buchenwald:
“This is a completely inappropriate instrumentalization of the memory of the victims of National Socialism for one’s own political, misanthropic agenda.”
The planned rally was also excoriated by the European Jewish Congress, the Conference of European Rabbis and other groups.
The Oath of Buchenwald was made by 21,000 survivors of the camp on April 19, 1945. They marched onto the roll call square and surrounded Buchenwald’s first memorial monument, a wooden obelisk made in the camp’s wood shop.
They read a memorial address in Russian, Polish, German, French, Czech and English, ending with the jointly spoken oath.
“We will only give up the fight when the last guilty has been judged by the tribunal of all nations.
“The absolute destruction of Nazism is our motto. The building of a new world of peace and freedom is our ideal.”
Just a few days later, the oath was revised. A new version swore to pursue the destruction of Nazism “down to its roots.” That addition had a clear meaning for communist survivors, a meaning solidified when Buchenwald came under Soviet-occupied East Germany: The “roots” of fascism were understood as capitalism and the West.
Buchenwald became a monument to the communist-led struggle and ultimate victory over fascism, a site symbolizing solidarity across national boundaries.
For decades, wide gaps remained in this history, such as the Hitler-Stalin pact and the fate of Jewish inmates.
After the fall of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany, Buchenwald was reconceptualized. In 1991, an independent historical commission recommended an array of changes, including emphasizing the concentration camp and installing memorials for groups that had not yet been commemorated.
A memorial was also installed for the “special camp” that the Soviets set up from 1945 to 1950. The regime used this camp to intern Nazis, along with numerous perceived enemies who were not Nazis.
An estimated 7,000 people who died there were buried in a forest near the camp, their graves kept a state secret. Now, Nazis are remembered among the victims in mass graves.
In the 1990s and 2000s, a new doctrine shaped Germany’s memory of the past: its special responsibility to Israel.
The robustness of the State of Israel became key to Germany’s rehabilitation.
“Just as the Holocaust did justify the birth of the State of Israel, in Germany’s eyes, part of the reason for the memorial is to commemorate the reason that Jews must never be attacked again — or, there must never be another genocide of Jews, in particular,” said Prof. James Young of Amherst.
The Oath of Buchenwald has been invoked throughout the 2000s. During the 70th anniversary of liberation in 2015, survivor Bertrand Herz pleaded with young people around the world to defend human rights and fight racism. As long as repression persisted in the world, he said, the oath would not be fulfilled.
That commemoration came in the midst of terrorist attacks on Jews in Europe and a Syrian refugee crisis that changed the makeup of Germany. Beside Herz, the politician Martin Schulz said Buchenwald’s victims left behind a moral compass to navigate these challenges.
Their memory obligated Europe to “fight the return of demons that we thought were overcome but which still show their ugly face — racism, anti-Semitism, ultra-nationalism and intolerance,” said Schulz.
Thuringia, the state housing the memorial, is a stronghold for the far-right Alternative for Germany party. The party received 38.6% of the vote there in last year’s federal elections, more than in any other German state.
The leader of the AfD in Thuringia, Bjoern Hoecke, has urged Germany to break with what he calls its culture of repentance for Nazism.
He has called Berlin’s Holocaust memorial a “monument of shame.”
In 2021, AfD election posters in the Buchenwald parking lot advertised “courage to speak the truth.” The site has seen attacks from graffiti of swastikas to people cutting down trees planted in memory of survivors.
The AfD’s takeover of Thuringia in 2024 prompted an outcry from the International Committee Buchenwald-Dora and Kommandos, founded in 1952 to preserve the memory of Buchenwald’s resistance.
“The ICBD thanks all the people in politics and civil society who fought fiercely in Thuringia and Saxony to defend our values — the values of the Buchenwald Oath,” the group said.
The AfD is predicted to surge in the region in September’s election.
