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Real History and the camp at Buchenwald The Documents on the Nazi concentration camps at Buchenwald, near Weimar your Buchenwald index again your newsletter “We now have many visitors to Buchenwald from the United States, and they are disappointed that there are no gas chambers,” said the new director of the Buchenwald tourist site. “Before, people did not want to the see the truth. Now they want to see what they expect to see, and we have to disappoint them. . .”

September 12, 1999 The Germans Want Their History Back By ROGER COHEN BUCHENWALD, Germany — The Buchenwald concentration camp, where the Nazis killed more than 65,000 people, later became one of the holy shrines of the East German Communist state. The camp was a statutory rite of passage for generations of schoolchildren, who learned here how the reactionary Hitler regime slaughtered socialists and Communists. This version of history was not true.

From its establishment in 1937, Buchenwald served to incarcerate leftists, including the Communist leader Ernst Thälmann , who died here in 1944 [ Website note: shot on Himmler’s orders with Hitler’s authorisation ] and became an East German icon, immortalized as “a great son of the German people murdered by fascism.”

But the portrayal of the Nazi regime as the ultimate and most brutal stage of bourgeois capitalism, and the shaping of the Buchenwald memorial to that end, amounted to a distortion of history. The fate of the Jews was omitted, as was Hitler’s wide appeal to the German working class.

Since the collapse of the East German state a decade ago, Volkhard Knigge , the western German historian who became the director of the memorial, has been working to create a more balanced picture of what happened at Buchenwald. But here, as elsewhere in Germany, history remains a charged issue. The squaring of eastern and western memory is elusive even as Chancellor Gerhard Schröder tries to make the recent move of the Government