Germany: Frail and elderly survivors of the Buchenwald concentration camp yesterday remembered its "40 hectares of cold and horror" as they commemorated the 60th anniversary of its liberation by US troops on April 11th, 1945.
In what many agreed would be their last such gathering, 500 survivors mourned the thousands killed by the Nazis and urged the young to remember and to be vigilant against anti-Semitism and far-right violence.
Buchenwald was not one of the death camps where the Nazis set about the systematic extermination of European Jews. Nonetheless, it was equipped with crematoriums and gas chambers and 56,000 people perished there, 11,000 of them Jewish.
Named after the surrounding beech trees, Buchenwald was set up in 1937, close to the picturesque eastern city of Weimar, home to the poets Goethe and Schiller and one of the great centres of classical German culture.
The camp housed Jews, gypsies and homosexuals, but was also the main internment centre for political prisoners, including communists, socialists and Christians.
The contrast with the surroundings has always symbolised one of the great paradoxes of German history - the co-existence of its rich humanist culture and the barbarity of the Nazis. - (Reuters)