The buildings stand in a place that seems to have been lifted up out of the surrounding landscape. The densely wooded Ettersberg, a hill located not far from the cultural hub of Weimar in the eastern German state of Thuringia, can be seen from far off. It seems like an idyllic area.

But the picturesque appearance belies the fact that this was once a place of horror. The plateau of the hill was the site of one of the biggest Nazi concentration camps in Germany. From 1937 to 1945, the Nazis imprisoned hundreds of thousands of people here in the Buchenwald concentration camp, including political opponents, communists, homosexuals, foreign prisoners, Jews, Roma and Sinti, Jehovah's Witnesses and undesired clergy.

Buchenwald was a hell, one of the many hells created by the Nazi machinery of persecution and killing. Some 280,000 prisoners suffered within the Buchenwald system, which included the camp on the Ettersberg and more than 50 small subcamps, mostly near factories producing key wartime commodities.

By April 1945, around 56,000 people, mainly Jews, had been killed in Buchenwald. It was not until World War II was nearing its end in Europe that liberation finally arrived. When the first US Army........

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