A German museum dedicated to sausages has stirred an unexpected controversy in announcing its new location: a site where prisoners of a concentration camp were once used as slave labor for the Nazi war machine.
The German Bratwurst Museum announced Wednesday it would be moving — complete with a cannon with a giant sausage in place of its barrel — to an industrial lot in Mühlhausen, a small city near the geographical center of Germany.
Hours later, it emerged that the same site had been during World War II a satellite of the Buchenwald concentration camp, with a munitions factory that used forced labor. Most of those who lived there were Jewish women from Poland and Hungary who had been transported from Auschwitz.
“Of course we are upset about it,” said Reinhard Schramm, who leads a Jewish community group in the state of Thuringia.
Thomas Mäuser, the deputy director of the museum, said Friday: “We were totally bowled over. I understand the reaction, but we had no idea.”
The Bratwurst Museum had unwittingly stepped into a long-running debate about what to do with the thousands of places that were once part of the Nazis’ extensive machinery of death.
Modern Germany has many opportunities to stumble onto the infrastructure of the Holocaust and other remnants of its Nazi past. As many as 800 locations across the country were once part of the concentration camp network, and a thousand more are sites where slave labor was used. Buchenwald alone had 139 external sites.
The first German Bratwurst Museum opened in Holzhausen. Source: picture alliance
“We know that we can’t prevent all use at all of these sites,” Schramm said. He suggested that Jewish and victim groups be included in discussions about how the sites are developed.
“This time it is a bratwurst museum, next time it could be an AfD meeting space,” he said, referring to the far-right party Alternative for Germany, whose leaders have challenged the country’s atonement for the Holocaust and for its Nazi crimes. “We can’t allow that to happen.”
Between October 1944 and February 1945, as many as 700 inmates were forced to build weapons at the satellite camp known as Martha II. When the camp closed, they were transported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
“The threat was always there: If they couldn’t work they’d be sent back to Auschwitz,” said Rikola-Gunnar Lüttgenau, a spokesman for Buchenwald Memorial Center.
Fencing surrounds Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, Germany. Source: Getty
The problem with such locations “has been a common theme since 1945 — a negation of history in the use of these historical crime scenes,” Lüttgenau said.
Luxury condos built and sold in a former Gestapo headquarters in Hamburg led to an outcry last year. The compound that includes famous water tower in the Prenzlauer Berg district of Berlin, which now houses some of the city’s more expensive dwellings, was part of a network of temporary detention centers used by the Nazis in the months after they took power in 1933.
The Bratwurst museum, now located in a small town near Mühlhausen, claims to have the world’s largest bratwurst and draws tourists, German and foreign, to its sausage-themed exhibition of “art, cult kitsch.”
Mäuser said the club that runs the museum learned of the new location’s dark history only after it had proudly announced the move. The fault, the club contends, lies with the city and the lot’s owner for not disclosing the property’s full background when offering it to the museum.
“It was army base” when the area was part of East Germany, Mäuser said, “and after reunification a refugee camp for while — you’d think someone would have said something then.”
Mäuser said the club did not yet know how the controversy would affect the plans for the museum. “International understanding and human rights are part of our statute, which is why we have so many international members,” he added
The owner of the site, Jan Kratochwil, seemed less sensitive to concerns about its history, suggesting that inmates actually liked being in the camp, according to Bild, the German newspaper that interviewed him.
Kratochwil could not be reached for comment.
On Thursday evening, the Mühlhausen City Council voted to allow zoning for the museum and to create a memorial on the site, according to local news reports.
The vote came hours after Israeli historian Saul Friedländer addressed the German parliament, warning of the perils of rising anti-Semitism. The speech, delivered in German, was part of the annual commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops in 1945.
Lüttgenau said he did not blame the museum for its plans. But he does wonder whether the move should happen.
“When you see the pictures of the bratwurst cannon,” he said, “it’s hard for me to imagine that in a former concentration camp.”
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