Weimar

Our three hour train trip took us along a valley with wooded hills on each side and we could see many small towns on the lower slopes. The houses appeared to be built to much the same plan, two stories with another level under a step pitched roof, most had white walls and orange roofs.  

In Weimar our apartment was in an old falconry bordering a cemetery and having trees around us was a nice change from inner city apartments.

Weimar has a proud cultural heritage with literary names of Goethe and Schiller ( I can't say I had heard of these two but the town has archives of their works) and musical names of Liszt and Straus having lived and worked in the city.

In 1929 Weimar became a centre for Nazism and Adolf Hitler visited the city more than forty times prior to 1933.  In 1937 the Nazis established Buchenwald concentration camp, only eight kilometres from Weimar city centre, the first inmates being political opponents, criminals and Jehovah's Witnesses. In 1938 Jews from Germany and Austria came to the camp then hundreds of Sinti Gypsies. Between July 1938 and April 1945, some 240,000 people were incarcerated in the camp and the number of deaths is estimated at 56,545.  The Buchenwald concentration camp provided slave labour for local industry and an armament factory was established at Buchenwald.

The Weimar city centre was partially damaged by US Air Force bombing in 1945 with some 1,800 people killed and many historic buildings destroyed. Many of the destroyed buildings were restored soon after the war because of their importance in German cultural history.

On our walk in Weimar we enjoyed walking in the large pedestrian areas and admired the old buildings, some perhaps restored and some maybe original.  

This building was destroyed in WWII and when it was rebuilt the historical façade was restored. It has been owned by the council since 1422 and the building has been put to a number of different uses over the centuries.  Apparently there is a tunnel connecting it to  the Town Hall across the square.

The town hall

The cemetery near our apartment was beautifully kept with many plots having flowering plants and large trees lined the paths.  In the centre there was a crypt and small chapel and there was also a Russian Orthodox chapel.

The Dukes palace had several fires in its long history and the current palace was built after a fire in 1774.  The building now houses a museum.

Old palace gate and tower 

Old palace from the park

Palace inner courtyard 

National theatre 

We visited Buchenwald where some of the camp buildings still exist and the layout of many other buildings was marked out on the ground.  

There was an excellent display covering many aspects of camp life from prisoner and guard points of view.  

Main gate and guard house 

Where the prison wires once fenced them in.

The dark stone shows the outline of some of the prisoners barracks 

The visit was a thought provoking experience and it left us wondering how such atrocities could be allowed to happen.  Similar things still happen in the world today so mankind hasn't learnt as much from the past as we would like.