Amid an intense backlash, plans to construct a sausage museum at the site of the former Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald, near Weimar, Germany, have apparently been cancelled.
A group called Friends of the Thuringer Bratwurst had released plans to relocate the Bratwurst Museum from its current location in Holzhausen to Mühlhausen, where a theater and a hotel were also in the works to be constructed.
Rikola-Gunnar Luettgenau of the Buchenwald memorial foundation said this plan shows a “lack of sensitivity” and a “lack of historical awareness.”
Benjamin-Immanuel Hoff, Minister of Culture for the German province of Thuringia, where Buchenwald is located, tweeted, on behalf of himself and Mühlhausen Mayor Johannes Brüns that alternative plans for the museum will be made as “the site in question—an outer camp of Buchenwald—is unsuitable.”
“There can be no doubt about the suffering of those interned in Nazi concentration camps and about the inhumanity of the forced labor system,” he continued.
CBS News’s Edward R. Murrow was the first reporter at Buchenwald after it was liberated by U.S. troops: “There surged around me an evil-smelling stink, men and boys reached out to touch me. They were in rags and the remnants of uniforms. Death already had marked many of them, but they were smiling with their eyes. I looked out over the mass of men to the green fields beyond, where well-fed Germans were ploughing. … But the manner of death seemed unimportant. Murder had been done at Buchenwald. … If I have offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I’m not in the least sorry.”