Asylum seekers in Germany might be housed in a former branch of a notorious Nazi concentration camp under plans being considered by a town that have sparked criticism, reports said on Tuesday.
Faced with an influx of refugees fleeing war-torn places such as Syria, Germany is scrambling to house new arrivals, resorting to converted schools and makeshift villages of freight containers.
However, town authorities in Schwerte in northwestern Germany are considering moving about 20 asylum seekers into a former satellite camp of Buchenwald, several German media outlets reported.
Buchenwald was one of the largest and most notorious Nazi concentration camps on German soil in World War II.
Forced workers, mostly from eastern Europe, worked at the sub-camp during the Nazi era, but the refugees would be housed in a part of the site that had been the camp warden’s barracks, Spiegel Online and regional online news site Ruhr Nachrichten said.
Germany’s national Deutsche Presse-Agentur news agency said members of the town council and administration visited the old barracks on Tuesday, but declined to comment.
Spiegel quoted Birgit Naujoks, head of the refugee council in North Rhine-Westphalia State, where Schwerte is, describing the plan as “alarming and disconcerting — at the very least insensitive.”
The former barracks has previously been used for various purposes, including storage, as an artist’s workshop and as a kindergarten, the reports said.
Christine Glauning, head of Germany’s Documentation Center on Nazi Forced Labor, said prior use did not automatically mean it should also be used in the future.
She was quoted by Spiegel as saying it was a place of “exploitation, oppression and boundless violence.”
An estimated 56,000 people from all over Europe died at Buchenwald between 1937 and 1945; starved and worked to death in horrendous conditions, killed in medical experiments or summarily executed.
About 250,000 people were imprisoned between 1937 and 1945 in Buchenwald and its 136 nearby sub-camps, where prisoners carried out forced labor in factories for the Nazi war effort.
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