Buchenwald Memorial Path Initiative Receives Monument Preservation Award

The "Gedenkweg Buchenwaldbahn" initiative has received the German Prize for Monument Preservation's mediation award. This award recognizes individuals and organizations dedicated to monument preservation with nationwide model character. The initiative, founded in 2007, focuses on the Buchenwald concentration camp railway on the Ettersberg near Weimar. This railway, built by prisoners, was used to transport inmates, including children and adolescents, to Auschwitz for extermination. Many minors also died within Buchenwald and its subcamps from illness, exhaustion, hunger, and forced labor.

The initiative commemorates these young victims with individually crafted memorial stones. According to the Thuringian Ministry of Culture, approximately 350 such stones now exist. The initiative's work is dedicated to roughly 1,800 underage victims, including Jewish youth, Sinti and Roma, and young Poles and Russians. Thuringian Culture Minister Christian Tischner praised the initiative's efforts as an outstanding example of actively practiced remembrance culture, emphasizing its continuation until every deported child and every minor who died in or near Buchenwald is honored with a memorial stone.

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in outstanding engagement in monument education and whose activities have nationwide model character.

The Buchenwald concentration camp, established in 1937 and liberated by U.S. troops in April 1945, held over a quarter-million people under inhumane conditions. Approximately 56,000 did not survive. The German Prize for Monument Preservation will be presented to ten recipients in Schwerin on October 26.

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an outstanding example of actively practiced remembrance culture.