Republished January 31, 2019 - 10:56 AM
Original Publication Date January 31, 2019 - 6:56 AM
BERLIN - A German sausage museum sparked controversy Thursday with plans to move to the site of a former Nazi concentration camp for slave labourers.
Operators of the German Bratwurst Museum reportedly want to use an area on the outskirts of the eastern town of Muehlhausen that was once a satellite site for the much larger Buchenwald concentration camp.
"A location on the area of a former barracks for Jewish slave labourers isn't acceptable," Reinhard Schramm, head of the Jewish community in Thuringia state, told the dpa news agency.
About 700 Jewish women from Eastern Europe were imprisoned at the camp, codenamed Martha II, during the Nazi era and forced to work at a local arms factory.
The association Friends of the Thuringian Bratwurst, which operates the museum, said it wasn't aware of the site's history.
The museum is currently located in another town, but was offered the new site by a private investor who bought it from the German government in 2008.
Regional lawmaker Katharina Koenig-Preuss of the Left party said the location should instead be used to commemorate its history and current instances of anti-Semitism.
"I think the museum is good and funny and relevant, but please not at that site," dpa quoted her as saying.
The Buchenwald concentration camp was established in 1937. More than 56,000 of the 280,000 inmates at Buchenwald and dozens of satellite camps were murdered by the Nazis or died as a result of hunger, illness or medical experiments before it was liberated by the U.S. Army in April 1945.
News from © The Associated Press, 2019