Russia and Belarus officials ‘not welcome’ at concentration camp ceremony

Memorials foundation says war in Ukraine is overshadowing events to mark anniversary of Buchenwald liberation

The 76th anniversary of the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp, near Weimar, Germany, was marked last year. Photograph: Karina Hessland/Reuters

AFP in Berlin-Tue 29 Mar 2022

The memorial foundation at the former Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald has said that official representatives of Russia and Belarus have not been invited to ceremonies next month marking the 77th anniversary of its liberation.

“Official representatives of Russia and Belarus are not welcome at the ceremonies this year,” the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation said in a statement, adding that the two countries’ embassies in Berlin had been informed of the decision.

The war in Ukraine is overshadowing the commemoration, “in particular the violent death of Boris Romantschenko”, a camp survivor killed by Russian shelling that struck his flat in the city of Kharkiv, the foundation said.

It said the ceremony on 10 April would pay special tribute to Romantschenko, a prisoner at four different Nazi camps during the second world war, who was killed at his home on 18 March.

Romantschenko, 96, had worked for decades to educate others about the horrors of the Nazi era and had been vice-president for Ukraine of the Buchenwald-Dora international committee. At the Buchenwald liberation anniversary ceremony in 2015, he had called for a struggle to create a “world of peace and freedom”.

The foundation said that rather than including officials from Russia or Belarus, it would invite representatives of Ukraine and Russia “civil society” to pay tribute to camp victims from the former Soviet Union.

Fifteen survivors from Germany, Canada, France, Israel, Poland, Romania, Switzerland, Hungary and the US are also expected to attend the event.

The foundation noted that 30 German remembrance groups have founded an aid network to assist survivors of Nazi persecution in Ukraine, given that many are in “existential danger” in the face of the Russian invasion.

It plans to deliver donations of food and medicine and offer practical help to survivors fleeing Ukraine, by picking them up from the Ukrainian border or finding them accommodation in Germany. There are still about 42,000 survivors of Nazi crimes living in Ukraine, according to the aid network.

More than 76,000 men, women and children died at Buchenwald and the Mittelbau-Dora satellite camp during the second world war. US forces liberated the camp in 1945.