Took a walk up to a little spot just above the city on an incredibly hot day. The location is deep in a Beech Wood from where it gets its name, a name which resides alongside some of the most feared and notorious names in European history, Buchenwald.

It wasn’t a factory of death like Auchwitz, there were no gas chambers here, but the levels of misery, despair, brutality and inhumanity were as high as anywhere in the Third Reich. Nearly 60,000 died in this spot, from malnutrition, disease and execution some 24% of those who passed through the camp. The wooden huts have now gone, but the crematoria still stands, the ovens now silent memorials to the mounds of human flesh they consumed. The cellar underneath is where the Gestapo carried out their brutal executions. The hooks on the walls show where prisoners were hanged, the life squeezed from their frail bones just minutes before their bodies were consumed by fire. The bunker still stands, its walls testament to untold horrors of torture and pain, of one man’s suffering at the hands of another. The cells are now empty save for flowers and wreaths and candles and pictures of not forgotten victims. And the Gatehouse still stands, the motto on the gate Jedem das Seine which means” everyone gets what he deserves”, and the clock on the gate shows the time the camp was finally free.

After the war the camp was used by the soviets as a POW camp and the killing went on. Another 7000 died in the years after the war before the camps closure in 1950. The woods are full of their graves, unmarked during the years of East Germany, but now located and honoured.