Note from Susan Albrecht: Later [on Day 6], about 2/3 of our group opted to head to Buchenwald to see the grounds and museum of the former Nazi concentration camp, where there were more than 55,000 deaths. After WW II, Buchenwald was put back into use as a Soviet internment camp until 1950.
Photos provided by Sidney Woram, Heidi Bauer-Clapp, Jessie McCrary, and Susan Albrecht.
Weimar, the cultural capital of Germany, was home to the Bauhaus School of Art and Design – known for its sleek, modern design elements. The Nazi regime outlawed Bauhaus, as it was considered to be filled with Communist intellectualism and “degenerate art.” Buchenwald camp commander Karl-Otto Koch commissioned the gate to the camp to be crafted with the words “Jedem das Seine” – literally translated as “To each his own” or “Everyone gets what he deserves” – in a manner so that prisoners would be forced to read it from their positions on the inside. Originally a Roman legal maxim expressing that “the precepts of law are these: to live honestly, to injure no one, to give each his own,” the Nazis abused the phrase by using it to justify their stance on master and inferior races. However, when inmate Franz Ehrlich was selected to complete the design, he created the letters in a typeset designed by his Bauhaus teachers. A clear act of resistance, his action helped return the phrase in a small way to its original concept of justice.