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Jews in Germany Protest Mining at Site of a Former Labor Camp

August 12, 1991
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Jews and Gypsies are protesting a gypsum-mining project under way at the site of the former Dora-Nordhausen slave labor camp in eastern Germany, arguing that the area should be preserved as a memorial to victims of the Holocaust.

But the company that extracts gypsum in that area, Harzer Anhydritwerke, vowed to continue, saying that 300 jobs are at stake.

A Nordhausen town official, Joachim Claus, said last Friday that the company is all but demolishing the site of the concentration camp and former Nazi factory, which was hidden deep within a hill called Berg Kohnstein.

“We told them to stop, but they just won’t listen,” Claus said.

The dispute is the latest of a series of battles that have been waged over plans to make commercial use out of concentration camp sites in what was formerly East Germany.

A similar scenario arose recently with plans to erect a shopping mall next to the site of the former Ravensbruck concentration camp. Likewise, the issue was the creation of jobs in an area of eastern Germany that suffers from a sluggish economy and a paucity of jobs.

Following a protest by Holocaust survivors that gained world attention, local German authorities agreed to scrap the shopping mall project.

Similarly, the state of Brandenburg decided last Friday to drop plans to house its central tax collection office in what had been the SS administration building of the former Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

A government spokesman, Heinrich Enderlein, said the building will become the office of a new agency whose task will be to design and run memorials throughout Brandenburg.

GYPSIES ALSO PROTESTING

When the East German Communist regime was in power, it erected a small plaque outside the Dora camp site but allowed mining to take place. Harzer Anhydritwerke, a western German firm, is now seeking to expand the work there.

Heinz Galinski, head of the German Jewish community, lodged a protest over the plans with Josef Duchac, prime minister of the state of Thuringia, where the labor camp site is located.

Galinski, who was himself an inmate at the Dora camp, described the terrible conditions under which Jewish inmates were forced to work for the Nazi missile program there. He demanded the site be preserved as a memorial and a center for educational programs.

Duchac did not respond, but his spokesman said Friday that he was still studying the matter.

The Central Council of Gypsies in Germany, which is also protesting, said both Jews and Gypsies worked in terrible conditions at the camp and comprised the majority of its victims.

According to various experts, the site is also important for possible research into the methods used by the Nazis for the V-2 rockets.

At the Dora camp, slave laborers, most of them Jews, were used to work on the ambitious Nazi program to produce the V-2 rockets, which were used against Britain toward the end of the war. One-third to one-half of the 60,000 prisoners at the camp died because of inhumane working conditions.

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