Mittelbau-Dora victims remembered

• "Ceremony held 69 years after the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp in Nordhausen, Germany, was liberated
• Around 60,000 prisoners were forced to make German armaments in terrible conditions. A third of them died
• Service at the camp, now a memorial site, focused on genocide of Hungarian Jews there and at nearby Buchenwald.

Wearing the striped caps designed to turn them from human beings into numbers, these Holocaust survivors wept as they returned to a concentration camp after 69 years.
The three Polish men were among those remembering 76,000 people who died at two sites in central Germany - hanged, starved or riddled with disease, mostly for the crime of being different.
They were forced to make munitions at Mittelbau-Dora, where the ceremony took place, and 50 miles away at its parent camp Buchenwald, both of which were liberated by U.S. troops 69 years ago this week.
As early as 1937, Nazi leaders sent some 250,000 people to Buchenwald, Mittelbau-Dora and dozens of other sub-camps, where they lived in terrible conditions with little food.
The majority of those who died collapsed from exhaustion. At Buchenwald, 8,000 Soviet prisoners of war were shot in a specially-made killing facility.
This year's ceremony focused on the genocide of Hungarian Jews in the Second World War, and saw the former prisoners lay flowers and examine the crematorium where the bodies of their friends were burned.
After lying forgotten in disrepair for decades, Mittelbau-Dora, near Nordhausen, Germany, was reinstated in 2005 as a memorial site and museum to the atrocities of Nazi Germany, with the message that they should never be forgotten."
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2602609/A-red-rose-dead-Tears-Holocaust-survivors-69-years-honour-76-000-died-two-Nazi-concentration-camps.html#ixzz2yciarySp