Modern culture of remembrance ─ rooted in local communities, accessible online
Jonastal_Ohrdruf. Source: Arolsen Archives
The Arolsen Archives are committed to promoting an active culture of remembrance together with associations, initiatives, and foundations. Cooperative partnerships, like our partnership with the Ohrdruf concentration camp, show how this kind of cooperation can result in innovative learning and remembrance projects – thanks to the use of digital media and the active participation of young people.
Suspicious – A Landscape of Crime
The digital learning module “Suspicious – A Landscape of Crime” brings the traces of Nazi crimes to light. Users can take a virtual tour that presents some of the largely unknown sub-camps of Buchenwald concentration camp located between North Rhine-Westphalia and Saxony. 360° panorama views enable them to explore the site where the Ohrdruf concentration camp used to stand; photos, quotations, and biographies invite them to dive into its history. The learning module featured on our arolsen school education platform encourages them to discover traces of history in the present.
Holger Obbarius is Head of the Education Department at the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation. He considers the learning module Suspicious: A Landscape of Crime to be an excellent example of how to teach young people about history.
Learning Module “Suspect – Landscape of Crime”. Source: Arolsen Archives.
Ohrdruf concentration camp: Lists in the online archive
By digitizing the names on the lists of people who were deported to the Ohrdruf camp, volunteers helped to make their stories visible and fill in “memory/remembrance gaps”. During a Week of Remembrance in early summer 2023, documents containing 30,160 names of prisoners from Ohrdruf concentration camp were successfully digitized. That meant the information was searchable in the online archive for the first time. Schools, associations, youth clubs, and companies were invited to enter the data from the documents into the crowdsourcing platform #everynamecounts.
School project on the Ohrdruf memorial. Source: Arolsen Archives
Johnny & Jones – deported to Ohrdruf concentration camp
Among the tragic stories from Ohrdruf concentration camp is that of the jazz duo “Johnny & Jones.” Jewish musicians Max Kannewasser and Arnold van Wesel wowed audiences in their home city of Amsterdam in the mid-1930s. Following the German Wehrmacht’s occupation of the Netherlands in May 1940, the musicians were banned from performing from 1941 onwards. In 1943, the Nazis detained them in the Westerbork transit camp, where they had to perform forced labor. Eleven months later, they were deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto, and some time after that, they were sent to Auschwitz and Ohrdruf concentration camps. Neither of them survived their imprisonment.
Photo of the duo “Johnny and Jones”, ca. 1938 Source: Collection Jewish Museum, Amsterdam
Ohrdruf concentration camp
The Ohrdruf concentration camp was the first of over 130 Buchenwald sub-camps to be liberated by the US Army in 1945. As a result, Ohrdruf holds a special place in US-American remembrance of Nazi crimes, while it remains largely unknown in Germany, even locally. From November 1944 to April 1945, around 20,000 prisoners from various European countries passed through the camp. They had to perform forced labor in the nearby Jonas valley, where they were made to do extremely heavy work for up to twelve hours a day, digging tunnels into the mountain. Around 7,000 prisoners died. In the U.S., the photos of the liberated camp taken by the U.S. army are now seen as symbolic of Nazis atrocities.
View of part of the Ohrdruf concentration camp. Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Nancy and Michael Krzyzanowski, April 6, 1945, photo no. 85351.
A flower for Benedek Sátori
Benedek Sátori from Hungary was one of around 7,000 forced laborers who were sent to work in the Ohrdruf concentration camp near Gotha in 1944/45. For years, no one knew what had happened to him – until his grandson Péter Füzi submitted a tracing inquiry to the Arolsen Archives.
Photos from Péter Füzi’s family album. Source: Péter Füzi (private)
The cooperation
In May 2022, the Friedenstein Castle Gotha Foundation launched a remembrance project called “Deutsche Erinnerungslücke KZ Ohrdruf” (German Memory/Remembrance Gap Ohrdruf Concentration Camp), which involves the Arolsen Archives and the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials as partners. As part of the project, a virtual memorial site is being created for the victims of the camp, which was located south of Gotha. The project also includes workshops, campaigns, and a digital educational module titled “Suspicious – A Landscape of Crime.”
Christoph Mauny, education officer at the Weimar painting and drawing school, initiated the school project. He received the Obermayer Award for this and other commemorative projects in January 2024. He continues to work with the Arolsen Archives on developing and organizing workshops in Thuringia.
The “Suspicious – A Landscape of Crime” module is funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media as part of the “Open Friedenstein!” project of the Friedenstein Foundation Gotha.
