BERLIN (WJC)–The websites of the memorials and documentation centers of the former Nazi concentration camps Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora have been attacked by hackers. The intruders replaced a ‘Book of the Dead’ on the Buchenwald website with neo-Nazi slogans and symbols and completely erased the Mittelbau-Dora camp website.
“Brown is beautiful,” read one slogan in English, referring to the color of the uniform shirts of Adolf Hitler’s SA storm troopers. “We will be back,” threatened another in German.
“By damaging the services and documentation that we offer – such as the Book of the Dead at Buchenwald concentration camp – the perpetrators were trying to efface the memory of the victims of the crimes of the Nazis,” said Volkhard Knigge, head of the Buchenwald Memorial Foundation, in a statement. The foundation, which is dedicated to preserving the camp’s remains in commemoration of the victims and promoting public knowledge and historical research into the Holocaust, said the hacker attack had been reported to police. The websites, have now been restored.
In Buchenwald, the Nazis incarcerated nearly a quarter of a million people, many of them Jews, who were forced to work in arms factories. An estimated 56,000 of them died of exhaustion, starvation or illness, or were executed. Nearby Mittelbau-Dora also provided forced labor for a Nazi weapons factory. It is estimated that one third of the 60,000 prisoners held there died.
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Preceding provided by the World Jewish Congress