Last update - 00:00 17/06/2007
Roll of Jews murdered at Buchenwald camp in WWII completed
By DPA
Weimar, Germany (dpa) - A roll of 37,000 people murdered by the Nazis at Buchenwald concentration camp has been completed after 10 years of work, the head of the memorial at the site, Volkhard Knigge, said Sunday.
The book of the dead lists inmates worked to death, killed by disease and starvation and those executed up to 1945 in the camp nearthe German city of Weimar.
It is to be presented July 15 to the International Committee ofBuchenwald survivors "as a sort of symbolic grave-marker," saidKnigge, the director of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorial Foundation.
The handover date will be on the 70th anniversary of the camp'sestablishment by the Nazis
Between 500,000 and 600,000 people visit the memorial every year, 40 per cent of them classes from German schools where the Holocaustis a major part of history lessons
The roll will be far from complete. More than 56,000 inmates are believed to have died between 1937 and 1945
Knigge said in an interview that incompetent record-keeping as the Nazi system gradually collapsed was partly to blame, with names misspelled or vital data muddled
He added that 10,000 were estimated to have vanished in the lastdays of the Second World War, when the Nazis forced the weakene dprisoners to join them running away from the Allied armies
In these "Marches of Death," many fell dead at the roadside andcould not be identified by Allied authorities who found the bodies.