Goethe Oak (or Goethe's Oak), is a name given to a number of oak trees in Germany that are referred to in this way because they allegedly bear some sort of connection to the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Goethe Oak (or Goethe's Oak), is a name given to a number of oak trees in Germany that are referred to in this way because they allegedly bear some sort of connection to the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Perhaps the most famous one is the oak tree near Weimar, Germany, on the Ettersberg, at the foot of which was the castle of Charlotte von Stein. [1] The oak, in the middle of a beech forest, is named thus because it is supposedly the tree under which Goethe wrote "Wanderer's Nightsong", [2] or, alternatively, the location where he composed the Walpurgisnacht passages of his Faust . The fate of the oak became in due course associated with the fate of Germany: if the one were to fall, so would the other. [1]
According to the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation, the name 'Goethe Oak' was simply an epithet made up by the inmates of Buchenwald camp in commemoration of the walks Goethe was known to have made in the area. The large, old tree had previously been labeled the Dicke Eiche (English:"thick oak") on maps of the area. [3]
The beech forest was cleared in 1937 [4] to make way for the Buchenwald concentration camp. [1] Originally the camp was to be called KL Ettersberg ("KL" for Konzentrationslager), but this was abandoned because the Ettersberg name was so closely connected to the life of Goethe. [5] The tree stood in the center of the camp, [1] and is reputed to have served also for the hanging and torture of prisoners. The tree was hit by an Allied incendiary bomb on 24 August 1944 and burned all night long. [1] It is preserved (being cast in concrete under the auspices of the DDR government, which also laid a plaque saying "Goethe Eiche" [5] ) and is part of the Buchenwald memorial. [4] [6] [7] For the SS guards and the prisoners, the tree held two completely different meanings: for the SS it was a link to the Germany they thought they represented, but for the prisoners the tree pointed to a different Germany from the one they experienced in the camp. [8] [9] According to Amos Oz, the incorporation of the oak in the camp and its subsequent destruction are evidence that the Nazis destroyed their own heritage,. [10] In Der Totenwald, camp survivor Ernst Wiechert recalls standing under the oak and reflecting on the two Germanies it represented—what later scholars would call the "Januskopf Deutschlands", the Weimar-Buchenwald dichotomy. The tree gave its name to another book by a survivor, Pierre Julitte's L'Arbre de Goethe (1965). [11] The oak was sketched by Léon Delarbre, who used to sit under its "charred limbs" and compose poetry. [12]
Another Goethe oak is in Krásný Dvůr Castle in Bohemia (today in the Czech Republic), estimated to be 1000 years old. [13] The Arnsberg Forest Nature Park in Sauerland claims one as well (a beech named for Friedrich Schiller fell victim to a storm in 2007 [14] ). [15]
Weimar is a city in the German state of Thuringia, in Central Germany between Erfurt to the west and Jena to the east, 80 km (50 mi) southwest of Leipzig, 170 km (106 mi) north of Nuremberg and 170 km (106 mi) west of Dresden. Together with the neighbouring cities of Erfurt and Jena, it forms the central metropolitan area of Thuringia, with approximately 500,000 inhabitants. The city itself has a population of 65,000. Weimar is well-known because of its cultural heritage and importance in German history.
Buchenwald was a Nazi concentration camp established on Ettersberg hill near Weimar, Germany, in July 1937. It was one of the first and the largest of the concentration camps within Germany's 1937 borders. Many actual or suspected communists were among the first internees.
Mittelbau-Dora was a Nazi concentration camp located near Nordhausen in Thuringia, Germany. It was established in late summer 1943 as a subcamp of Buchenwald concentration camp, supplying slave labour from many Eastern countries occupied by Germany, for extending the nearby tunnels in the Kohnstein and for manufacturing the V-2 rocket and the V-1 flying bomb. In the summer of 1944, Mittelbau became an independent concentration camp with numerous subcamps of its own. In 1945, most of the surviving inmates were sent on death marches or crammed in trains of box-cars by the SS. On 11 April 1945, US troops freed the remaining prisoners.
The number of deaths in the Buchenwald concentration camp is estimated to have been 56,545, a mortality rate of 20% averaged over all prisoners transferred to the camp between its founding in 1937 and its liberation in 1945. Deaths were due both to the harsh conditions of life in the camp and also to the executions carried out by camp overseers.
Franz Hößler, also Franz Hössler was a Nazi German SS-Obersturmführer and Schutzhaftlagerführer at the Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dora-Mittelbau and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps during World War II. Captured by the Allies at the end of the war, Hößler was charged with war crimes in the First Bergen-Belsen Trial, found guilty, and sentenced to death. He was executed by hanging at Hameln Prison in 1945.
The Stiftung Ettersberg is legally established foundation, located in Weimar, Germany. Its mission is the comparative study of European dictatorships and their transition to democracy. The foundation administers the Memorial and Education Centre Andreasstrasse, a museum housed in the former Stasi prison in Erfurt.
During the Holocaust, death marches were massive forced transfers of prisoners from one Nazi camp to other locations, which involved walking long distances resulting in numerous deaths of weakened people. Most death marches took place toward the end of World War II, mostly after the summer/autumn of 1944. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners, mostly Jews, from Nazi camps near the Eastern Front were moved to camps inside Germany away from the Allied forces. Their purpose was to continue the use of prisoners' slave labour, to remove evidence of crimes against humanity, and to keep the prisoners from bargaining with the Allies.
The Dora Trial, also the "Dora"-Nordhausen or Dachau Dora Proceeding was a war crimes trial conducted by the United States Army in the aftermath of the collapse of the Third Reich. It took place between August 7 and December 30, 1947, on the site of the former Dachau concentration camp, Germany.
Helmut Hermann Wilhelm Bischoff was a German SS-Obersturmbannführer, Gestapo officer and Nazi official. During World War II he was the leader of Einsatzkommando 1/IV in Poland and later headed the Gestapo offices in Poznań (Posen) and Magdeburg.
Rainer Eisfeld is a German political scientist and professor emeritus at the University of Osnabrück.
Subcamps, officially Arbeitslager der Waffen-SS, were outlying detention centres (Haftstätten) that came under the command of a main concentration camps run by the SS in Nazi Germany and German-occupied Europe. The Nazis distinguished between the main camps and the subcamps subordinated to them. Survival conditions in the subcamps were, in many cases, poorer for the prisoners than those in the main camps.
The Buchenwald trial or United States of America vs. Josias Prince of Waldeck et al. was a war crime trial conducted by the United States Army as a court-martial in Dachau, then part of the American occupation zone. It took place from April 11 to August 14, 1947 in the internment camp of Dachau, where the former Dachau concentration camp had been located until late April 1945. In this trial, 31 people were indicted for war crimes related to the Buchenwald concentration camp and its satellite camps, all of whom were convicted. The Buchenwald trial was part of the Dachau trials, which were held between 1945 and 1948.
Léon Delarbre was a painter, museum curator, and World War II resistance fighter. After a career as a museum conservator and teacher in his hometown of Belfort, he joined the French resistance in 1941. Arrested in 1944, he was held in a series of concentration camps where he sketched scenes from camp life. These drawings have been widely used to illustrate the horrors of camp life.
Block 66, the Children's Block was part of Buchenwald concentration camp, in what was known as the "little camp", which was separated from the rest of the camp by barbed wire. Buchenwald was a labor camp, and as a result a child's chances of survival depended greatly on their age. The older they were, the better, because that meant that they were fit to do work. Oftentimes, children lied about their ages to make them older, so that rather than being sent to Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen to be killed, they could work in the camp. Children were at high risk for being killed at Buchenwald, because if they were too weak or young, this meant that they were unfit for labor, and therefore had no use. The creation of the children's barrack, Block 66, served to protect these children from the Nazi agenda.
Boelcke-Kaserne concentration camp was a subcamp of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp complex where prisoners were left to die after they became unable to work. It was located inside a former Luftwaffe barracks complex in Nordhausen, Thuringia, Germany, adjacent to several pre-existing forced labor camps. During its three-month existence, about 6,000 prisoners passed through the camp and almost 3,000 died there under "indescribable" conditions. More than a thousand prisoners were killed during the bombing of Nordhausen by the Royal Air Force on 3–4 April 1945. Their corpses were found by the US Army units that liberated the camp on 11 April. Photographs and newsreel footage of the camp were reported internationally and made Nordhausen notorious in many parts of the world.
During World War II, the German Luftwaffe staffed dozens of concentration camps, and posted its soldiers as guards at many others. Camps created for the exploitation of forced labor for armaments production were often run by the branch of the Wehrmacht that used the products. The Wehrmacht also posted about 10,000 soldiers to concentration camps because of a shortage of guards in mid-1944, including many from the Luftwaffe.
Danuta Czech was a Polish Holocaust historian and deputy director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim, Poland. She is known for her book The Auschwitz Chronicle: 1939–1945 (1990).
Jürgen Möller is a German former officer, and a military historian, focused on the exploration of the end of World War II in Germany in 1944/45, especially the American occupation of Central Germany.
Jens-Christian Wagner is a German historian who specializes in the Nazi era and the politics of memory. Wagner has published multiple academic books about Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp and its subcamps. He was the director of Mittelbau-Dora memorial from 2001, was the chairman of Lower Saxony Memorials Foundation, and became the overseer of Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation in 2020.
Albert Kuntz was a German goldsmith, soldier, communist and concentration camp victim. A soldier in the First World War, Kuntz rose to become an elected representative of the German Communist Party in Berlin's Prussian Landtag. In 1933 he was arrested by the Gestapo, and sent to a succession of prisons and concentration camps. He died in January 1945 at the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, where he had been organizing the sabotage of the V-2 rocket production line. Following his death, he was revered as an anti-fascist hero in East Germany.
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