The web site of the Buchenwald concentration camp was attacked last week by neo-Nazi vandals who defaced the home page and redirected surfers to a Holocaust denial site.
The Internet web page of one of Nazi Germany's largest and most notorious concentration camps was splattered across with slogans such as, “We will return,” and “Brown is beautiful” – a reference to the color of the shirts worn by the Nazi storm troopers during World War II.
Functionality to the site was partially restored, according to Volkhard Knigge, head of the camp's memorial foundation. However, it was still partially disabled when surfers tried to access the site the following Sunday. Visitors were met with an apology which explained, “Owing to a hacker attack, evidently motivated by neo-Nazi sentiment, on the homepage of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation, the foundation’s online offers are presently available only to a limited extent."
The precise extent of the damage was still being established by week's end, and the foundation was unable to say how long it would take to repair the site.
"The memorial assesses the attack on the Internet presence of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials – which is used by several thousands of people worldwide every day – and the placement of Holocaust denials there as a criminal assault of an unprecedented nature on the memorial work," the foundation said in the statement posted on its site.
"Through the damage of service offers and documentations such as the Book of the Dead of Buchenwald Concentration Camp, the perpetrators attempted to obliterate the memory of the victims of the National Socialist crimes."
German police are investigating.
Some 56,000 people were murdered at Buchenwald between 1937 and 1945, victims of starvation, overwork, capricious executions and medical experiments.
The website, www.buchenwald.de, contains archives that chronicle the miserable experiences of those victims and the others that made up the approximately 250,000 inmates who were imprisoned within the camp grounds and its 136 nearby forced labor camps and factories.
Among the victims of Buchenwald were Jews, Roma, Sinti, homosexuals, disabled individuals, Jehova's Witnesses and other so-called “opponents” of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. They were transported to the camp in cattle cars from as far away as the Netherlands, Poland, Ukraine and France, as well as elsewhere around Europe.