The Gauforum is begun
The party built itself an administrative quarter in the middle of Weimar, with a hall for twenty thousand — and used concentration camp prisoners to do it. Most of it is still standing.
A quarter for the party
The complex was laid out to gather the central administrative offices of a Nazi Gau in one place. Three things were planned: a "Halle der Volksgemeinschaft" with standing room for twenty thousand, a bell tower, and a building for the Reichsstatthalterei and the Gauleitung. On 1 May 1937 Rudolf Heß laid the cornerstone of the hall.[1]
Who was to move in
The southern wing was intended for Fritz Sauckel's office as Reichsstatthalter, relocating out of the Landesmuseum once the complex was finished.[1] Sauckel had been Gauleiter of Thuringia since 1927, and on 21 March 1942 Hitler made him Plenipotentiary General for Labour Deployment — the man principally responsible for deporting millions of people into forced labour.[2] That gives the building's later history a symmetry nobody planned.
Built with camp labour
Prisoners of the Buchenwald concentration camp were among those put to work on the construction.[1] This is the fact that keeps the Gauforum from being an architectural curiosity: the party's administrative quarter in the centre of a UNESCO town was built, in part, by people held in the camp on the hill above it.
What is there now
The buildings survived and are in use. Since 2005 the complex has held a shopping centre and a Thuringian state administrative office,[1] and since 2024 the Museum Zwangsarbeit im Nationalsozialismus — a museum of forced labour under National Socialism, inside the complex built for the man who organised it.
Sources
- Gauforum — weimar-im-ns.de, retrieved 29 August 2026
- Fritz Sauckel — Museum Zwangsarbeit im Nationalsozialismus, retrieved 29 August 2026
Historical figures
Historical figures
1894–1946 • Gauleiter • Reichsstatthalter • war criminal
The complex's southern wing was built for his office as Reichsstatthalter; the forced-labour museum occupies part of it today.
Period
1933–1945
The regime's building programme in the middle of the town, running in parallel with the camp on the Ettersberg.
In Weimar's history
In Weimar's history
From July 1937 the SS had prisoners build a camp on the Ettersberg, the wooded hill above the town. 277,800 people from more than fifty countries were held there; 56,000 did not survive.
Prisoners from the camp were used on the construction — the same year the camp itself was built.