The satellite camp at Kranichfeld
On 24 May 1941 the SS put fifty Buchenwald prisoners into a carriage shed at Kranichfeld to rebuild a castle it had bought — and the point of the work was an insurance claim.
A castle, a fire, and an insurance claim
The client was the Gesellschaft zur Förderung und Pflege deutscher Kulturdenkmäler, an SS association that had bought the Oberschloss in order to rebuild it; Himmler intended a Thuringian residence there. The portal is blunt about what the work was actually for: construction had to be started in order to secure the insurance money from a fire of 1934.[1]
Who was sent
Fifty prisoners arrived on 24 May 1941, and the camp held at most ninety by mid-August 1942.[1] Nearly half were Poles. Among the German prisoners were men wearing the black triangle of the "asocial" and the green of the "professional criminal", as well as Jehovah's Witnesses, Sinti and Roma, and political prisoners. The prisoner Kapo was Jakob Tenten, a political prisoner from Krefeld.
A carriage shed and no doctor
They were housed in the castle's former carriage shed. There was no medical care on the spot: a sick prisoner was sent the thirty kilometres back to the main camp.[1] The work was rebuilding and maintaining the castle at what the memorial calls an extreme pace, and from 1942 the day ran to eleven hours; when building stopped they were put to farm work, landslips, road building and a paper mill, at eleven and a quarter hours a day.
Dissolved
On 2 January 1943 the SS dissolved the camp, by then down to twenty prisoners.[1] A memorial plaque and a small exhibition stand at the site. Kranichfeld is one of the towns around Weimar that visitors drive out to for its two castles, and this is part of what is there.
Sources
- Außenlager Kranichfeld — Gedenkstätte Buchenwald, retrieved 29 August 2026
Historic sites
Historic sites
Am Oberschloss 1 a, 99448 Kranichfeld
The satellite camp stood on this castle from 1941 to 1943, and its prisoners were the ones who raised part of the burnt ruin again.
Buchenwald, 99427 Weimar
One of the satellite camps of the main camp on the Ettersberg, documented on the memorial's own satellite-camp portal.
Period
1933–1945
The camp system reached into the towns around Weimar, not only the hill above it.
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.
One of the 141 satellite camps the memorial counts; its prisoners came from and returned to the main camp.
Stay and eat nearby
Around Weimar
Southeast
The camp stood at the Oberschloss, and a plaque and small exhibition mark it today.