The GDR builds its national memorial
By 1958 a monumental complex stood on the southern slope of the Ettersberg as the national monument of the GDR — a memorial to the dead that was also a platform for the state that built it.
A competition and a collective
The design came out of a limited competition held in 1951, after which a group of young architects who took the name Architektenkollektiv Buchenwald worked up the complex together with the sculptor Fritz Cremer. It went up on the southern slope of the Ettersberg, away from the camp itself, and was finished by 1958.[1]
Eleven figures and a tower
Cremer's bronze shows the prisoners freeing themselves, in eleven distinct characters — the caller, the doubter, the boy among them — and weighs seventeen tons; it was restored between 1998 and 2005.[1] He had submitted three draft versions between 1952 and 1954, the first with only eight figures. Behind the group stands the bell tower, the "Turm der Freiheit", built of pale sandstone, over fifty metres high and visible for a long way. It holds earth and ash brought from concentration camps and places of terror.[1]
A memorial that was also a tribune
The memorial records what the tower was then used for: the parapet served the GDR's state and party leadership as a speakers' platform at mass events, including army swearing-in ceremonies.[1] The complex commemorates the murdered and simultaneously supplied a state with an antifascist ancestry, and it is one of the few places where both of those things can be seen standing in the same stone.
Sources
- Mahnmal — Gedenkstätte Buchenwald, retrieved 29 August 2026
Historical figures
Historical figures
1906–1993 • sculptor
He worked with the Architektenkollektiv Buchenwald on the complex unveiled on 14 September 1958.
Historic sites
Historic sites
Buchenwald, 99427 Weimar
The bell tower and Cremer's figure group are the memorial's most visible structures, on the southern slope below the camp.
Period
1945–1990
The GDR's first national monument, and a working illustration of how the state used the classical and the recent past alike.
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.
The complex was built to commemorate the camp on the same hill.
On 18 August 1944 the leader of Germany's communists was killed inside the Buchenwald crematorium. Nine years later the first memorial plaque in the prisoners' camp marked the spot, and the GDR arranged its visits around it.
The first marker on this hill was the Thälmann plaque of 1953, five years before the monument; the commemoration was built outwards from one communist's death.
On 11 April 1945, with armoured divisions of the US Third Army approaching, the SS were ordered out and armed prisoners took the camp gate.
Cremer's eleven figures depict the prisoners' self-liberation — the subject is the day the camp fell, not the day an army arrived.
Bruno Apitz's novel appeared in 1958 and a DEFA film followed in 1963. For a decade afterwards it was easier to tell Buchenwald's story through a novel than to research it.
Novel and monument arrive in the same year — the symbolism on the hill and the story in print, built for one another.