Located on top of a wooded mountain slightly north of the town of Weimar in Thuringia is the concentration camp Buchenwald. Buchenwald was not an extermination camp, like Auschwitz, but rather a work camp. Its prisoners were mostly men and often political resisters, although criminals, asocials, Jews, homosexuals, and Jehovah's Witnesses were also interned there. Between 1937 and 1945, 250,000 people were imprisoned at the camp, and over 50,000 died. After 1945, it was used by the Soviet army to hold political prisoners, such as former Nazis. From 1945-1950, about 28,000 were held, of which more than 7,000 died. The camp was a national warning site and memorial for the German Democratic Republic from 1958 until the fall of the wall. Now it is a memorial for the united Germany.

Unlike the Auschwitz memorial, Buchenwald does not exhibit rooms of hair, eyeglasses, suitcases, and other objects that show the sheer enormity of Nazi destruction. Nor is one greeted with a near-exact replica of the camp during the Third Reich. The crematorium has remained intact, but only a few other rooms recall the way the camp was. The prisoners' barracks no longer stand, but instead their outlines are marked by charred stone.