World

Vandalizing history

Breaking through: Hackers posted neo-Nazi slogans on the Buchenwald camp’s website

Michael Kappeler/AFP/Getty Images

On July 28, hackers attacked the Buchenwald concentration camp foundation and memorial website, and replaced it with neo-Nazi slogans and symbols. One English slogan read “Brown is beautiful,” referring to the colour of the shirts worn by Adolf Hitler’s SA storm troopers. The hackers also erased a list of Holocaust victims’ names from the website and replaced them with links to Holocaust denial websites. The website for another camp was also erased.

The Buchenwald foundation’s mandate is to preserve the camp in commemoration of the victims and promote knowledge through Holocaust research (an estimated 56,000 people were killed by the Nazis at Buchenwald). Police launched an investigation into the hacking, and both websites were restored the next day. The incident came just days after former Nazi death camp guard Samuel Kunz, 88, was charged with aiding in the murders of 430,000 Jews at Belzec during the Second World War. Kunz was indicted for crimes committed between January 1942 and July 1943, including shooting 10 people himself.

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