BERLIN(AFP)---Survivors of the Buchenwald concentration
camp at the weekend marked the 70th anniversary of its construction with a call that the 56,000 people who died here during the Holocaust shall never be forgotten.

"Who will speak of the Nazi crimes, who will oppose the neo-Nazis and all those who trample on democracy and human dignity? Who will speak up when we are no longer there?" they said in a statement issued in Weimar on Saturday.

Elderly survivors, one of them a former Ukrainian prisoner who came dressed in a striped blue and white concentration camp uniform, on Sunday laid wreaths at the former camp outside the east German city.

Buchenwald was founded by the Nazis on July 15, 1937 for the internment of Jews, Roma, political opponents and homosexuals.
Prisoners perished in the cold or starved to death and thousands were murdered. A large percentage of the victims remain nameless, while the identity of many others were only established in the past decade.

On Sunday, Jens Goebel, the culture minister of Thueringen state which incorporates Weimar, handed Roma and Jewish representatives and the group of survivors a "Totenbuch" (book of the dead) bearing the names of 38,000 identified victims.

The city council of Weimar marked the anniversary by adopting a declaration vowing to fight racism and anti-Semitism.

Buchenwald was liberated by US troops on April 11, 1945, when 21,000 prisoners, many emaciated and close to exhaustion, were freed.

The US commander in charge of the liberating troops forced 1,000 residents from Weimar to visit the camp to see the atrocities.

Around 500,000 people a year visit Buchenwald, of which at least a quarter are foreigners. The authorities which manage the site say a large number of the visitors are young people.

An exhibition of photographs of the camp titled "Black on White" was opened there on Sunday.