The administration of the Buchenwald Memorial Foundation decided not to invite officials from Russia and Belarus to commemorative events in April dedicated to the 77th anniversary of the liberation of the German concentration camps Buchenwald and Dora-Mittelbau. Instead, the museum complex will receive delegations of civil society from Russia and Belarus.

In a statement, the director of the Jens-Christian Wagner Foundation says that this decision is connected with the recent death in Kharkov of the former prisoner of Buchenwald, 96-year-old Boris Romanchenko. It was coordinated with other former prisoners of concentration camps from several countries..

This decision was not easy for us.. The fact that official representatives of the authorities of Russia and Belarus will not take part in the celebrations does not mean that we do not honor the victims of concentration camps from these countries.. Quite the contrary: they play a central role.

However, after the violent death of Boris Romanchenko, it would be unbearable to imagine that on the anniversary of the liberation of the Buchenwald and Dora-Mittelbau camps, official representatives of the Russian and Belarusian governments responsible for his death would be invited. Hundreds of other concentration camp survivors are now under threat due to Russia's aggressive war in Ukraine, some of whom we are in contact with.

Russian Consul General in Leipzig Andrei Dronov said he was already aware of the non-invitation of the Russian side to Buchenwald. He also confirmed that instead of diplomats, representatives of civil societies — Ukrainian and Russian — would speak at the ceremony.. “We don’t know who these representatives are, but I can roughly imagine what will be said there,” the Consul General said..

Boris Romanchenko, a former prisoner of Buchenwald and several other German concentration camps, died on March 18 in his own apartment in Kharkov after a shell hit the building. Romanchenko lived in Severnaya Saltovka, an area that has been subjected to massive shelling by the Russian military since the first days of the war.. The Kremlin questioned reports that Romanchenko died due to Russian shelling, and suggested that the former prisoner of Buchenwald could have died "