Weimar cattle auction hall

The inside of the cattle auction hall during the construction work for an event for the Weimar Art Festival in 2009.
Photo: Maik Schuck

The ruins of the hall after the fire

The police arrested three young arsonists the day after the fire.

The cattle auction hall was a listed market and event hall in the city of Weimar in Thuringia in the immediate vicinity of Weimar's Hetzerhallen . It was built in the late 1930s and destroyed by fire in April 2015.

history

The hall was built in 1939 with a floor space of 35 meters by 70 meters - that is, mathematically a floor space of 2,250 square meters - and a height of 25 meters near Weimar Central Station.

From May 1942 the hall was used to round up Jews from all over Thuringia and deport them via the nearby train station. For this reason, it was considered a symbol of the persecution of Jews in Thuringia . Subsequently, a Wehrmacht material and equipment depot was set up on the premises of the hall , in which prisoners from the Buchenwald concentration camp were also used as slave labor .

After the Second World War, the hall was used by the Soviet Army / GSSD and after their withdrawal in 1992 as an exhibition and event hall. It was most recently owned by the Weimar consumer cooperative and served, among other things, as an exhibition hall for the International Building Exhibition Thuringia (IBA). The hall had been in poor condition for a long time, the roof in particular was badly damaged by storms. Due to the lack of usage concepts, however, there was no renovation, only regular security measures.

On the night of April 22, 2015, it burned to the ground for an initially unknown cause. A day later, three young people confessed to the deliberate arson after a cell phone video of the fire was found on one of the perpetrators. In November 2015, prosecutors brought charges against the three youths. She estimates the damage incurred at one million euros. According to the investigation, 13 surrounding objects - buildings, vehicles and others - were damaged by the fire. The three perpetrators, aged 15, 18 and 20, confessed to the crime and were sentenced to suspended sentences in October 2017.

Stefan Wolf , Sigrid Hebestreit (consumer cooperative), Christian Carius and Jörg Geibert (from left to right) at the on-site meeting in front of the cattle auction hall

An expert then found considerable damage to the remains of the building and saw a danger from falling parts. After the relevant offers have been obtained, the site should therefore be cleared. In an on-site conversation initiated by the President of the State Parliament Christian Carius , representatives of the JA Topf & Sons memorial and the Buchenwald memorial spoke out in favor of preserving parts of the hall as a memorial in order to create a place of remembrance of the fate of the Thuringian Jews deported there. The consumer cooperative, on the other hand, saw itself under pressure from the insurance report to remove the danger posed by the remains of the building by clearing it. According to Mayor Stefan Wolf at the time, this was only subject to notification and not authorization, which is why the decision on this was left to the consumer cooperative alone. The directly adjacent, also listed Hetzerhalle , which is also owned by the consumer cooperative and at that time served as a warehouse for a scaffolding construction company, was discussed as an alternative exhibition location for the building exhibition .

On March 5, 2018, a draft for the future memorial was presented. The main remaining remains of the cattle auction hall were to be integrated into a park-like facility. The names of the deportees were to be immortalized on a round fountain table and protected by a film of water flowing over it. The implementation of the design was planned for 2019. ^[outdated]