A German Bratwurst Museum Unwittingly Starts a Holocaust Controversy

A German museum dedicated to sausages has stirred an unexpected controversy in announcing its new location: a site where prisoners of a concentration camp were once used as slave labor for the Nazi war machine.

The German Bratwurst Museum announced on Wednesday that it would be moving — complete with a cannon with a giant sausage in place of its barrel — to an industrial lot in Mühlhausen, a small city near the geographical center of Germany.

Hours later, it emerged that the same site had been during World War II a satellite of the Buchenwald concentration camp, with a munitions factory that used forced labor. Most of those who lived there were Jewish women from Poland and Hungary who had been transported from Auschwitz.

“Of course we are upset about it,” said Reinhard Schramm, who leads a Jewish community group in the state of Thuringia.