50 Years After Its Liberation, Buchenwald Still Causes Pain : Europe: Disputes mar memorial. Critics say museum discounts Communist resistance at concentration camp.

U.S. Army veterans, concentration camp survivors and thousands of ordinary Germans converged Sunday on Buchenwald for a day of ceremonies whose solemnity was marred by continuing disagreements over what really happened during the Nazi years.

The former concentration camp, spread out over the crest of a hill overlooking Weimar in the former East Germany, has just been renovated, with a new museum depicting life at Buchenwald under the Nazis. The museum opening was timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Buchenwald’s liberation by U.S. troops on April 11, 1945.

The new museum, which replaces an East German exhibition that had a decidedly pro-Communist tilt, has aroused passions in Germany. Critics say that the renovations represent an attempt to cover up the fact, politically unpalatable in the post-Cold War era, that the core of any German resistance to the Nazis in the early 1930s was made up of Communist Party members.

“I’m very upset at the moment,” said Monika Krotter-Hartmann, a visitor from southwest Germany who was eyeing chilling displays of photographs, forced-labor tools and inmates’ personal belongings laid out in unadorned gray metal cases. What is missing, Krotter-Hartmann claimed, is sufficient emphasis on the German inmates of Buchenwald, who managed to organize some resistance to the Nazis from within the camp.

“Buchenwald was the only concentration camp that was self-liberated,” she said, explaining that Buchenwald inmates who still had the strength at the end of their ordeal overran a guard tower, captured the few SS guards who hadn’t already fled and ran up a white flag one day before U.S. soldiers arrived.

By not explaining this, she said, the museum sent the signal that no Germans had the morals or the courage to fight the Nazis.

Outside, on the grim, rock-covered hillside where inmates once had to appear for daily roll-calls, a boisterous crowd of Germans booed the Christian Democratic governor of the surrounding state of Thuringia, Bernhard Vogel, when he said in a speech that U.S. troops had liberated Buchenwald single-handedly.

“Ridiculous! That’s not true at all!” shouted the spectators, who like Krotter-Hartmann wanted some attention paid to the efforts of German Communist resistance members.

In East German times, the museum at Buchenwald heavily emphasized the activities of the German Communist inmates, who were among the first to arrive when the camp opened in 1937.

Because the Communists had been so well-organized before their imprisonment, they managed to establish a resistance network at Buchenwald, significantly affecting life in the camp. They stockpiled about 100 guns, experimented with homemade explosives and in some cases helped young prisoners.

The droves of East German schoolchildren who used to be bused to the Buchenwald memorial during the Cold War years came away with a solid idea of these Communist activities but a much less clear notion of what happened to the Jews and Gypsies who began to be brought here in large numbers in 1938. The U.S. presence at the end of the war wasn’t mentioned at all.

Buchenwald’s curators had hoped to correct this historical imbalance when they took down the East German displays and replaced them with the current exhibition. And unlike the German critics present Sunday, the U.S. veterans who visited the camp--and many of the non-German surviving inmates--expressed satisfaction with what the renovators did.

“The feeling that I have is, we must remember history,” said Solomon Miller, a camp survivor now living in Brooklyn who was making his first trip to Buchenwald in 50 years. Miller was brought to Buchenwald from his native Poland in 1944 and put to work quarrying stones on a daily ration of a quarter of a piece of bread.

“Children need to be told about this so that it never happens again,” said Miller, who with fellow inmate David Schwartzberg of New Jersey praised the museum and the way young Germans were attentively examining its contents Sunday.

Other former inmates, many of them also returning for the first time, recounted heart-wrenching tales of life in the infamous camp.

Israel’s chief Ashkenazi rabbi, Yisrael Meir Lau, gave a speech in which he recalled being scooped up, an emaciated 7-year-old, in the arms of a liberating U.S. soldier in the spring of 1945.

“He lifted me up and said to the people of Weimar, ‘Look at your enemy,’ ” Lau recalled as many in the audience wept.

Although Buchenwald wasn’t designed as a death factory in the sense of such Nazi camps as Auschwitz, it was nevertheless the site of thousands of executions by shooting, hanging and lethal injection. Hundreds more inmates died when they were used as human guinea pigs in tests of early vaccines.

About 56,000 inmates died at Buchenwald from 1937 until 1945, out of about 250,000 who passed through the camp’s iron gates. There were 21,000 alive when the Americans arrived.