There are days when the places you visit seem to speak to one another, and today was certainly one of them.
Mark and I are in Germany with Friends of Scouting in Europe, visiting projects supported by the European Scout Foundation. This morning took us to Weimar; this afternoon, just a few miles up the road, to Buchenwald. I knew, of course, that the two were close. I am not sure I had appreciated quite how powerful that proximity would feel.
Weimar is a beautiful place, but its importance goes well beyond its buildings. This is the city of Goethe and Schiller, two figures who helped shape German cultural life and whose work wrestled with some very big questions about freedom, humanity, education and what it means to live a good life. It is also, of course, the city that gave its name to Germany’s first democratic republic.
Standing in front of the famous statue of Goethe and Schiller, I was struck by the importance attached here to ideas, literature, education and culture. Their belief that human beings could be enlarged by education and exposure to ideas feels remarkably modern, and it resonated with me as someone who has spent much of his life involved in movements which believe in the power of education, particularly non-formal education, to help young people grow.
This afternoon we travelled the short distance to Buchenwald, on the wooded Ettersberg above Weimar, where the SS established the concentration camp in 1937. More than a quarter of a million people from over 50 countries were imprisoned at Buchenwald and its satellite camps during the years that followed, and more than 56,000 died through murder, hunger, exhaustion, torture and medical experimentation.
It is difficult to describe a visit to somewhere like Buchenwald without falling back on words which feel inadequate. Walking through the gate and standing on the enormous parade ground, imagining the thousands of prisoners forced to stand there, sometimes for hours and in all weathers, brings you face to face with something that statistics alone can never convey.
For me there were inevitably some very personal dimensions to the visit too. My father’s family gives me a Jewish heritage, and I was there with Mark, my husband. Jews were among those imprisoned and murdered at Buchenwald, while gay men were also imprisoned there under the Nazi persecution of homosexuality. Knowing that people were persecuted because of identities which form part of my own life and family history makes it impossible to encounter this place simply as an interested visitor to an historical site.
What stayed with me was not simply the contrast between Weimar and Buchenwald, but the uncomfortable truth that they belong to the same story. The existence of Goethe, Schiller, great universities, music, literature and learning did not somehow inoculate a society against barbarism. A country capable of producing extraordinary culture was also capable of systematically stripping people of their rights, their dignity, their identity and ultimately their lives.
Nor did that happen in a single moment. People were labelled and excluded, institutions were weakened and language changed. Those who were different were increasingly presented as threats, and things which would once have been unthinkable became first discussable, then permissible and eventually normal. It is one of the reasons why places such as Buchenwald need to be remembered rather than allowed to become simply chapters in history books.
That history feels particularly uncomfortable at a time when far-right and populist movements are again attracting significant support in countries across Europe, including at home in the UK. I do not make the lazy comparison that today’s politics is simply a rerun of the 1930s; it isn’t, and treating every political view with which we disagree as evidence of fascism teaches us very little. But neither should remembrance become so safely historical that we fail to ask what it might have to say to us now.
Buchenwald is a reminder to pay attention to the health of our democracy, to the language used about minorities and those who are different, and to the temptation to offer simple answers by blaming particular groups for complicated problems. It reminds us, too, that prejudice rarely announces where it ultimately intends to go. For me, with Jewish heritage through my father’s family and standing there with my husband, that did not feel like an abstract lesson from somebody else’s past. It felt like a reason to value the plural, tolerant society in which we are fortunate enough to live, and never to assume that its continuation is inevitable.
Visiting as part of a Scout group added another dimension. The history of Scouting in Nazi Germany is itself instructive. The Nazis understood very well the importance of youth movements, and independent Scout organisations were suppressed as the regime sought to bring young people under the control of the Hitler Youth. Young people were not incidental to the Nazi project: shaping what they believed, whom they trusted and where their loyalties lay was fundamental to it.
That history makes me reflect again on what Scouting, at its best, tries to do. We make a Promise to do our best, to help other people and to live by a Law which asks us to be trustworthy, friendly, considerate and courageous. We encourage young people to think, to take responsibility, to work alongside others and to become increasingly capable of making their own choices. International Scouting adds the deliberate experience of friendship across borders, cultures and traditions, helping young people discover that someone from another country or background is not an abstraction but another human being with much the same hopes, fears and potential as themselves.
Those values can sometimes sound comfortable when we recite them. A place like Buchenwald reminds us that they are anything but. Friendship, respect, courage and service matter most when they cost us something; when the crowd is heading in another direction; when someone is being treated as less worthy because of who they are; or when it would be easier to remain silent. For me, standing there as a gay man, as someone with Jewish roots and as a Scout made that point particularly sharply.
That is part of why the work supported by the European Scout Foundation matters to me. We may talk about funding projects, programmes and places, but ultimately we are investing in encounters between young people and in their ability to understand and respect one another. We are helping to create spaces where leadership means service rather than domination, where difference can be approached with curiosity rather than suspicion, and where belonging to one community does not require hostility towards another.
There was a particularly poignant moment at the end of our visit. Our Friends of Scouting in Europe party gathered on the parade ground and laid flowers in memory of the Scouts who were imprisoned and died at Buchenwald. Standing there together as Scouts, remembering fellow Scouts whose lives ended on that ground, connected the history we had been learning about with the movement of which we are part today.
It also brought together the different strands of the day for me. In the morning we had encountered a vision of humanity enlarged through culture, thought and education; in the afternoon we had seen the consequences of systematically denying the humanity of others. My own family history, my life with Mark and more than half a century of Scouting inevitably shaped the way I experienced both.
As we stood together for that final act of remembrance, I found myself thinking about the responsibility that comes with the Scout scarf we wear: to pass on to another generation the values of friendship, service, courage and respect, but also to help young people understand that those values sometimes require them to speak, to challenge and to stand alongside someone whom others would push aside.
For a group of Friends of Scouting in Europe, gathered together on the parade ground at Buchenwald, that felt like something worth remembering long after we had left.
