Weimar: a summer festival on the square, 1937
Thousands crowd a town square hung with swastika banners, sitting at small tables, dancing in a cleared space and filling every corner.
From high windows the square is a sea of people from wall to wall: they sit at small café tables among potted shrubs, push through the gaps and stand in dense crowds before the tall old houses, whose fronts are hung with swastika banners and garlands. Striped poles wreathed with greenery rise from the throng; in a cleared space couples dance, and at the tables a young man in black uniform sits among families while a timber scaffold decked with banners rises before a house front.
Weimar, the town of Goethe and Schiller, was the seat of Fritz Sauckel, Gauleiter of Thuringia, who made it a showpiece of the party. Popular festivals like this one mixed beer, music and flags; in July 1937 the SS opened the Buchenwald camp on the Ettersberg above the town.
