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In the spring of 1943, concentration camp inmates were forced do build the ten-kilometre stretch of track from Weimar-Schondorf to Buchenwald within a mere three months. It served the supply needs the armaments factory. From early 1944 onwards, hundred thousand inmates were transported on these tracks in good wagons, some of them without roofs. They were brought here from all over Europe, and sent on to one of the subcamps to perform forced labour. Buchenwald was also the point of departure for extermination transports which took children and sick inmates to Auschwitz to be murdered. When the SS evacuated the camps in the east, mass transports came to Buchenwald. Many inmates were already dead on arrival.