On October 16, 1942, 405 Jewish Buchenwald prisoners were deported to Auschwitz in freight wagons from the Deutsche Reichsbahn. It can be assumed that the freight station was also the departure point for the transports of destruction that left the concentration camp in 1944.

In early May 1942, the hall next to the freight yard, which was built for livestock auctions in 1937, served as a gathering place for Thuringian Jews before deportation. The transport went via Leipzig to the Belzyce ghetto near Lublin, Eastern Poland. From there, most of the approximately 1,000 deportees from Thuringia and Saxony were deported to Majdanek concentration and extermination camp and gassed in gas chambers.

The cattle auction hall was a listed market and event hall in the city of Weimar in Thuringia, in the immediate vicinity of Weimar's Hetzerhallen on Rießnerstraße in Weimar-Nord. It was built in 1938-39 and destroyed by arson in April 2015. It was also located near the freight station.

On March 5, 2018, a design for the future memorial was presented. The main remaining parts of the cattle auction hall were to be integrated into a park-like area. The names of the deportees were to be immortalized on a round fountain table and protected by a film of water constantly flowing over it. The design was planned to be implemented in 2019.