Drütte Concentration Camp Memorial Site and Documentation Centre

Gedenk- und Dokumentationsstätte KZ Drütte

The town of Salzgitter was founded in 1942 at the northern foothills of the Harz mountains. In 1994, a memorial was set up on the premises of the Salzgitter AG company, dedicated to the people who had to conduct forced labour at the site. Between 1942 and 1945, thousands of forced labourers had been deployed in arms production.

History

The »Reichswerke Hermann Göring« plant was founded in 1937 as a state-run enterprise for steel and arms production. A steel mill was established close to the township of Watenstedt at the northern foothills of the Harz mountains. As a result, thousands of workers moved to the region and several smaller towns were merged to form the city of Watenstedt-Salzgitter. Soon the new industrial complex demanded significantly more labour than was available and the »Reichswerke« began recruiting workers from abroad. The first Polish forced labourers came to Watenstedt-Salzgitter shortly after the beginning of World War II. In 1940, the Gestapo set up a »labour education camp« in Braunschweig. In the course of the war, several more camps were established and prisoners of war from Western and Eastern Europe as well as Soviet civilians (so-called »Ostarbeiter«, eastern workers) were deployed in forced labour. In September 1942, the »Reichswerke« management and the SS jointly decided to also deploy concentration camp prisoners as forced labourers in the industrial complex. On October 18, 1942, the first transport of prisoners from Buchenwald concentration camp arrived at the newly founded Drütte satellite camp of the concentration camp Neuengamme. In November 1942, there were 250 prisoners in Drütte; by 1944 the number rose to over 2,700.
The prisoners had to produce munition in Watenstedt-Salzgitter, particularly shells. In May and September 1994, two further camps were established for over 3,000 concentration camp prisoners. On April 7, 1945, the SS dissolved these camps and transferred the prisoners by train to various collection camps. It is not clear exactly how many camps there were in the Watenstedt-Salzgitter region: When the Allies arrived on April 11, 1945, they discovered 67 remaining »Reichswerke« camps with tens of thousands of prisoners.

Salzgitter, 1946, Former Drütte conentration camp, Public Records Office, London

Victims

Around 40,000 men and women were deployed in forced labour at the »Reichswerke Hermann Göring« in Watenstedt-Salzgitter. The prisoners came from most parts of Europe - mostly from Poland and the occupied Soviet territories, but also from France, Belgium and Italy. They came to the Salzgitter region as prisoners of war, »Ostarbeiter« and concentration camp prisoners. The prisoners of war were mostly brought to Watenstedt-Salzgitter from the »Stalag XI B« and »Stalag XI D« camps in Fallingbostel as well as the »Stalag XI C« camp near Bergen-Belsen. Germans from the so-called »labour education camp« were also deployed in forced labour. At least 4,000 people perished in the Watenstedt-Salzgitter camps.

The entry to power of the National Socialists in 1933 heralded the state persecution of opponents of the regime, Jews, Roma – who were classed as »gypsies« -, the sick and many other groups. For the first time, anti-semitism became part of the government policy of a modern state and the persecution of all groups was progressively heightened. The process was characterised by the interplay between state regulation, violence from supporters of the regime and rabble-rousing propaganda from the press. The acts of terror against the Jews in November 1938 (»The Night of the Broken Glass«), culminating in around one hundred deaths, marked the prelude to the complete exclusion and murder of the Jewish minority. With the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, large parts of Europe fell under German control. In Eastern Europe in particular a multi-tiered system of camps and extermination sites was established, in which the SS murdered up to six million Jews, among them around 165,000 German Jews. It is estimated that around seven million Germans lost their lives in the war, including almost 3.5 million civilians. Around 28 million residents of the occupied Soviet Union (both soldiers and civilians) and three million non-Jewish Poles met a violent death. These groups are still barely commemorated in Germany. Germany came under Allied occupation in 1945 and 1949 saw the foundation of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), who had very different cultures of remembrance. The GDR profiled itself as an »antifascist« state. The former concentration camps at Buchenwald, Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen became »National Memorials« and primarily documented the communist resistance during the war. In the Federal Republic, the dominant memory was initially of the victims of Allied bombing raids and those who had fled or been expelled from their homes in the former territory of the Third Reich. It was left to specific groups to remember Nazi persecution, the Holocaust or the resistance. With the exception of the war crimes trials, there was no public discussion of perpetrators or involvement in crimes. However, the situation was to change in the mid-1960s, when the statute of limitations for murder was lifted following a lengthy debate. Also during this period, memorial sites were established at former concentration camps (1965: Dachau and Neuengamme; 1966: Bergen-Belsen) and the German Resistance Memorial Centre was opened in 1968 in West Berlin. However, it was not until the 1980s that a diverse and often small-scale landscape of memory developed as the result of local initiatives. Following German unification in 1990, a national memorial site concept was developed and there was a major review of German sites of memory. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin was inaugurated in 2005. The Topography of Terror, a comprehensive documentation of National Socialist crimes and perpetrators, has opened with a new centre in May 2010; the documentation centre »Flight, Expulsion, Reconciliation« followed suit in 2021. In the meantime, central memorials in Berlin have been erected to commemorate further groups of Nazi victims as well: the murdered Sinti and Roma, the patients murdered in the context of the Nazi’s »Euthanasia« killings and the persecuted homosexuals. The German victims of National Socialist terror in the former Eastern territories of the Third Reich were forgotten by both German states after the end of the war. For decades, memory of these victims was only preserved by West German associations for Germans born in these territories and it mainly excluded the period from 1933 to 1945.

Remembrance

The Salzgitter steel works endured World War II. In 1983, individuals from Salzgitter established the »Arbeitskreis Stadtgeschichte e.V.« (an association called »Study Group for City History«) and then in 1985, the »Drütte Documentation Centre Committee« with the aim of setting up a memorial on the steel works premises. However, the board of what was then the »Peine-Salzgitter AG« stood up to the plans, which had already been endorsed by the workers' council. In 1992, an agreement between the management board and the workers' council was reached: The Peine-Salzgitter AG made one of the former accommodation barracks for concentration camp prisoners available as premises for a memorial centre. On April 11, 1994, the »Drütte Concentration Camp Memorial Site and Documentation Centre« was opened. Presented at the memorial is a permanent exhibition on the Drütte concentration camp.

Open

Only by appointment and with a guide. The memorial is open to visitors without prior booking on the second Saturday of every month from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m.

Contact

http://www.gedenkstaette-salzgitter.de

info@gedenkstaette-salzgitter.de

+49 (0)5341 445 81

Eisenhüttenstraße 99
38239 Salzgitter

Salzgitter, 1995, Exhibition at the Drütte Concentration Camp Memorial Site and Documentation Centre, Arbeitskreis Stadtgeschichte. e.V.

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