Esterwegen Memorial

Gedenkstätte Esterwegen

The Esterwegen Memorial opened on October 31, 2011 to remember the 15 different protective custody and POW camps which existed in the Emsland region between 1933 and 1945. The Esterwegen Memorial replaces the »Documentation and Information Centre (DIZ) Emsland Camps« in Papenburg as the central memorial to the Emsland camps.

History

Already in June 1933, the Prussian Ministry of Interior set up several concentration camps in the Emsland region, which was located in the Northwest of the German Reich along the border to the Netherlands. After the National Socialists came to power, there were between 25,000 and 30,000 people in »protective custody« in Prussia alone. The National Socialists persecuted social democrats, communists and trade unionists particularly harshly. They were taken by the police and the SA to improvised concentration camps, where they were abused and tortured. Three such concentration camps were set up in the Emsland region: in Börgermoor, Esterwegen and Neusustrum. According to estimates, between 8,000 and 10,000 people were imprisoned in those early Emsland camps. The prisoners had to conduct forced labour, amongst others in cultivating the moor landscape. This is also the time period during which the »Song of the Moor Soldiers« was composed in Börgermoor. At first, the local Schutzpolizei guarded the concentration camps; from July 1933 on, members of the SS and SA took over this task. In the spring of 1934, the concentration camps at Börgermoor and Neusustrum were shut down, followed by the dissolution of the Esterwegen concentration camp in 1936. They were all converted to prison camps. Four other camps were established in the Emsland in the meantime. Only »lawfully« sentenced criminals were incarcerated in these camps; most of them came there on the grounds of »high treason«. From 1939 on, prisoners of war were also held captive at the nine southern Emsland camps. About 50,000 Soviet prisoners of war were incarcerated there from 1941 on. In all, there were 15 different camps in the Emsland until 1945. They were all liberated by the Allies in April 1945.

Esterwegen, 2012, Memorial site, Harry de Jong

Esterwegen, 2012, Memorial site, Gedenkstätte Esterwegen

Victims

Between 1933 and 1945, about 180,000 people were imprisoned in camps of the Emsland region. Among them were, between 1933 and 1934, about 10,000 concentration camp prisoners from the German Reich and about 66,500 convicts from 1934 on. Beginning 1939, more than 100,000 prisoners of war were held captive at Emsland POW camps; numbers peaked in 1941 with the arrival of over 50,000 Soviet soldiers. Up to 30,000 people perished at the Emsland camps, primarily Soviet prisoners of war – according to estimates, there were up to 26,000 Soviet victims.

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 areas on which the camps once stood today mostly constitute farmland. The Emsland administrative district decided to erect information plaques at those sites in 1990. Immediately after the war the former camp site in Esterwegen was used as a detention camp by the British occupying forces. From 1953 to 1959 the former concentration camp served as a transit camp for refugees from the GDR, during this time all the camp's buildings were demolished. Since a memorial to the victims of the Emsland camps received no political support in the post-war era, the »Action Committee Documentation and Information Centre Emsland Camps« (DIZ) association was founded in 1981 in Papenburg. In 1985, the association opened its first exhibition. The DIZ moved into newly constructed premises in 1993 showing an exhibition on the history of the Emsland camps. In 1994, two memorial stones were inaugurated at the former entrance to the camp, initiated by Gorg Gumpert (1914-2005), a former prisoner of the camp. One of them remembers the »moor soldiers« who called the camp »Hell on the Edge of the Forest«, the other was erected in the memory of journalist, pacifist and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Carl von Ossietzky (1889-1938) who was an inmate of the camp between 1934 and 1936.
In 2001 the administrative district Emsland acquired the the former camp site in Esterwegen from the Bundeswehr with the aim of founding a central memorial to the victims of the Emsland camps. In 2008 the Emsland Memorial Foundation was established by the Emsland district council. After an extensive redesign of the site and the construction of a new exhibition building the memorial was inaugurated on October 31, 2011. The DIZ moved from Papenburg to the new memorial site in Esterwegen.

Esterwegen, 2012, View of the exhibition, Gedenkstätte Esterwegen

Esterwegen, 2012, Wall of portraits, Gedenkstätte Esterwegen

Possibilities

Guided tours, educational offer, events, library

Open

April to October: Tuesday to Sunday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. November to March: Tuesday to Sunday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Closed between December 15 and January 15.

Contact

http://www.gedenkstaette-esterwegen.de

info@gedenkstaette-esterwegen.de

+49 (0)5955 988 950

Esterwegen, 2012, Two memorial stones initiated by former prisoner Georg Gumpert for the »Moor soldiers« and for Carl von Ossietzky, Harry de Jong

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