European Holocaust Memorial

Europäische Holocaustgedenkstätte

From 1944 onwards eleven forced labour camps were built in the vicinity of Landsberg am Lech. Until 1945 about 30,000 people passed through these camps, most of them Jews. Approximately 14,500 of them died of strenuous labour, diseases, selections and death marches. Since 1985 the European Holocaust Memorial on one of the former camp premises commemorates the fate of the victims.

History

The medieval city of Landsberg is located in Upper Bavaria on the steep banks of the river Lech. In modern times the city was turned into a fortress. After the failed »Beer Hall Putsch« in November 1923, Adolf Hitler started to serve his five year sentence for high treason in the Landsberg Prison. However, of his five year sentence he only had to serve barely two years. During his imprisonment he wrote his book »Mein Kampf« (English: My Struggle) which became the party manifesto of the Nazi Party NSDAP. During World War II a satellite camp (Außenlager) and several sub camps (Außenkommandos) of the Dachau concentration camp were built near Landsberg: in July 1944 the SS established a forced labour camp in Kaufering, in total the Kaufering camp complex comprised eleven camps. The prisoners had to conduct forced labour in arms production. Organisation Todt (OT) deployed the prisoners at building sites for large bunkers, where fighter jets were to be assembled. The construction of three bunker complexes began near Landsberg. The first prisoners arrived in Kaufering in the middle of 1944, mainly Jews from Polish and Lithuanian ghettos. Later Hungarian Jews were added, marched to Bavaria on foot. More than 3,000 people were squeezed in the bigger camps by OT and SS. The living conditions were very poor: The Jews had to live in earthen huts, offering hardly any shelter against weather conditions and the cold. Diseases quickly spread and claimed many victims. The SS selected those who were sick or unable to work, deported them to Auschwitz and killed them by poison gas. Hard labour and insufficient nutrition also caused many prisoners to die. In March 1945 about 10,000 prisoners in the Kaufering camps were still alive. Most of them were sent on a death march to Dachau by the SS in April 1945. Some of the prisoners were liberated there, others wandered through Bavaria until beginning of May 1945.

Landsberg, 2011, Direction sign to memorial, Pete Ridley, http://www.flickr.com/people/ridders/

Landsberg, 2011, Memorial complex in front of ruined earthen barracks, Pete Ridley, http://www.flickr.com/people/ridders/

Victims

All in all about 30,000 people passed through the camps near Landsberg from June 1944 to April 1945. Historians estimate that approximately half of them died through hard labour, diseases or in the Auschwitz gas chambers. Almost all of the prisoners were Jews. The vast majority were men. However, there were about 4,200 women and about 800 children in the Kaufering camps as well.

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

In April 1945 American troops occupied Landsberg. They liberated the survivors of the camps and accommodated them in the Saarburg military barracks in Landsberg. Most of the former prisoners couldn't and wouldn't return to their home towns, many had lost all of their relatives. These so called Displaced Persons (DP) awaited the continuation of their journey in DP-camps, which had been set up for them. For a period of time, the Landsberg DP camp was home to up to 6,000 people. It was the biggest camp of its kind in the American zone of occupation. All in all about 23,000 people passed through the DP camp until it was dissolved in 1950, the vast majority were Jews. At the same time defendants in the Nuremberg Trials were detained in the Landsberg Prison, including Oswald Pohl and Otto Ohlendorf. More than 250 death sentences against war criminals were carried out in Landsberg until 1951. A large proportion of the Landsberg population sided with the defendants who had been responsible for the deportation and the mass murder of Jews and who were awaiting their execution. Repeatedly Landsberg inhabitants tangled with residents of the DP camp: The inhabitants of Landsberg championed a pardon for the NS criminals, the Jewish survivors protested to emphasize the legitimacy of the sentences against the murderers. Many Jews were victims to anti-Semitic hostilities.
For a long time nothing reminded of the forced labour camps near Landsberg. In 1983 a citizens' initiative teamed up to preserve the ruins of the Kaufering camp and to commemorate the victims. In 1985, their members started to create the European Holocaust Memorial after acquiring the site of the former camp »Kaufering VII«. Bit by bit several memorial stones were set up remembering the victims of the Kaufering camps. Since 2009 the memorial is run by the Europeaan Holocaust Memorial Foundation based in Landsberg.

Landsberg, 2011, Memorial stone, Pete Ridley, http://www.flickr.com/people/ridders/

Landsberg, 2011, Memorial stones, Pete Ridley, http://www.flickr.com/people/ridders/

Possibilities

Guided tours on appointment

Open

The memorial is accessible at all times.

Contact

http://www.landsberger-zeitgeschichte.de/Gedenkstaette.htm

EuropaeischeHolocaustgedenkstaette@gmx.de

+49 (0)8191 392 98

Erpftinger Straße
86899 Landsberg am Lech

Landsberg, 2011, Earthen barrack with memorial stone in the foreground, Pete Ridley, http://www.flickr.com/people/ridders/

Landsberg, 2011, Derelict earthen barracks, Pete Ridley, http://www.flickr.com/people/ridders/

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