Jamlitz Camps

Die Lager Jamlitz

The village of Jamlitz is in the southern part of Brandenburg. The second largest satellite camp of Sachsenhausen concentration camp was located here. A monument, an exhibition in the closeby village of Lieberose and a documentation site at the historic place commemorate the victims of the »Lieberose labour camp«. A further exhibition in Jamlitz provides information on the Soviet »special camp no. 6«, which was set up on the site of the satellite camp in 1945.

History

In 1943, prisoners of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp had to set up the Jamlitz satellite camp on orders of the SS. The Waffen-SS needed prisoners for the construction of the large SS military training ground »Kurmark«. It is possible that the Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler required the military training ground in order to be close to Berlin and be able to intervene with the Waffen-SS in case of a coup d’état.
First prisoner transports from the Groß-Rosen concentration camp arrived in the spring of 1944. In the course of 1944, the »Lieberose labour camp« developed into a camp for thousands of Jews, who had been selected for forced labour at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. Many of them were of Hungarian origin.
In Jamlitz the Jewish slave labourers had to build barracks, roads and military installations. The terrible conditions in the »Lieberose labour camp« led to a high death rate among the prisoners. There was little equipment and few tools for the completion of the strenuous work; there were no sanitary facilities in the makeshift barracks. The prisoners received meagre food rations and little clothing. Many of them fell ill. Those no longer able to work were sent back to Auschwitz on a regular basis until October 1944 and murdered there. After that time, those who fell ill and could no longer work were admitted into one of the two »Schonungsblocks«. In February 1945, the SS shot more than 1,200 sick prisoners, mainly Hungarian Jews.
Between September 1945 and April 1947, the Soviet secret service NKVD administered the »special camp nr. 6« on the site of the former »Lieberose labour camp«. In all, around 10,000 people were imprisoned there without a trial or sentence, of which around 3,000 perished due to the harsh conditions.

Lieberose, 1944, Prisoners constructing the electric wire to Ullersdorf, Stiftung Brandenburgische Gedenkstätten

Jamlitz, 2009, Entrance to the former camp site with a marking stone from 1944, Stiftung Denkmal

Victims

Between November 1943 and March 1945, around 11,000 prisoners passed through the »Lieberose labour camp«. Around 10,000 of them were Jewish slave labourers, mainly from Hungary and Poland. In all, there were prisoners of twelve different nationalities in Jamlitz.
More than 1,200 Jewish prisoners who were sick and unable to walk were shot by the SS in Jamlitz during the evacuation of the camp in February 1945. The SS had their bodies buried in at least two mass graves.
According to newer research on the »Lieberose labour camp«, about 3,500 prisoners perished in Jamlitz of illnesses and exhaustion or were murdered by the SS. It is assumed that a further 4,000 prisoners were sent back to Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp until October 1944 and murdered there. Around 1,600 prisoners had to set off on a march towards Sachsenhausen concentration camp in February 1945. Around 140 men didn’t survive the exertions of the march.
There were about 10,200 prisoners in the Soviet special camp, which was located on the same site after 1945, of which about 3,000 died in the camp.

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 1971, one of the mass graves containing the remains of 577 murdered Jews was discovered close to Staakow, upon which the GDR authorities arranged for their exhumation. An urn, allegedly containing ashes of the mortal remains, was laid to rest in Lieberose. Subsequently, a memorial wall for the victims of fascism and a small museum were established at the site. The Jewish victims of the camp, however, remained unmentioned. Only in the 1990s did a local initiative group begin dealing with the history of the »Lieberose labour camp« and its victims. The results of this work can be seen in the exhibition of the memorial »Satellite camps Lieberose«. It is located in a small museum building close to the urn grave of the Jewish slave labourers. Since 2009, there is a Jewish cemetery on the site of the mass grave which was found in 1971.
Until the end of GDR, nothing marked the site of the former satellite camp or Soviet special camp in Jamlitz. In 2003, a documentation exhibition was inaugurated, having been funded by the evangelical community of Lieberose and financially supported by the state of Brandenburg and the Brandenburg Memorial Foundation. Spatially separated translucent information boards provide information on the history and the victims of both camps.
Already since 1995, there has been a cemetery in memory of the victims at one of the mass graves of the Soviet special camp.

Jamlitz, 2009, Exhibition on the former camp site, Stiftung Denkmal

Jamlitz, 2009, Jewish cemetery at the mass grave which was discovered in 1971, Stiftung Denkmal

Open

The exhibitions are outdoors and are accessible at all times.

Contact

http://www.die-lager-jamlitz.de

info@die-lager-jamlitz.de

+49 (0)33671 280 032

Kiefernweg
15868 Jamlitz

Jamlitz, 2003, A part of the exhibition at the site of the former labour camp, Ulrich Schwarz

Nordhausen

Mittelbau-Dora Concentration Camp Memorial

Since 1954, a memorial on the site of the former Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, close to Nordhausen on the edge of the Harz mountains, commemorates the fate of the prisoners who were slave laboure...

Seelow

Seelow Heights Memorial

The Battle of the Seelow Heights, which took place in the spring of 1945, was the largest battle on German territory in the course of the Second World War. Tens of thousands of Soviet, Polish and Germ...

Osthofen

Rhineland-Palatinate National Socialist Documentation Centre / KZ Osthofen Memorial

Between March 1933 and June 1934, an early concentration camp was in operation in Osthofen, a small town near Worms. The people incarcerated there were for the most part political prisoners in police...